User:SebastianHelm/principles
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As a mediator, it is important for me to have principles. Many of them are common sense and some are Wikipedia guidelines.
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[edit] Promises
This section contains promises to all parties I interact with. Please take me up on them. If you feel I didn't follow any of them, please write so on the talk page. This is important for me as a chance for personal growth, but also to show others if and how far they can trust me.
[edit] Confidentiality
Generally, I want people to have no regrets when they act in the way I would like them to act. Since I always want people to be open to me, I do not want you to ever regret anything you told me confidentially. This includes not using such information without your explicit approval.
For e-mail, I adhere to the following privacy principles:
- If you give me your email address I will not give it to anyone without your permission.
- If I want to send email to you and someone else, and I don't know if the other person has your email I will put you on BCC.
- If I accidentally get someone's email address (e.g. with a forwarded mail) I will use it only if that doesn't compromise the person who gave it to me.
[edit] PINOT
PINOT is the acronym for the principle Private Information - No Offense Taken. This principle means that you can tell me whatever you want privately. It could be the worst insult, and I will never take offense. If I don't like it, I just won't take it. It's that simple. You wouldn't take another person's dirty facial tissue, either. But usually I find some use in what you have to say.
The only thing I will hold against you is if you lie to me. (And no, this is not a backdoor. If you say "you're an a**hole", it's clearly not a lie. It's an opinion, not a statement of fact.)
I am actually going beyond that. E.g. I promise to not take anything as an offense that you write on this page's talk page.
If a couple more people like this principle then we could promote it like 1RR.
[edit] Verifiability
Dealing with ethnic conflicts and terrorism, I hear a lot of accusations. Some of them may be true, many aren't. While I listen to them, I let them not impact my judgment in mediations. I see this as a logical extension of our policy WP:V.
Without reliable citations, I will not take statements like the following as facts:
- "Late last year a newspaper claimed that ..."
- "Minister So-and-so was quoted in newspaper X that ..."
Vague citations like that are a red flag for me. I regard anything that contains nothing but such vague citations as propaganda. Don't bother presenting that as evidence to me. It only makes me sand and angry and will not convince me.
[edit] 1RR
WP:1RR is the promise to not do more than one reversion per day. I found this very helpful in cooling down emotions in a heated conflict, above all my own.
[edit] Related topics
[edit] NVC
Nonviolent communication is less of a principle than a technique. I found it a very empowering win-win strategy. I'm including it in this list for two reasons: (1) to promote it; (2) as a warning. NVC is different from the way we usually communicate. In NVC, it's OK to start sentences with "I want", or to talk about the other person's feelings. I'm not fluent in it yet, so I may sometimes be a bit clumsy when I try to adapt this to real life situations. Please see User talk:SebastianHelm/NVC for details.
