Fred 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.
I agree. However, IMO, the main task of arbitrators in this regard would be to determine if more discussion would be useful and whether discussion seems to be going in circles or has stopped in some significant way. Then the arbitrators could ask on the relevant talk page whether or not a vote should be held. If a majority (say 60%) of the user's (to be defined) responding to that question respond 'yes' then a vote should be set-up. The arbitrators' job at that point would be to help the litigants decide which questions should be asked and what the terms of the vote should be. The resulting outcome of the vote would be binding and should not give the impression that the arbitrators are making content decisions (all arbitrators should recuse themselves from voting on at least any issue they are arbitrating). We could also set-up [[Wikipedia:Official votes]] as a jumping-off place to the various official vote pages on Wikipedia.
The current "vote" pages that are set-up willy-nilly should be regarded as strawpoll opinion surveys not subject to listing on the 'Official votes' page and should not be considered binding in anything other than the current wiki sense (meaning that people will not get in trouble for working against the outcome of the poll unless they very consistently break a policy such as Wikiquette).
Just some ideas.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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