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
Editors wishing to edit in [problematic] areas are advised to edit carefully, to adopt Wikipedia’s communal approaches (including appropriate conduct, dispute resolution, neutral point of view, no original research and verifiability) in their editing, and to amend behaviors that are deemed to be of concern by administrators. An editor unable or unwilling to do so may wish to restrict their editing to other topics, in order to avoid sanctions.
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, sockpuppetry, 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;
- discussing issues related to the topic area in a non-transparent manner, e.g. through comments that are not in English or off-wiki (on private mailing lists, web forums, etc.);
- misusing Wikipedia's dispute resolution mechanisms, including arbitration enforcement, e.g. through making too many unfounded requests for administrative intervention.
- 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.
Standards
In determining whether to impose sanctions on a given user and which sanctions to impose, administrators should use their judgment and balance the need to assume good faith and avoid biting genuinely inexperienced editors, and the desire to allow responsible contributors maximum freedom to edit, with the need to reduce edit-warring and misuse of Wikipedia as a battleground, so as to create an acceptable collaborative editing environment even on our most contentious articles.
Sanctions
While creative or individualized sanctions may at times be necessary, the following sanctions are most often employed:
- revert restrictions for edit warriors,
- interaction bans for people who have trouble interacting collegially with specific other editors,
- topic bans for editors who engage in repeated disruption,
- blocks to stop ongoing disruption or to enforce any of the above sanctions.