Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Ban Appeals Subcommittee
The Arbitration Committee is the final body of appeal[1] for Wikipedia users who have been blocked, banned, or sanctioned. In order to improve efficiency, the Arbitration Committee has formed the Ban Appeals Subcommittee (or BASC) to decide appeals from indefinitely blocked or banned contributors to Wikipedia. The subcommittee hears appeals by e-mail.[2] You may only appeal your block or ban to BASC as a last resort, and if you have used the Wikipedia community's other methods of receiving block and ban appeals. These other methods of appeal are described at Wikipedia:Appealing a block, which you must read before submitting an appeal.
If you:
- Are banned from Wikipedia entirely, or you are blocked indefinitely; and
- Have tried to appeal your block by using the {{unblock}} template on your talk page or the UTRS interface,
Then you may submit an appeal to BASC. Please read Wikipedia:Appealing a block and the next section of this page before doing so.
If a Wikipedia administrator has sanctioned you (with a topic, namespace, or single-account restriction), or blocked you for a short period of time, you may not submit an appeal to BASC.
Contents |
[edit] Procedure
If you do not have access to Wikipedia's EmailUser function, you can send an e-mail directly to us at arbcom-appeals-en
lists.wikimedia.org. If you can use Wikipedia's internal EmailUser function, please use it rather than e-mailing us directly.
[edit] About the subcommittee
[edit] Membership
The subcommittee is a sub-panel of the Arbitration Committee and is composed only of elected members of the full Committee. The Ban Appeals Subcommittee is staffed by four arbitrators (one of whom is the co-ordinating arbitrator). Many other arbitrators also observe the appeals process and participate in appeals at their discretion.
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- Subcommittee members
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- Other arbitrators
- Carcharoth, Courcelles, Kirill Lokshin, Newyorkbrad, NuclearWarfare, Risker, Roger Davies, Salvio giuliano, and Worm That Turned.
The primary difference between subcommittee members and the other arbitrator members is that the subcommittee members take a greater role in communicating with appellants and co-ordinating the subcommittee's workload. Other arbitrators usually take a lesser role in the subcommittee's business, but are subscribed to the mailing list and assist with acknowledging appeals, offering opinions when the subcommittee is divided, and providing research (like checkuser results) about open appeals. Appeals are usually decided summarily, by one or a small group of subcommittee members and/or arbitrators; occasionally, appeals are decided based on the consensus of an ad hoc group of arbitrators who opine on the appeal; and rarely, appeals are referred to the community for consultation before the subcommittee makes a decision. Appeals may be referred from the subcommittee's mailing list to the attention of the full committee, through a full vote, at the discretion of any arbitrator (though this is exceedingly rare, and the result of appeals is usually decided through discussion and debate).
[edit] Mailing list
The arbcom-appeals-en mailing list is used by the subcommittee to conduct ban appeals. The appeals mailing list replaced the older system of conducting appeals on the full arbcom-l mailing list on 30 July 2012.
The interface page for the mailing list is located here, and the mailing list address is arbcom-appeals-enlists.wikimedia.org. Messages sent to the list by non-members will initially be held for approval by the list administrators. Your email will only be distributed to the subscribers listed, but the content of the mailing list may be shared with the entire Arbitration Committee when necessary, is available to any sitting arbitrator on request, and will be made available to future subcommittee members through the list archives.
[edit] Standard practices
The Ban Appeals Subcommittee acts on behalf of the Arbitration Committee as a panel of final appeal for site-bans and long blocks. Our decisions are unanimous; where we cannot unanimously decide an appeal, we defer it to the wider Arbitration Committee for a full vote among all the arbitrators (but this rarely happens). The subcommittee is governed by the committee procedure on "Handling of ban appeals":
| Copy of procedure on Handling of ban appeals |
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The procedure for handling ban appeals is as follows:
An arbitrator's service on the Ban Appeals Subcommittee is part of his or her official service as an arbitrator, and therefore shall not constitute grounds for recusal in a subsequent matter involving an editor whose appeal was considered by the subcommittee. |
In addition, we follow these standard practices:
- We never accept appeals from one editor more often than once in every six months. Once we decide an appeal, we will not revisit it earlier than six months except at the request of a sitting arbitrator.
- We try to decide all appeals promptly, and in under three weeks if possible. If we do not decide an appeal in three weeks, we would welcome the appellant asking for an update on the status of their appeal.
- We will announce successful appeals on the appellant's user talk page, at WT:BASC, and/or on a public community noticeboard at our discretion.
- We may also announce the result of an unsuccessful appeal on the appellant's user talk page, so that the community is aware an editor has unsuccessfully appealed their block to BASC.
- All appeals may be included in the statistics we periodically release. We would not include confidential information in these statistics.
