The Elder Scrolls Wiki:Dispute resolution

This page provides advice for avoiding and resolving disputes which may crop up while contributing to TESWiki.

Avoidance
The best way to resolve a dispute is to avoid it in the first place.

Be respectful to others and their points of view. This means primarily: Do not simply revert changes in a dispute. When someone makes an edit you consider biased or inaccurate, improve the edit, rather than reverting it. Provide a good edit summary when making significant changes that other users might object to. The Three Revert Rule forbids the use of reverts in repetitive succession. If you encounter rude or inappropriate behavior, resist the temptation to respond in kind, and do not make personal attacks.

Closely following the guidlines provided in the Manual of Style, Layout Guide, What TESWiki is not, Canon policy, Civility policy and NPOV policy can help you write "defensively" and limit your personal bias.

First step: talk to the other parties involved
The first resort in resolving almost any conflict is to discuss the issue on a talk page. Either contact the other party on that user's talk page, or use the talk page associated with the article in question. Never carry on a dispute on the article page itself. When discussing an issue, stay cool and don't mount personal attacks. Take the other person's perspective into account and try to reach a compromise. Assume that the other person is acting in good faith unless you have clear evidence to the contrary.

Both at this stage and throughout the dispute resolution process, talking to other parties is not simply a formality to be satisfied before moving on to the next forum. Failure to pursue discussion in good faith shows that you are trying to escalate the dispute instead of resolving it. This will make people less sympathetic to your position and may prevent you from effectively using later stages in dispute resolution. In contrast, sustained discussion and serious negotiation between the parties, even if not immediately successful, shows that you are interested in finding a solution that fits within TESWiki policies.

Further dispute resolution
If talking to the other parties involved fails, you should try one of the following methods to resolve the dispute. Which ones you choose and in what order will depend on the nature of the dispute, and the preferences of users involved.

Informal mediation
If things are getting a bit tricky, it might be useful to ask some cool heads to look in and help out; this might turn out to be sufficient to do the trick.

Discuss with third parties
TESWiki works by building consensus. To develop a consensus on a disputed topic, you may need to expose the issue to a larger audience. For disputes over the content of an article, if you have not agreed to a truce before this point, you should do so now. This allows others to fairly consider the issue without the confusion of ongoing edits, which are likely to aggravate the dispute. If an edit war persists and a truce is not feasible, request that the page be protected to allow the process to move forward.

Conduct a survey
If consensus is difficult to gauge from discussion alone, or if some users seem to be ignoring the consensus, consider conducting an opinion survey on the talk page. The survey should be carefully designed to present all sides of the dispute fairly.

Mediation
Request mediation of the dispute. Mediation is a voluntary process in which an Administrator works with the parties to resolve a dispute. The mediator helps guide the parties into reaching an agreement that can be acceptable to everyone. When requesting formal mediation, be prepared to show that you tried to resolve the dispute using the steps listed above, and that all parties to the dispute are in agreement to mediate. Mediation cannot take place if all parties are not willing to take part.

Disengage for a while
If you have a dispute, and discussion has ground to a standstill, and attempts to gain new participants have failed, the next step in the dispute resolution process is to stop. Put a note on your user page mentioning the article you have a dispute about, and a short explanation of the dispute (so you, and anyone who happens across your user page will be aware) and go away and work on something else on TESWiki.

Stay away from that dispute for a while. Respond to questions about it on your user talk page with a polite pointer to this section of the dispute resolution process, and a request that the questioner take their issues to the article talk page. Most importantly, do not force the matter on the article or discussion page. Allow the dispute to calm down. In the interval, new editors may become interested in the article and, if the issue comes up again, participants in the discussion may have a different perspective.

Active disputes
What follows is a dynamic list of pending disputes on TESWiki.

If no pages are listed in one or more categories, it means that there are no pending disputes. ([ force page update])