Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Orangemarlin

The decision viewable in the history was declared to be vacated here, by the Committee. The subsequent request for arbitration was rejected by the Committee. This rejection was primarily due to statements by Orangemarlin and arbitrator Jpgordon, in which it was announced that Orangemarlin (talk · contribs) had agreed to mentorship by Jpgordon (talk · contribs).

This page and its history is preserved for transparency.

Final Report

The Arbitration Committee has issued this further statement. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:00, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

The Committee has decided to issue a Final Report on the Orangemarlin case, now resolved without formal proceedings by a voluntary mentoring agreement. What is said here is on the basis of an exhaustive review of all discussions relevant to the handling of the matter. It takes into account feedback from observers on our ArbCom mailing list.

This report supersedes earlier statements.

(1) Role of FT2

It was always an unlikely explanation that FT2, who is known for his careful and thorough work on and for Wikipedia, had wittingly gone outside and deliberately flouted our standard procedures. Part of the blame lies on email discussion as a way to get work done. The Committee takes collective responsibility for what occurred. Inferences that have been made, adverse to FT2's reputation for care, are simply not well founded.

(2) Handling of matters in private and public

We want to clarify the nature of two types of ArbCom "paths" - ways of handling matters, that are not the usual cases held in the Wikipedia: namespace. These are

(a) Summary actions (such as are often applied to serious sockpuppetry investigations); (b) Privately-held cases.

We do not hold cases under (b) that are handled under the terms of (a). That would be the kind of "secret trial" that has been alleged. We do not hold such private cases without the participation of the parties. Orangemarlin was handled directly under (a).

We shall make it a rule not to have such matters tracked this way in future, but the core of the problem can be said to lie in this point: trying to specify a completely rule-based system here failed us.