Wikipedia talk:Dispute Resolution Improvement Project/Newsletter

Mediation Cabal

I think it's noteworthy the Mediation Cabal achieved a 100% success rate in the May 2012 analysis. Presumably, this reflects the high quality of volunteers MedCab attracted, who will hopefully continue to offer their services through the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard. PhilKnight (talk) 19:45, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Dispute resoution in general

My own experiences with wiki, however limited and perhaps extreme, might provide a worthwhile perspective on DR at wiki. They at the very least cover nearly the entire gamut of DR mechanisms available. First, the shear number available for ostensibly aggrieved editors to shop is alarming though perhaps not surprising for something the size of wiki. More importantly, the different rules and makeup of each and every is something which provides a sizable advantage to the party with greater inside familiarity in any kind of dispute. This naturally creates a distinction and discrepancy between the haves vs. have-nots, since the sure-fire way to "win" anything when the decision mechanism is "consensus" is inherent to membership in an aristocracy built via quid pro quo. This further removes the discussion from the technical merits of any matter into the pointless (to the outside) realm of petty politics. This is probably reflected in the survey which shows hardly any difference between widely diverging DR processes, given the depth/level at which the pervasive and influential political mechanism works.

That said, this doesn't mean reform is futile, only that it needs to be targeted to how everything actually works instead of how it's perhaps assumed to work. If the politics is a given, and goal is still quality content, many things can be done in practice to mitigate the influence of the former while still attaining the latter. For example, one idea could be have-nots instructed or otherwise given more effective tools to use against wikicrats, couple of which are detailed in my post here. But more importantly, the simple acknowledgement by those disillusioned by the second of the chasm between content editors in the vast long tail at wiki, and an incestuous self-important inner circle would go a long way. IOW, DR at wiki needs to remember who it's working for and towards, and it's certainly not those who've seemingly made a career of building a bureaucracy. Agent00f (talk) 01:35, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Glad to hear someone is addressing the dispute resolution crisis. It's the main reason I have been largely inactive in recent years.

During the first 3 or 4 years I was at Wikipedia, I was considered of the three top experts on NPOV and was one of the most trusted Wikipedians. (I was the first elected "bureaucrat".)

Later, a sustained campaign to subvert neutrality was made, with me as a primary target. I was vilified en masse as 'tendentious', although out of 30,000 edits not one was ever shown to be in violation of NPOV policy. Other contributors simply said they were "sick" of having to deal with my unrelenting protests of their NPOV violations. Apparently deciding that the best defense was a good offense, they accused me of what they themselves were doing.

After disproving the first few dozen false charges, I gave up the fight but (like Lance Armstrong with the false doping change) I found that the anti-NPOV side had "truth in numbers".

What we need is a system that exposes false attempts to blacken someone's name and besmirch their reputation. Each NPOV dispute should be settled on objective measures of neutrality. The principle that an article on a controversy should never assert any side as true or correct must be upheld, and never made a case of "ignore all rules" or "85% majority trumps policy".

It's not really hard to make an article neutral: simply say that A says B about C. --Uncle Ed (talk) 17:28, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]