User:Jbolden1517/NotesOnMediation

The project I'm primarily involved in is the Mediation Cabal, where I try and get everyone to move towards ahinsa if possible.

Dispute Resolution

Steps

What would normally happen would be the dispute resolution process. There are 3 primary processes on wikipedia for resolving issues of subject matter

1. The mediation process where a mediator tries to determine if there is any solution acceptable to both sides
2. The RFC process (on subject matter) where other people from the community have experience in similar situations are called in
3. The verifiability process where both sides are asked to produce high quality references for what they are arguing the standard on wikipedia is verifiability not truth (called wiki's razor). A high quality well respected source saying something "false" outweighs a low quality source saying something "true".

Why mediate

Hi. Can you two address the issues above? I mean you could just go back and forth and keep reverting one another forever but one of you had asked for a little mediation and this way is substantially less stressful. More importantly as communication breaks down what starts to happen is the article gets written in a way which is designed to be defensible in terms of the argument rather than most useful for our readers. So that while each individual edit may be an improvements, "improvements" in an environment where the talk pages have become divisive or hostile are likely to result in this article getting worse not better. Mediation is often successful in reducing hostility when people of good faith engage in it and this will help the article. I'm not going to force anybody to engage but I would urge to consider it rather than revert warring.

Passion

By in large people who take the time to edit wikipedia articles are motivated by some sort of passion. Good articles come from fans and foes. Remember our goal is to create a great encyclopedia. If we can utlize X's [hatred/love/frustration/anger/loyalty] of Y to create a very good article, that's a net plus. Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith refers to a X's attitude towards wikipedia, not his attitude towards Y. Only in the case where X was unable or unwilling to create quality content for Y would we disqualify him based on passion.

Trolling

Jimbo Wales

We need to take due process seriously, but we also need to remember: this is not a democracy, this is not an experiment in anarchy, it's a project to make the world a better place by giving away a free encyclopedia. When the user in question is acting this way, we can cut some serious slack to administrators who are doing the good work of defending us from nonsense. [1]

Republic of Nice

Now in terms of deletes of unnice comments by users, you are going to see many more of them if I'm running the mediation. My first priority is going to be to change the culture on this talk page. And that means enforced niceness for now (i.e. stuff that falls far short of a personal attack will still be censored). What we will have is cultural transformation driving content transformation which is the opposite of what usually occurs on non mediated talk pages.

How to pick cases

1. If possible choose cases with named users over IPs and people who have posted to multiple articles
2. If you aren't an admin avoid cases involving admins
3. Pick cases where you know little about the subject matter
4. Pick more than one case at the same time

How to start cases

1. Describe you own neutrality
2. Try and get people to agree to mediation if they haven't
3. Pick a first issue on which little judgement is required to get people used to arguing facts

Time

Mediation takes much more time then editing the same amount of material. That means it often takes much more time than the editors bargained for. On the other hand mediation takes far less time then resolving disputes through edit wars, which means it takes less time than the editors would have spent otherwise.