Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee

Use this page to discuss information on the page (and subpages) attached to this one. This includes limited discussion of the Arbitration Committee itself, as a body. Some things belong on other pages:

requesting arbitration: WP:A/R
discussing finalised decisions of the committee: WT:ACN
discussing pending decisions: find the proceedings page at Template:Casenav
discussing the process of arbitration: WT:A/R

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This Arbitration Committee has been mentioned by a media organization:

Ramey, Corinne (May 7, 2018). "The 15 People Who Keep Wikipedia's Editors From Killing Each Other". Wall Street Journal.

RfC: Should Signpost Articles on Open ArbCom Cases be NPOV?[edit]

Please see: Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost#RfC: Should Signpost Articles on Open ArbCom Cases be NPOV?. Onceinawhile (talk) 16:34, 18 March 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Contentious topic scope[edit]

Recently, a good-faith request for page protection was made at WP:RFPP to apply extended confirmed protection to an AfD page for an Israel/Palestine article (diff). I took a quick look through WP:CTOP to see if there is any guidance given about the scope of namespaces that might be included in a contentious topic. My assumption was that contentious topic restrictions can only be applied to articles, and perhaps article talk pages in extreme cases. However, I didn't find any language on the page that made it clear. Anyway, I declined the protection request, since the AfD isn't actively being disrupted, and since any experienced closing admin shouldn't have much trouble weeding out SPA votes and other nonsense when the time comes. But, I thought it might be good to start a discussion here about whether pages in the WP namespace and other namespaces could reasonably have contentious topic restrictions applied to them, and whether or not WP:CTOP should be modified to make the namespace scope more clear. —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 23:46, 20 March 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Sorry if I'm telling you something you already know. Per WP:ARBECR:

Non-extended-confirmed editors may use the "Talk:" namespace to post constructive comments and make edit requests related to articles within the topic area, provided they are not disruptive ... However, non-extended-confirmed editors may not make edits to internal project discussions related to the topic area, even within the "Talk:" namespace. Internal project discussions include, but are not limited to, AfDs, WikiProjects, RfCs, RMs, and noticeboard discussions.

The procedure page goes on to say "If a page (other than a "Talk:" page) mostly or entirely relates to the topic area, broadly construed, this restriction is preferably enforced through extended confirmed protection, though this is not required." So, you don't have to approve such requests, but it'd be nice. The topic area is plagued with socks that do not always present as obviously disruptive or as SPAs. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 23:55, 20 March 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

(edit conflict) in the days of discretionary sanctions, the authorisations explicitly said "pages" rather than "articles" because disruption is not necessarily limited to the mainspace. I would be surprised if this was intentionally changed by the change to contentious topics. Thryduulf (talk) 23:58, 20 March 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Administrators are empowered to enact restrictions from a standard set listed at Wikipedia:Contentious topics#Standard set. One of the listed restrictions is page protection, which is linked to Wikipedia:Protection policy. Wikipedia:Protection policy#Discretionary usage has a brief mention of contentious topics, saying that any level of protection can be imposed. There is no limitation mentioned based on the namespace of the page in question. isaacl (talk) 00:33, 21 March 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thanks for the clarifications. I don't wade into contentious topics all that often, so I'm not familiar with all the minutiae. Guess I was looking on the wrong policy page for this info. I went ahead and protected the AfD, since it seems clear from WP:ARBECR that that's the preferred way of doing things. —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 02:01, 21 March 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]