Wikipedia:At wit's end

The phrase "At wit's end" is used as a motion in ARBCOM cases to indicate that, given numerous attempts to resolve an issue having failed, they will resort to more extreme ways of solving the problem that may appear over-the-top or excessive compared to the individual acts that participants to the dispute may have committed.

The motion is typically accompanied by wording along the lines of:

"In cases where all reasonable attempts to control the spread of disruption arising from long-term disputes have failed, the Committee may be forced to adopt seemingly draconian measures as a last resort for preventing further damage to the encyclopedia"

Purpose

Wit's end is typically applied in disputes related to contentious areas, and normally signifies that blocks/bans are going to applied to some or all of the parties to a dispute. More generally it reflects a principle that draconian measures can be invoked for defending the encyclopaedia against patterns of behaviour, even if those patterns of behaviour may be made up of acts that, taken individually, do not rise to the level of requiring harsh measures to counter them.

History and basis

The earliest case in which it was invoked was apparently the October 2007 Eastern Europe case, originally known as the Digwuren case. The motion does not appear to have been discussed in the workshop phase of the Eastern Europe case, however, various rationales can be suggested for it.

One basis for invoking this can be, for example, the amount of community time that is being taken up having to referee a dispute, meaning that the dispute is detracting from the work of building the encyclopaedia. Disputes that mean that otherwise-productive editors are detracting from the constructive activities of others can make them a net-negative for the project, against which the community are entitled to defend themselves.

Another basis could be that a dispute is acting to reduce collaboration or co-operation by converting the work of writing and editing articles in to a battle-ground. Since collaboration and co-operation is key to volunteers working together to build an encyclopaedia, anything that acts to reduce it is again a potential threat to the project.

The apparently-disproportionate nature of Wit's end can be seen as a product of the sanctions used to address disruptive behaviour on English Wikipedia not being punishments per se, but instead technical measures designed to "fix" a situation. Whilst in many cases the fact that sanctions are not punishment per se results in the sanction being less harsh than it might be if it were designed to simply redress the wrong done to others, this also means it can greatly exceed what might be expected if a sanction was to be imposed proportionate only to the harm done to specific complainants.