Wikipedia:Arbitration/Policy

Last amended 11 March 2005; see /Proposed amendment, /Proposed amendment ratification vote, and approval by Jimbo Wales of the amendment. Further proposals should go to /Proposals.

The Arbitration policy acts as a guideline for the workings of the Arbitration Committee. These policies are now fully adopted, but subject to amendement. See the Arbitration policy comments, the Arbitration policy ratification vote, and the Arbitration rationale.

Jurisdiction

The Arbitrators reserve the right to hear or not hear any dispute, at their discretion. The following are general guidelines which will apply to most cases, but the Arbitrators may make exceptions.

1. The Arbitrators will hear disputes that have been referred to Arbitration by the Mediation Committee.
2. Where a dispute has not gone through Mediation, or the earlier steps in the dispute resolution process, the Committee may reject, suggesting that such steps should be taken first, if they believe that it is likely to help.
3. The Arbitrators will occasionally request advice on whether to hear a particular dispute from Jimbo Wales.
4. The Arbitrators will primarily investigate interpersonal disputes.
5. The Arbitrators will hear or not hear disputes according to the wishes of the community, where there is a consensus.
6. The Arbitrators will not hear disputes where they have not been requested to Arbitrate.
7. The Committee has jurisdiction over the official mailing list "WikiEN-l" and the English Wikipedia only; its jurisdiction does not cover the IRC channels, private email exchanges, nor any other arena of conflict or dispute. IRC evidence and evidence gathered from private e-mails may, however, be used to support a claim being made about actions on Wikipedia itself.
8. As a body reporting to the Wikimedia Foundation Board, which has the ability to direct the Committee to reach a verdict or otherwise act in a particular way, the Committee has no jurisdiction over the members of the Board.

Rules

The Arbitrators will judge cases according to the following guidelines, which they will apply with common sense and discretion, and an eye to the expectations of the community:

1. Established Wikipedia customs and common practices.
2. Wikipedia's "laws": terms of use, submission standards, bylaws, general disclaimer, and copyright license.
3. Sensible "real world" laws.

Former decisions will not be binding on the Arbitrators - rather, they intend to learn from experience.

Outcomes

The initial solution to most problems will be to issue an Arbitration Decree. For example:

• "User X, you are making unhelpful edits to article A. Stop it, and take a broader lesson from this as you edit other articles."
• "User X, you are making personal attacks on a wide variety of pages. Don't do that, personal attacks are inappropriate."
• "User X, limit your reverts to article A to one per day."
• "User X, refrain from editing this group of articles."

The second option will be to require that a user does not edit Wikipedia for a given time frame: up to thirty days to start with, up to a year in severe cases. These may be enforced by, for example, sysop blocks on IP addresses and usernames. Such bans may be appealed to Jimbo Wales, who retains the right to veto such decisions.

In due course, the Arbitrators will review the possibility of additional software-based security measures, but will not request such features at the present time, relying instead on Decrees.

Transparency

1. We plan to take evidence in public, but reserve the right to take some evidence in private in exceptional circumstances.
2. Each Arbitrator will make their own decision about how much personal information about themselves they are willing to share, both publicly, and with the rest of the Committee.
3. Arbitrators with multiple accounts on Wikipedia will disclose the usernames of those accounts to the rest of the Committee, and to Jimbo Wales, but are not required to disclose them publicly.
4. Initially, we will keep our deliberations private, based on a semi-formal vote amongst Arbitrators. However, both Fred Bauder and The Cunctator have expressed strong distaste for this option, so the Arbitrators are far from unanimous on this point.
5. We will make detailed rationale for all our decisions public, based upon our private deliberations.

Requests

The Arbitration Committee accepts requests for Arbitration from anyone; however, in most cases, the Arbitration Committee will only hear cases referred to them by the Mediation Committee or directly from Jimbo Wales. The Arbitration Committee will decide whether to accept cases based on its Jurisdiction, as described previously.

The Arbitrators will accept a case if four or more Arbitrators have voted to hear it. The Arbitrators will reject a case if four or more Arbitrators have voted not to hear it. Individual Arbitrators will provide a rationale for their vote if so moved, or if specifically requested.

In the case of users whose editing privileges on Wikipedia have been revoked, they can request Arbitration by emailing a member of the Arbitration Committee.

Who takes part?

1. Initially, all Arbitrators will hear all cases, barring any recusals. We will not use Alex's proposed selection of a three Arbitrator panel, for example.
2. Arbitrators will recuse themselves immediately if they believe that they have a conflict of interest.
3. Users who believe Arbitrators have a conflict of interest should post an appropriate statement during the Arbitration process. The Arbitrator in question will seriously consider it and make a response.
4. Arbitrators will not be required to recuse themselves for trivial reasons - merely reverting an edit of a user involved in a case undergoing Arbitration, for example, will likely not be seen as a serious enough conflict of interest to require recusal.

Hearing

Litigants involved in cases heard by the Arbitration Committee will present their cases and evidence as directed on a sub-page of the case page, itself a sub-page of Requests for Arbitration, titled as "[Username]" or "[UsernameA] vs. [UsernameB]" or the like, at the discretion of the Arbitrator responsible for opening the case. Litigants shall be defined as the user or users named in the case or any advocates they identify.

Litigants may add evidence and argument to the case page at any time. Evidence and argument may also be posted by third parties and by the Arbitrators themselves. The Arbitrators reserve the right to disregard certain items of evidence or certain lines of argument.

Once the hearing has begun, the Arbitrators will deliberate upon the case. If the deliberations are made public, then outside commentary on the deliberations is discouraged until such time after the hearing has ceased that the Arbitrators define as the period for public commentary on the deliberations.

Judgement

Once the hearing has ended, the Arbitrators will construct an consensus opinion made out of Principles (general statements about policy), Findings of Fact (findings specific to the case), Remedies (binding Decrees on what should be done), and Enforcements (conditional Decrees on what can further be done if the terms are met). Each part will be subject to a simple-majority vote amongst active non-recused Arbitrators, the list of active members being that listed on Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee. Dissenting votes for and opinions on parts that pass will be noted. In the event of no options for action gaining majority support, no decision will be made, and no action will be taken.

The decision will contain detailed findings of fact as to what rules were violated, including reference to each specific action or group of actions that violated a rule.

The findings of fact will be of the form similar to:

We find that XXX has/has not engaged in YYY behavior [in violation of ZZZ rule]. We find that the following edits/list postings/IRC chats/etc., in whole or in part, constitute YYY behavior:

• Incident 1
• Incident 2
• etc.

Therefore, we find that XXX has been in violation of policy to ABC extent, and is subject to the following remedy:

Delineation of remedy

Judgments are subject to veto by Jimbo Wales.

Amendment

Amendments to the policy are subject to the following rules:

• Exact suggested wording changes should be suggested on a page, and the presence of the page made well known.
• Discussion should continue for at least a fortnight.
• A small straw-poll should be taken of those discussing the suggested amendment; if there is strong support (>70%) for this amendment to go to a vote, a widely-announced full vote should be taken.
• The vote shall be considered passed when at least 100 users have voted, and at least 80% of the votes are in support
• When the vote has passed, the Arbitration policy shall be altered to reflect the amendment. This should be widely noted.

No changes, no matter how small or insignificant, may be made to the policy without the due process of an amendment being made in the above manner.

Unresolved issues

Deliberately left unspecified at this time. See the sub-pages for discussion:

• Election of Arbitrators
• Procedure for votes which produce no majority opinion

See also

• Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee, Wikipedia:Requests for Arbitration