Erik Moeller wrote:
This whole mediation/arbitration distinction seems fallacious to me. Alas, we're in this mess now, and it is unlikely to be fixed.
I don't know, I'm up for radical change if the current system is not working out.
The big problem I see right now is that too many people say "forget mediation, I want to go straight to arbitration". So the mediation step is slighted. And people aren't just being annoying when they do that, it's that by the time it gets to formal "mediation", things are so bad that only "arbitration" is possible.
The Mav/168 situation strikes me as being like that. Here we have two valued contributors arguing endlessly about something that outside parties see as entirely pointless (the wording of the introductory paragraph of [[DNA]], where there's nothing transparently wrong about either alternative, and it seems impossible that there could be no compromise).
They want to go to arbitration over it.
--Jimbo