Wikipedia talk:Mediation Cabal/2010 Archive 3

doc change, somewhere
You know, just because I've run into this misconception a few times now, I've been thinking about adding a banner somewhere in the boilerplate that says, effectively: "Involvement in mediation is voluntary, and should be active. Mediation only works if participants have a sincere desire to resolve the issues at hand and are willing to commit themselves to the process of discussion. Do not begin the mediation process if there are some participants who are unwilling or unable to make that commitment; It will simply be a waste of everyone's time.  In such cases it would be better to seek out formal mediation, arbitration, or some more authoritative solution to the dispute." sorry if that sounds a little psychotherapeutical. The intent is to plant the idea in people's heads early that they need to be active and committed to the process otherwise it won't work. Would that work, you think? -- Ludwigs 2 00:01, 4 September 2010 (UTC)


 * I think providing additional advice could be worthwhile. However, generally speaking, if the parties don't agree to formal mediation, then it doesn't proceed. Also, care should be taken in signposting disputes to ArbCom, as they don't rule on content, and require parties to have tried other steps in the dispute resolution process. PhilKnight (talk) 01:35, 4 September 2010 (UTC)


 * well, it may be a function of the fact that the mediations I've done have all been high-tension affairs, but in both cases I ran into editors who had (for unknown reasons) come to the conclusion that medcab was an authoritative process, and settled down to disrupt the proceedings as best possible to prevent an authoritative ruling on that matter that would go against their interests. It's a funky misperception that causes headaches.  We don't need to mention other venues, I just would (personally) like to make it explicit that (a) this is a cooperative system for structured discussion, not an authoritative system for reaching decisions, and (b) the process goes nowhere at all unless people are willing to commit themselves to the process. -- Ludwigs 2  18:55, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Sometimes, it's best to walk away. Hard truth: they can't all be solved. Xavexgoem (talk) 04:53, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Request suggestions on what should be done
Hello I am in the middle of a dispute with another editor. It is getting to the point that I think WP:AGF is becoming hard to apply. To avoid further deterioration I suggested mediation to which I thought I would get an automatic yes, but instead what I got in response was "Mediation is unsuitable for such disputes, as explained at WP:Mediation." Good faith or no I do not trust the other editor's interpretation of Wikipedia guidelines. Related discussions of issues involved have already taken place on the talk page of the said article, the talk page of another article where we had another disagreement, and two noticeboards. In each case, when third parties gave opinions, some in general some specific to my case, they all supported the rationale for my edits. From the discussion above it would seem both parties involved in a disagreement should acknowledge this process for it to be a success. Given the response I received what next should be done? From my point-of-view it would seem I either appease the other editor, edit war with the other editor, go ahead with a mediation process anyway, or report at WP:ANI. Are there any other options? Thank you. Lambanog (talk) 15:18, 5 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi Lambanog, I've added List of Philippine restaurant chains to my watchlist and I'll help out if necessary. PhilKnight (talk) 13:23, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Close case
How do you close a case? The dispute over Authorship of the Bible seems to have been resolved.RomanHistorian (talk) 15:39, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
 * On the request page you change the status from Open to Closed. Mr R00t   Talk      'tribs  23:33, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Missing mediator
What should be done when one's esteemed mediator goes offwiki for 2.5 weeks? The case is longevity myths, I already left a talk message that the mediator responded to but didn't follow up on, and there is much unresolved that I would like to consider in-process rather than out-of-. JJB 21:48, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Hi JJB, I'll help out until Atama returns. PhilKnight (talk) 10:44, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Revamping case naming conventions
Hello, Cabalists and Cabalettets! If you've seen the "test" cases on the frontpage, let me explain what's going on. I'm trying to figure out a way to do away with the inclusion of dates in case names. Its ugly, it was a kludge to solve a bot issue years ago, and I can never remember the exact date a case was opened to find it again without looking at the list of cases (God help me if I want to find it again after its been closed!). In short, I'd like to make everyone's lives a little easier by removing a bit of unnecessary stuff.

The problem that I see is with having the bot list cases in the appropriate order. As you can see from the case listings, the bot lists them in alphabetical order from 1-9 and then A-Z. That's how including the date makes it list in date order. What I would like to do is figure out how to get it to list in the appropriate order without modifying the bot. Does anyone have an idea on how to do that? The Wordsmith Communicate 05:36, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The date information has to be in the title for the bot to work? Netalarm talk 05:41, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The way the bot is currently programmed, yes. The way it works appears to be as follows:


 * 1) Bot runs this task every half hour, on *:06 and *:36.
 * 2) It checks the New Medcab Cases category and sees if there are any cases listed there that aren't on the case listing page.
 * 3) If it finds one or more, the bot adds them to the list and then sorts by alphabetical order, 0-9, A-Z, a-z.
 * 4) The bot saves the page and then goes back to sleep for half an hour.


