Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-01-16/ArbCom update

Arbitration Committee elections continue; ArbCom member resigns

This week, the Arbitration Committee elections continued, with voting running until Sunday, 22 January. As of press time, 13 of the 68 candidates had dropped out, leaving 55 candidates in contention. However, of those 55, only 22 have greater than 50 percent support. Aranda56, Blankfaze, Dogbreathcanada, Emt147, Jtkiefer, Kelly Martin, Mikkalai, NSLE, Redwolf24, Svartalf, Terrenceong1992, Tony Sidaway, and Z.Spy all withdrew; most of them had considerable amounts of opposition.

As of press time, there were six candidates with greater than 80 percent support (listed in percentage of support, from greatest to least): Mindspillage, Filiocht, Charles Matthews, SimonP, Morven, and Dmcdevit. Both Mindspillage and Filiocht had greater than 90 percent support. In addition, eight candidates had less than 80 percent support but greater than 70 percent support.

Real-time results of the vote (assuming server lag is negligible) are available at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/arbcom (see related story ), and updates every hour (not dependent on server lag) are available at User:Mathbot/Results.

Also this week, Kelly Martin resigned from the Arbitration Committee after withdrawing from the elections, citing personal reasons. "I withdrew from the race because it was pointless to continue," she stated. "I resigned from ArbCom for solely personal reasons related to the amount of free time I have for the moment due to obligations at work." Martin was appointed to the Arbitration Committee by Jimbo Wales in October of 2005 along with Mindspillage and had been facing controversy over the past week relating to userboxes. However, after several users commented that they thought the controversy had caused Martin to resign, she dismissed those claims by saying, "Interpreting [my resignation] as attempts to 'restore tranquility' is misplaced."