The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The volume of work for the Arbitration Committee increased again last week, with five new requests being accepted and only two matters closed. Following considerable discussion about the enforcement of content-related policies, the Committee accepted a potential test case dealing with this area.
A number of recent discussions, especially on the mailing lists, have focused on how to enforce policies such as no original research and cite sources in the context of the dispute resolution process. Several users complained that arbitration had been effective in dealing with poor behavior, but unable to deal with other policy violations that harmed the quality of articles. Proposed solutions floated during the debate included the creation of a separate committee to handle "content arbitration", or the expansion of the current Arbitration Committee's work to consider violations of content-related policy, but without actually dictating what content goes in or stays out of an article.
Slrubenstein, one of those who had expressed concerns about the imbalance, requested arbitration last Friday against RJII in a dispute over definitions of capitalism. Two arbitrators initially voted to reject the request, with Ambi saying, "We don't deal with content disputes." In response, mav argued, "We would not be ruling on content itself per se but instead enforcing our content policies." Ultimately seven arbitrators agreed to accept the request in order to take this approach to the issue.
Another of the newly accepted requests is also in large part a content dispute, although the evidence mixes in more allegations of misbehavior. That would be Cortonin's request against William M. Connolley, which stems from a debate over issues related to global warming. This request also saw the arbitrators divided between rejecting and accepting, but was narrowly accepted after Ambi changed her vote to support acceptance.