Wikipedia:WikiProject Arbitration Enforcement/Standards and principles
This page documents the principles and standards usually employed by administrators participating in WikiProject Arbitration Enforcement. Because arbitration enforcement relies on the individual discretion of administrators, members remain free to use other standards and procedures.
Principles
Disruption
This WikiProject covers topic areas that are subject to discretionary sanctions or similar broad-ranging remedies imposed by the Arbitration Committee. That Committee has determined that these areas are exceptionally conflict-laden and that editors editing in them must therefore take particular care. This means that the community's tolerance for disruption in these areas is much lower than elsewhere, and so is the threshold for what counts as sanctionable disruption. In particular:
- Disruption is not limited to the usual sort of misconduct (edit-warring, vandalism, etc.) but may also include:
- exhibiting a battleground mentality, e.g. by referring to other editors in terms of friends and enemies;
- using incivil terms or making personal attacks that may be tolerated elsewhere on Wikipedia;
- violating the biography of living persons policy, including in discussions, e.g. by referring to living public figures in a disparaging manner;
- overly long, aggressive or numerous contributions to discussions that have the effect of disrupting an orderly resolution of the matter under discussion.
- Two wrongs do not make a right. Disruption of any sort by one editor is no justification for disruption by others. In such cases it is most likely that all disruptive editors will be sanctioned, not just the one who started the disruption.