Wikipedia talk:Mediation Cabal/Cases/2008-01-19 Australian rules football

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• Comment. I have been a participant in these twin discussions at Talk:Australian rules football and Talk:National sport. The problem here is that PIO is firmly of the belief that Australian Rules Football is the national sport, and other sports are merely "popular" [1]. He bases his contentions on having been to Australia six times, and having an uncle who is an Australian citizen [2]. Now, in no sense do I intend to disparage his knowledge of Australia, nor do I mean that his edits are in bad faith, but to be able to judge what a country's national sports are often requires intuition or a certain sense of how the people of that country themselves view the situation to be able to judge. I'm not Australian either - I'm English - which is why I have generally kept my thoughts to the talk pages.

Other editors have in various ways tried to explain the problem [3][4] and proposed compromise wordings [5][6]. Unfortunately PIO has not commented upon these, nor proposed any alternative compromise.

Throughout the edit war over this issue on both articles, PIO has sought to say that Australian Rules Football is the national sport and the most popular sport. To be fair, he has made efforts to find sources to support this opinion. However, he has consistently, and sometimes belligerently [7] [8] reverted the edits made by other users to his own version, removing references to other sports that may have a claim to be called one of the national sports of Australia, including removing sources that disagree with his opinion [9][10] [11][12][13][14]. He has made no effort via the talk pages to reach consensus; he has used talk pages only to disparage the view that there are any other sports in Australia worthy of being called national sports [15][16][17][18][19][20]. Regarding the quality of sources, PIO disparages the Sweeney Report where it doesn't say what he wants it to say [21], but is very happy to use other surveys where it suits his opinion to do so Sports Attendance, Australian Bureau of Statistics, April 1999 Australia's attendance 2006 as well as throw in Google searches and leave the reader to try to work out what the source is for themselves Site sportbusiness. Overall, my view is that the current impasse is a result of one editor who has a fixed POV being entirely unwilling to seek consensus or even discuss the matter. AlasdairGreen27 (talk) 09:38, 20 January 2008 (UTC)