Delirium wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
The arbitrators cannot decide any dispute that is not submitted to us, but I think our jurisdiction should include disputes over content in appropriate instances, for example, where repeated struggles to produce a NPOV article have failed.
Of course. Arbitrators who are narrowly focused on whether someone should be banned or not would be a waste of human resources. Based on the facts in an actual case, they should have a wide range of possible solutions available to them.
I do see your point somewhat, and might be willing to let arbitrators do things like set up a vote and interpret its results. I'm somewhat opposed, however, to letting an arbitration committee actually arbitrate the content of controversial articles. If something cannot be worked out through mediation and must be put to a vote, I think a vote of the contributors on the talk page is preferable to a vote by a separate committee.
In my view, the arbitration committee should really only be taking over powers previously reserved by Jimbo, which are basically to make decisions on banning and procedural matters. He's never reserved a right to dictate resolutions to content disputes, and I don't think the new committee should either.
I agree that having arbitrators decide on the contents of an article would be unwise, but then so is voting on the contents or an overdependence on Google statistics.
We have a number of contributors who are otherwise very good contributors, but who tend to go off the deep end when dealing with certain subjects. Depending on how the meta-data discussion ends up it could be possible to block a user from editing a range of articles. Thus a person who loses perspective over the Middle East conflict could be barred from editing any article that are classified with the words "Israel" and "Palestine". Arbitrators would still primarily deal with disciplinary matters. (I don't know about the procedural) They could still have a wide range of solutions available.
Mediators could be more free to deal with content since they would not be implementing solutions. In dealing with an edit war over content, by talking with the parties they could perhaps convince both to shift their positions.
Ec