[Wikipedia-l] Arbitration/mediation on en

[Daniel Mayer]

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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