Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee

Mentioning administrator elections to your WMF contact in your monthly meeting

Hello arbitrators. We were wondering if you might be willing to mention administrator elections to your WMF T&S contact in your monthly meeting. I've sent them a couple emails now but it is not moving very fast. Basically we can't move forward until they state that they are willing to set up a mw:Extension:SecurePoll election for us and give us a date window in which they're willing to do it. Thoughts? Thank you. More context. –Novem Linguae (talk) 01:53, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Just noting that there are a lot of global SecurePoll instances that will take priority over anything else. Specifically, the U4C elections have just completed; in June/July, there will be the Movement Charter ratification vote (running both a local instance and a global instance simultaneously); in August/September, there will be the WMF Board of Trustees election. T&S is also currently short-staffed, with their lead SecurePoll person not available at present. I do understand the frustration, but an experiment on English Wikipedia (when we are already carrying out a bunch of other RFA experiments at the same time) probably shouldn't be the priority for their team. I'd suggest holding off until they get through this unusual glut of global SecurePoll instances, perhaps until September, before raising any red flags. That will also give time to see how the other RFA-related experiments work out. Risker (talk) 05:18, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Hey Risker. Always good to see you :) If T&S emails me back with an explanation like that, I'd be totally understanding, and would be happy to pick a date in the calendar that is many months from now. I disagree with the idea that we need to intentionally move slowly due to other RFA reform efforts. The T:CENT-advertised RFC passed with a consensus to do one trial, so I no longer see the consensus part as being ambiguous. –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:01, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

I have now added it to the next meeting's agenda, but to my personal understanding, sending e-mails is the right decision and there's no huge urgency. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 06:27, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

We are not EN Wikipedia's Foreign Office. This is a gross misuse of our political capital and time. Guerillero ^{Parlez Moi} 11:34, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

I didn't think much about it and have removed it again. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 12:39, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

@Guerillero Ironically, a topic of discussion highly related to the question of increased SecurePoll use appeared on the committee agenda while I was on it. As such I don't think calling it a gross misuse of capital and time is whatsoever reasonable. Izno (talk) 16:06, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

I don't see how convincing the WMF to set up SecurePoll is in our remit in any reasonable way. Local scrutineering, however, is due to the committee's oversight of the CheckUser team. -- Guerillero ^{Parlez Moi} 10:33, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Notice to arbitrators about IRC notices that may come in

Hello Arbitration Committee. I was advised to write a message here informing you of some cleanup work I started doing for the pre-2009 cases that ... I did not realize generated a lot of IRC messages until it was brought to my attention.

Long story short, after noticing that there were several old cases that were not subpages of Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case but rather Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration, I found this edit summary that hints in 2009, the case requests page was renamed. To me (and my cleanup-ish, somewhat OCD-mind and one of my goals to make all aspects of Wikipedia simple to find for everyone of any technical level ... with one being making sure parent pages match whenever possible/necessary), as well as noticing that there was not functional change in how the rest of the subpages of the cases were organized after that move (such as "proposed resolution", etc), I started making moves from cases in the Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration space to Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case.

However, after I started making some of these moves, I was almost immediately informed on my talk page that the moves I was making caused IRC notifications, and I was unaware that there was such notification functionality to the arbitrators (or any other interested parties) that when a subpage is created somewhere in the "Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests" space (not sure which page exactly), a bunch of IRC notifications get sent out.

So, here's what I found ... there's about 600-800 subpages of "Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration" (main case pages and the respective subpages) that look to be compatible to be moved to subpages of Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case. What this means is ... for all these pages to be moved, from my understanding with how IRC works in these subpages, there is the potential for 600-800 notifications to be produced with these moves. As pointed out to me, this can be annoying since these notifications do not represent cases being created and/or added to.

Since I am able to move a page and its subpages all at once, I can be able to get this task done rather quickly, making it so this burst of notifications would last for maybe 1-2 hours tops (maybe not even that, maybe even 30-45 minutes). I have been advised as well that maybe it is better to do these moves in small chunks; in my perspective, this means that the streams of potentially false notifications via IRC will happen more than once while these moves are occurring.

In a nutshell, this is what I have been doing, and I know everyone has their lives, and if I continue to do this task, I would, I guess, like to know how quickly I can do this task (provided there is no opposition to me continuing this) as I think that provided I continue with this task, everyone who gets the IRC notifications would prefer this happen as quickly as possible. This will allow true notifications to come in without all the false notifications about the page moves mixed in with them. I'm not trying to cause issues here as I thought I was doing uncontroversial cleanup ... and then was informed it's not as uncontroversial as I thought, primarily due to the notifications.

