Wikipedia talk:Mediation Committee

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Hi. Hopefully this is the correct place to ask, but I noticed an error on the page Wikipedia:Mediation Committee (below the "members" table and below "see also"):

Warning: Default sort key "Mediation Committee" overrides earlier default sort key "MedComChair".

Any idea how this can be fixed? Kind regards, Trijnstel_talk 12:29, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

This is an error in the {{DEFAULTSORT}} of various Mediation Committee pages. The fault is mine, so I'll go around and fix as soon as I can. Thanks! AGK [•] 10:29, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Time to shutter formal mediation?

I attended a session at Wikimania with the "fellows" wherein the each presented their findings from the past year. The schedule was a bit screwy, apparently this rejected submission was rolled into this panel discussion.

The point is, during the section on DR it was mentioned that during the fellowship tenure formal mediation's success rate was a rather alarming 0%. I think perhaps it is time to reconsider the wisdom of continuing to have formal mediation if the results are this poor. I don't mean to insinuate that there is anything wrong with the fine people who put their time and energy into this process, it just doesn't seem to work. My guess is that by the time a dispute gets here any kind of chance for agreement or compromise is already out the window and this has become more of a stepping stone to ArbCom than a functional part of our dispute resolution mechanisms. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:55, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

I think that it's only appropriate that I comment here - I'm the one that's done the research on dispute resolution in my role as a fellow, and I came up with this statistic. So, to clarify, the 0% result came from an analysis of disputes at MedCom that were either filed or closed in May 2012. Only 7 were at MedCom, 4 were outright rejected and the other three that were open in May were closed as unsuccessful. It appears that the last successful mediation was Wikipedia:Requests_for_mediation/Draza_Mihailovic - closed on 4 September 2011, and since that time MedCom has had 51 requests for mediation (that I can see), ten of which were accepted, and two are currently open. In May, the three open cases were open for an average of 29.6 days, and none of them were successfully resolved (as described on the case pages). The DR survey results on effectiveness according to the respondents rated RFM as poor by 29%, mediocre by 23%, average by 25%, good by 20% and excellent by 3%.

Now, all these figures don't necessarialy mean that MedCom is bad, it may just indicate that once a dispute reaches RFM it's too late. The high amount of rejected cases may indicate one of two things - either that the bar for acceptance is too high, or it's too easy to file a case at RFM when it should be looked at somewhere like DRN. I don't think MedCom should be closed, but as I have mentioned to medcom-l before, I think some change could be of benefit. I just wanted to make it clear as to how I reached my conclusions. The purpose of outlining these stats is because the trend showed that the further a content dispute went up the DR chain, the less likely it was to be successfully resolved. Regards, Steven Zhang ^{Get involved in DR!} 22:43, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

It was 0% for the month of May. 99.149.231.106 (talk) 13:11, 22 July 2012 (UTC)