Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-08-02/Discussion report

Discussion report

Fox News, a flight of RfAs, and banning policy

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By Pythoncoder and Bri

In brief

WP:Village pump (proposals)#Proposed: a massive automated invasion of privacy for the greater good (proposed by BD2412), suggesting automated sockpuppet detection by machine learning/bot, has tens of editors in attendance, and at least one proposal for seven-dollar-figure WMF project. Also, a project that WMF already has under way is arguably functionally equivalent to the proposal, and another effort by an individual unnamed checkuser exists: some smaller version of the behavioural analysis ... is being worked on by a CU on another project as a tool.
The paid editing firm Wiki Professionals has been banned by the community (see RfC closure and/or shortcut WP:WIKIPRO). They are also called by many other names, including Get Wikified.
An RfA "flight" has been proposed. The plan is for multiple users to run for adminship at around the same time in order to reduce the stress on individual nominees. This stemmed from this discussion, which also addressed RfA reform with an ArbCom-like voting process across a roster of candidates.
There is a proposal to get rid of stub tags; it was created in June, but is still open at the time of writing.
One resysop request by an admin who was desysopped for inactivity led to some controversy on the bureaucrats' noticeboard. The user would have been eligible to be resysopped under the criteria in place when his administrator rights were removed, but he was deemed to be no longer eligible due to the resysop criteria being tightened in 2019.
There is a proposal on WT:Banning policy to increase the minimum length of discussions on whether an editor should be site-banned from 24 hours to a longer period (such as 48 hours, 72 hours, or 7 days).

Recently-closed discussions

The former speedy deletion criterion T2 (prohibiting "Templates that are unambiguous misrepresentations of established policy, e.g. disclaimer templates intended to be used in articles and speedy-deletion templates for issues other than speedy-deletion criteria") has been removed following a community discussion.
The RfC on Fox News's reliability has been closed by 3 admins, with the following results:
- Reporting of Fox-TV's affiliate stations (such as New York City's WNYW) is generally reliable.
- There is no consensus regarding the reliability of the Fox News Channel and foxnews.com with regard to politics and science.
- Fox News Channel and foxnews.com should be considered generally reliable in all other areas.
- The RfC specifically did not discuss the reliability of Fox News opinion programs (such as Hannity) so there is no change as to the community consensus in that area. See WP:FOXNEWS for a summary.