[Wikipedia-l] Arbitration/mediation on en

[Ray Saintonge]

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