Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/Archive/Scope of mediation

This is a partial quotation of an essay-like response written by Essjay (talk · contribs), eighth Chair of the Mediation Committee. Recovered from Special:Undelete/User:Essjay/Archives/Mediation.

I've found, looking through the archives as well as observing during my time on the [Mediation Committee], that user conduct cases are rarely successful, indeed, rarely does the "problem" party agree to have thier behavior analyzed. Most such cases really aren't mediations: You don't really mediate how someone behaves, you mediate a point of disagreement. When a court sends a couple in divorce to mediation, they do so for the parties to work out who gets the house and car, not who was right & wrong in the fight that led to the divorce. In the same way, users come to us to help them work out which reference should be included in the article, whether a given section should be it's own article or a part of a related one, etc., not who made more personal attacks or was the most uncivil.

There are, sometimes, cases where we can be helpful in matters of conduct, but in most of those cases, it is conduct about content. To steal a contemporary example, we could mediate the road-naming move-war dispute if both parties were willing; it would not, however, be of any use to fill a page with discussion about the appropriateness of move-warring (the conduct), we have policy that clearly states it isn't. What we would have to discuss is the content leading to the conduct, specifically, how the pages are named. Only when we had an agreement on the contet (correct names) would the problematic conduct (move-warring) end.

I believe strongly that most user-conduct cases are a matter for Arbitration, where actual, meaningful decisions can be made about conduct and sanctions imposed where necessary. The Arbitration Committee is in a position to say "You are wrong and must stop." The Mediation Committee is, in most user disputes, completely useless: We can neither offer an analysis of the dispute, because we must remain neutral facilitators, nor can we offer any resolution to the problem, as we are completely powerless to even offer a decision, much less enforce it. We can't say "you are wrong" nor can we make them stop. In most cases, we can't even get the two sides to admit that their conduct might have been wrong; if we could, the Arbitration Committee wouldn't be anywhere near as busy as it is. When it comes to matters of behavior that rise to the level of formal dispute resolution, the parties aren't at a place where they can discuss it over tea and come away with an "I'm sorry."

I may be completely wrong in my understanding of the Committee and its place, but I see mediation as being the complement to Arbitration, not the preceeding step. (I take this from the description of the Commmittee: The role of the mediation committee is explicitly to try to resolve disputes to the mutual satisfaction of all, and not simply a first step towards banning or for vetting candidates for the Arbitration Committee to ban. Mediation is instead an honest attempt to resolve the problem.) Arbitration doesn't handle content disputes precisely because the nature of the commmittee is to investigate a situation, come to a binding decision, and then enforce it upon all parties. Wikipedia content doesn't work that way; everything is subject to consensus, and the best way to determine consensus is to work together, not to have it decreed from the top. That's why Mediation is so well suited to content disputes between parties who have a good faith desire to solve them: We can be the neutral facilitator they need to work out a consensus position. The key to solving content disputes is to get people talking with each other who were previously talking at each other, and mediation does that spectacularly.

I have seen plenty of successful mediations on content matters that encourage me to believe that our job is to resolve disputes between users about content, not to wade into inter-user fistfights completely unarmed. There is, quite simply, nothing we can do to assist in most user-conduct disputes; we can only hope to resolve disputes between two or more sides about content. It will, in many cases, be conduct that brings a case to our door, but the solution will be to solve the underlying content problem.

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