Provided there are no stopping concerns presented, I'm planning on getting back to this at some point in the next few hours (just got hit with a real life interruption). I'm open to feedback and advice on this. Thank you all for your time and understanding. Steel1943 (talk) 21:44, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

For what it's worth, given the discussion below, I'm holding off performing any additional page moves for the time being. Steel1943 (talk) 00:57, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

At this point, I have reverted all of the moves I did and restored any redirects that existed prior to me making the moves which pointed at the original titles. At this point, my interest level in pursuing this cleanup I found is nonexistent, and everything is back the way it was before I started any of these moves. Cheers. Steel1943 (talk) 01:42, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

All arbitration cases before 2009 were headed under the old style, until Kirill reorganized arb-space 15 years ago. As you point out, these cases have hundreds of subpages (the Committee used to decide dozens of cases each year). I assume these moves would break thousands of links, although presumably the page-moves would leave redirects. I'll of course defer to the current arbitrators and clerks, but frankly I'm not convinced that this massive set of moves is worth making. The short-term burst of IRC notifications is probably the least of it. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 00:18, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

@Newyorkbrad: For what it's worth, the moves would not break links, as long as their former names remain as redirects towards the correct pages. Steel1943 (talk) 00:45, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

My first thought matches Newyorkbrad's. The archive searches at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index and Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index/Cases (and possibly elsewhere) have been set-up with two search boxes for pre- and post-July 2009 case naming structure. Assuming the counts at the top of the yearly index pages are correct there were approximately 397 cases before the naming scheme changed, with each having a main page and typically 3 subpages, all of which have a talk page - or just under 3200 pages. All of these will need to be examined for broken links, all the index pages will need to be checked for broken links - even if redirects are left. I'm not convinced that there is benefit to this task, and certainly not without an explicit consensus from the current committee. Thryduulf (talk) 00:40, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

@Thryduulf: What you stated regarding the "old" versus the "new" styles, as I see it, are problematic since they cause a bit of unnecessary effort by the searchers to find what they may be looking for. It also requires any editors, arbitrators, etc. to have a vague understanding of when old cases occurred, especially if they occurred before 2009 ... which, quite frankly, I'm sure there are some arbitrators who were either not actively editing then and/or did not even have their account created yet by 2009. Merging all the archived discussions under one parent page configuration makes it so only one search has to be accomplished to look through the archives that is time-agnostic. Steel1943 (talk) 00:49, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

(Individual opinion, not a collective one) I left a comment at Steel1943's talk page saying that I was fine with the moves. My issue with the current split system is that it causes issues finding cases, especially when I'm going to them directly from the URL bar. For example, I always have issues finding the Ryulong case, which is housed at Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Ryulong and does not have a redirect from where it would be as a modern case. Now, is this convenience and consistency worth making so many moves? I don't know, which is why I didn't propose internally that we (clerks/Committee) did it. But given that Steel is willing to do this tedious work, I currently lean towards carrying this out. Sdrqaz (talk) 00:56, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

That sounds like an argument to create a redirect from the modern form. Either on mass or, less disruptively, individually when the need arises. Another alternative would be to create a shortcut (e.g. WP:ARBRYULONG) for cases you refer to frequently. This achieves the same aim with (at most) a tiny fraction of the disruption (and in a lot of cases none at all). Thryduulf (talk) 01:22, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

The way the wiki software works actually prefers subpages to be married to their parent pages as live pages, not redirects, so that the appropriate subpages can be moved and/or deleted whenever applicable, which is why I did what I did (now reverted, of course). Steel1943 (talk) 01:44, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

• Oh please don't do this. There are sufficient mitigations in place that have been successful for 10+ years. This is not solving any problems. This is not improving the encyclopedia, or even the Wikipedia space; there will still be the same number of pages, all of which will require redirects to prevent broken links. In fact, it is making Wikipedia space worse, because of all the redirects cluttering up the place. There is zero benefit to this action. Tens of thousands of accounts are going to be pinged, hundreds of pages are going to consume peoples' watchlists, and for what? There's no good reason to do this, and lots of good reasons to not do it. Risker (talk) 01:08, 2 June 2024 (UTC)