Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Suggestions for mediators/PhilKnight

Suggestions for mediators

• Take cases that genuinely interest you. In my experience, the more enthused you are the better. Confident, energetic mediators can solve low-medium difficulty cases quickly, taking advantage of initial goodwill.
• The reality of most disputes is that participants have probably started, to a greater or lesser extent, some form of bickering or edit warring. If, from how you approach the case, you are very obviously a bright professional editor, who is confident the difficulties can be resolved, the participants will very often improve their own conduct, while attempting to persuade you of the other participants' guilt. During this early phase attempt to gain agreement the edit war should cease. Begin to formulate and suggest possible compromises.
• Don't be timid - if the article requires a copy edit then don't hold a discussion about this - be bold and make the changes.
• Be flexible - recognize that each case is different.
• Hold the main discussion on the talk page or a sub talk page, using the case page to discuss overall progress. If you are contacting the participants via email, be very discreet to avoid suspicion of bias. Generally, avoid lengthy discussion on user talk pages.
• If the edit war continues, then edit the article yourself, without using the revert button, towards a sensible compromise. Discuss your edits on the talk page and continue to suggest that a ceasefire would be prudent.
• If a case begins to go badly wrong, don't allow it to become stressful - request help from WT:MEDCAB.
• Eventually, you may be stuck with several cases that are 99% resolved that participants won't let you close. This is how many mediators drift away from WP:MEDCAB, because they don't want to accept any more cases without closure of their current case load. I haven't exactly cracked this problem, however putting up templates indicating you're taking a wikibreak works every time.

PhilKnight 18:21, 20 March 2007 (UTC)