 * Hopefully this clears things up. The Wordsmith Communicate 05:51, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't think you can without modifying the bot. The pages are created "####-##-##/case name", and are saved by the bot that same way. There's no way to specify, in WP, that you don't want rendered the date and the forward slash. The bot needs to strip those out before saving, and when it re-orders the list needs to compare the case name (e.g., "e.g.") to the case name in the category (e.g., "2010-10-24/e.g.") to get the date (or somehow embed the date invisibly) . Xavexgoem (talk) 06:12, 24 October 2010 (UTC) And O. M. G. something needs to be done about the old cases Xavexgoem (talk) 06:18, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
 * We could easily make the case page creation button not include the date by default. I don't think we would really need to move the old pages, but if we did AWB could easily handle it. As far as listing them in the correct order, a bot could theoretically look at the "Date opened" field on the case page and use that. Misza is less than active currently, so I'll talk to Betacommand about possibly using his bot (it already handles SPI, so it should be an easy adaptation). The Wordsmith Communicate 06:24, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
 * But then every page would need to be accessed to get the dates. Huge bother if you set a case to new again. Xavexgoem (talk) 06:32, 24 October 2010 (UTC) Not to mention the poops who clear the page and write in their own stuff. Don't want to write for many corner-cases
 * Yes, have something like Mediation Cabal/Cases/14 September 2011/Jeff Frederick be a redirect to Mediation Cabal/Case/Jeff Frederick. Rich Farmbrough, 21:19, 17 September 2011 (UTC).

Parties need educating
Should we be discouraging parties from saying "such-and-such-element-in-contention has consensus"? You'll read this a lot in opening statements. You read that and it's hard not to think you'll be communicating with a brick wall. It angers the opposition party, as well. We really should be reminding parties that the reason they're here is because these elements don't have consensus.

I at least recommend that mediators first get these parties to agree that there isn't consensus, as a sort of "opening play". This clears the air somewhat between parties, since at least that side stops appearing so obstinant. You'll have to make a few nimble decisions if they don't initially agree, since you don't want to create the appearance that you're against them.

If you don't clear this air first, you'll get a huge mess of miscommunication, and inevitably the conflict will become more behavioral. I'm really starting to believe that there's a behavioral threshold that, once passed, makes a dispute nearly impossible to solve with mediation. (Some mediators are better at taking advantage of parties' behavioral issues, though, but this is inherently risky). Xavexgoem (talk) 19:58, 12 November 2010 (UTC) While I'm on a roll, I'd argue there are broadly three kinds of disputes, all with overlap: (1) behavioral, (2) content (how neutral, how reliable, how fringe), (3) rules (naive interpretations of policies and guidelines). I'll bet that (3) is the biggest. This has interesting overlap with the policy trifecta (DICK, NPOV, IAR, respectively, for certain values of IAR)

Bot updates
Should the bot have added Mediation Cabal/Cases/2010-11-21/Kendrick mass to the Mediation Cabal/Cases list? Thanks. --Kkmurray (talk) 04:09, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Ack. Looks like my recent change to the case list screwed with the bot. I'm not entirely sure how, though. I'll check in an hour; I changed one thing. Xavexgoem (talk) 04:48, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh, wow. No, this started happening a week or so ago. Guess we'll need to manually update the list, now. Xavexgoem (talk) 04:50, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

New and Open cases
It seems that the bot is either broken or is going really slowly. I marked Ganas as open yesterday and it hasn't been updated yet. Mr R00t  Talk      'tribs  23:32, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, something's up with the bot. Dunno what. I've done a manual update. Xavexgoem (talk) 11:20, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Great, let me know if you continue to need help with the bot. I could look at it. Mr R00t   Talk      'tribs  02:26, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
 * This botfail is really annoying. I have no knowledge of bottery, so can someone skilled in this art spank it? -- Scjessey (talk) 19:20, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Yay! The bot seems to be working again. Own up to fixing it and receive a generous slice of good cheer pie! -- Scjessey (talk) 19:13, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Template to inform
Is there a uniform template that informs users of a case that can be posted on parties' walls? -- Lord Roem (talk) 21:56, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
 * If you rummage around in Category:Wikipedia Mediation Cabal you might find a couple.
 * Personally, I'm not entirely happy with what I've found so far, and have resorted to hand-rolled notifications.
 * bobrayner (talk) 22:59, 31 December 2010 (UTC)