 | This user is a native of the United Kingdom. |
 | This user is a native of France. |
 | This user lives in London. |
| This user is an electronic engineer. |
Providing third opinions
edit- Third opinions must be neutral. If you have had dealings with the article or with the editors involved in the dispute that would bias your response, do not offer a third opinion on that dispute.
- Read the arguments of the disputants.
- Do not provide opinions recklessly. Remember that Wikipedia works by consensus, not a vote. In some cases both sides may have presented valid arguments, or you may disagree with both. Provide the reasoning behind your argument.
- Provide third opinions in the relevant section of the disputed article talk pages following the discussion of the dispute. Sign your comments with four tildes, like so: ~~~~.
- The {{3OR}} template is handy for inserting a third opinion on the talk page. For a shorter alternative, {{3ORshort}} can also be used. Usage: {{subst:3OR | <your response> }} or {{subst:3ORshort | <your response> }}.
- Write your opinion in a civil and nonjudgmental way.
- Unless there's a clearly urgent problem, don't make immediate article-content changes of your own which affect the ongoing discussion.
- Consider keeping pages on which you have given a third opinion on your watchlist for a few days. Often, articles listed here are watched by very few people.
- If it's not clear what the dispute is, put
{{subst:third opinion|your_username}}on the talk page of the article. This template will post sections for the disputing editors to summarize their opinions. - For third opinion requests that do not follow the instructions above, it is possible to alert the requesting party to that fact by employing {{uw-3o}}.
- When providing a third opinion, please remove the listing from this page before you provide your third opinion. Doing so prevents other volunteers from duplicating your effort. Mention in the summary which dispute you have removed and how many remain.
Respondents appreciate feedback about the outcome of the dispute, either on the article's talk page or on their own talk page. We want to know whether the outcome was positive or not, helping us to maintain and improve the standards of our work. If a respondent's third opinion was especially helpful or wise, you might want to consider awarding {{subst:The Third Opinion Award|your message}} on their user talk page. It can also be given once for diligent service to this project which is generally any volunteer who has more than 50 edits to this page. For more information see its documentation and Wikipedia:Third opinion/Service award log.