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Discussion report

Farewell, Mediation Committee

MedCom closed

Study the Past, at the U.S. National Archives

Wikipedians reached a consensus on the village pump to close the Mediation Committee and mark all its associated pages as historical. The closer, Winged Blades of Godric, pointed to the wide support of the proposer Beeblebrox's argument that MedCom's original purposes have been supplanted by (and are better served by) RfCs. WBG also pointed to MedCom being too opaque and bureaucratic in the eyes of many Wikipedians, and concluded that many of the "oppose" !votes were not sufficiently convincing when compared to the rebuttals. Alternative routes for content dispute resolution (as suggested by Wikipedia:Dispute resolution requests as well as commenters in the discussion) include requests for comment and the dispute resolution noticeboard.

Admin controversies lead to new RfCs

Several admin accounts – some of which were largely inactive but stayed in compliance with the policy on removing inactive admins' tools – were recently compromised to insert vandalism into articles. This led to a proposal to tighten the policy on the policy village pump. The changes would remove the requirement that admins be notified before their mop is removed, as well as requiring that a logged action be made every 12 months to keep the bit, such as a block, deletion, or page protection; not just an edit. Both changes were proposed with the intention of discouraging admins from "holding on to the bit" despite not actively editing. These vandal attacks have led to a proposal on the Administrators' Noticeboard to temporarily restrict editing the main page to interface admins.

In other admin news, after a bureaucrat desysopped an admin who removed someone else's block of their account (see the arbitration report) and several compromised admin accounts unblocked themselves (resulting in global locks for the affected accounts), an RfC was created on the village pump about whether self-unblocking by admins should ever be permitted by technical means. In addition to an outright ban (option A) and the status quo of "admins are technically capable of self-unblocking but also see the policy for whether it's acceptable" (option C), another option was offered of bureaucrats being able to self-unblock but not other admins (option B). Four days after the RfC was created, developers implemented option A, though admins will still be able to remove blocks they made on themselves.

Other discussions this month

Follow-ups

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  1. ^ There are over two million members of Category:All stub articles as of publication date.
  2. ^ Estimated by Iridescent to be between 10,000 and 100,000 pages; in other words, up to 4.5% of all stubs.