Wikipedia:WikiProject Arbitration Enforcement/Standards and principles

This page documents the principles and standards usually employed by administrators participating in Wikipedia:WikiProject Arbitration Enforcement. Because arbitration enforcement relies on the individual discretion of administrators, they remain free to use other standards and procedures. These standards and procedures are not necessarily endorsed by the Arbitration Committee and enforcement actions remain in all cases subject to Committee oversight and review.

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.

— Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Discretionary 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, even if similar conduct 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.

— Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Discretionary sanctions

Warning

As provided for in the relevant remedies, AE sanctions may normally not be imposed without a prior warning on the user's talk page that links to the relevant arbitration decision and tells the editor how they should improve their editing. Because of this second requirement, the warning is necessary even in cases where the editor can be assumed to be already aware of the arbitration case.

Any editor may issue such a warning, but warnings left by editors involved in any ongoing conflict must meet the same standard of neutrality and usefulness as those left by administrators.

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.

Audi alteram partem

Except where necessary to stop ongoing disruption, administrators should allow editors to reply to any concerns that the administrator or others may have about the editor's conduct before imposing sanctions based on these concerns.

Duration and extent

Sanctions should be as narrow and short as is necessary to stop the disruption at issue, and as broad and long as is necessary to ensure that the disruption will most likely not occur again. In practice, this is often realized through an escalating scale of sanctions, e.g. as follows:

• warning,
• block on the order of hours, or revert restriction on the order of weeks, or ban from a few articles on the order of weeks,
• block on the order of days, or revert restriction on the order of months, or wider topic ban on the order of months,
• block on the order of weeks, or general topic ban on the order of months, or indefinitely in egregious cases.

The idea behind escalating sanctions is that if a short and narrow sanction proves ineffective to prevent disruption, a longer and broader sanction may be required. In all cases, sanctions may be reduced in scope or duration, or lifted, at any time if the imposing administrator or the community are convinced that the sanction is no longer required (see, mutatis mutandis, the guide to appealing blocks).

Because of the particular sensitivity of the topic areas subject to arbitration enforcement, administrators may tend to err on the safe side and impose longer and broader sanctions than they would for similar disruption in other topic areas.

Review of sanctions

The mechanism for the review of arbitration enforcement sanctions is described at WP:AEBLOCK.