Jimmy Wales wrote in part:
I do not envision, and would strongly oppose, that mediation and arbitration committees get involved in ruling on the exact detailed contents of articles. (There is of course some overlap, since some behavioral problems exhibit themselves via a refusal to engage in NPOV editing over a long period of time.)
Arbitration of content would be pointless, since the content isn't permanent. Somebody new (or old but pretending to be new?) could change things again. So ceratinly arbitration on content would be silly.
But mediation could work here as well -- and it likely /would/ happen, if the mediation is with a user that doesn't work well with others. The mediator can start by mediating conflicts over content, because that's exactly what non working well with others is about.
Unlike arbitration, mediation makes sense when it comes to content, because mediation is merely the /facilitation/ of discussing conflict. And discussing conflict over content is exactly what we're supposed to do. Certainly I would agree that mediation is a better means than voting to facilitate discussion! As you said:
Voting is just one method (a bad one, in cases like this, I think) of _talking about the article_.
And Erik has suggested that JTD may need to be banned, so this is directly relevant to what we're dealing with here. If we had a mediation process, then as soon as Erik said that, the mediator would have a mandate to come in and try to smooth things over. To some extent, Ed Poor (my first nominee for mediator, no coincidence!) has been trying just that on this mailing list.
Not that we need to set anything up formally to have a mediation process. Keep talking, Ed!
-- Toby