[WikiEN-l] Civility poll results

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 09:59 PM 8/11/2009, FT2 wrote:
>On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:45 AM, Marc Riddell 
><michaeldavid86 at comcast.net>wrote:
>
> > Any solution to this problem should start with the simple question: How do
> > you treat another human being?
> >
>
>The biggest clue isn't some "civility" standard - it's when some user says
>"please talk about the issues, actions, and evidence, rather than
>insinuations and ad hominen". Any user should have that right.

The problem with this is that the protest is itself ad hominem. 
"Insinuations" is a complex negative judgment about the *intention* 
of another.

I've seen practically a direct quote of the above in a discussion 
where it was the "issues, actions, and evidence" that were discussed 
by the other editor, as far as I could tell. The statement is an 
insinuation that the other editor was *not* behaving properly.

We have open discussion, self-regulated most of the time, between 
people who commonly have no experience with consensus process. We 
have editors who have a strong agenda who complain that other editors 
have a different strong agenda.

Consensus process can be tedious in person, where the communication 
bandwidth is far higher than mere text, we have tone of voice, 
pauses, body language (which is highly efficient compared to text at 
communicating intention). Two people just looking at each other can 
find agreement rapidly, if agreement is what they intend, yet, even 
there, communication can break down if skills are lacking.

With text, without all those other cues, we still need to know, 
often, what the *point* is, in order to understand. Yet in consensus 
process, one of the steps is abandoning the point -- temporarily -- 
and exploring what is present. Where there is conflict, the roots of 
the conflict may not be apparent, each party may have a complex of 
opinions, including unexplored assumptions, and finding where the 
true conflict lies can be difficult at best and may require 
discussing aspects of a situation other than the "goal," which with 
us is always, in the end, article text.

Where no underlying agreement has been reached, differences of 
opinion about the result can be unresolvable.

There are people who are skilled at facilitating consensus, given the 
opportunity. Dispute resolution process suggests bringing in a 
neutral party to mediate, but we don't insist on that process. 
Instead, we have editors who, when they oppose what another editor is 
trying to do, go to a noticeboard to request that the other editor be 
coerced into stopping. And the noticeboards are full of 
result-oriented editors who are impatient with process.

Dispute resolution works best when discussions are very small-scale, 
it should normally be three editors involved, not the whole 
community, and the goal of one of these editors should be to help the 
other two find consensus.

When I had a problem with Jehochman, who had dropped a warning on my 
Talk page that seemed to me to attack everything I was doing as 
useless garbage or worse, which warning then led to a block by 
another administrator (complicated situation from which I learned and 
accomplished a great deal), I first explored my own behavior, asking 
for advice about it. Once I had that advice, from other editors, I 
went to Jehochman and asked him to consider what I'd collected. He 
didn't want to, and I can understand. Why should he read all that 
stuff? So I asked that he suggest a mediator. He wrote "Carcharoth." 
Brilliant, I thought, I couldn't imagine anyone better. So we went to 
Carcharoth and asked for mediation.

Carcharoth was even more brilliant than I expected. Carcharoth agreed 
to help, but was busy. Then, after some delay, when we asked again, 
Carcharoth wrote, "Can't you guys work it out?" So we did. Quickly, 
in fact. There was a shift in intention; our intention became to 
resolve the dispute, not to promote our own purposes and convince the 
other that we were right and they should change. Carcharoth had 
reframed the problem. The problem was our apparent inability to 
resolve the dispute by ourselves. We really unable to do this?

We need to recognize that there is a problem with our own intentions. 
By focusing on article text and insisting on sticking to that, we 
sometimes divert ourselves from the process of finding agreement and 
what that takes. In real-life consensus process, the obstacle to 
agreement often turns out to be something completely unexpected, and 
to find it requires setting aside our preconceptions not only about 
others, but about ourselves.

The practical suggestion here? If there is a dispute, working on it 
with discussion limited to three people, one of whom has a known 
agenda to help the other two find agreement, or, failing that, to 
document the dispute clearly so that both of the others will say, 
"Yes, that is a fair, accurate and complete statement of our 
dispute." Then, and only then, would the discussion expand.

We have the mechanisms for it, the technology, but we don't insist on 
it. When a complainant appears at AN/I, the first question should be 
if there is any urgent need for administrative intervention. AN/I 
should be 911 for Wikipedia, and not a court that sits in judgment, 
AN/I has no structure for that, and frequently, when it takes this 
on, it makes bad decisions, or simply wastes a lot of editor time. If 
there is an urgent need, it should be quickly handled, without 
debate. But that intervention should be non-judgmental, making no 
assumptions or conclusions about who is right and who is wrong. The 
police do not determine guilt, they maintain and restore order and 
protect. Good police officers will, in fact, do some emergency 
mediation, but they don't normally have the time for deeper dispute 
resolution. AN/I needs some structure and discipline. As it is, 
someone calls 911 to say that their house is on fire, and someone 
else says, "That house is better off burnt down," and someone else 
says, "Didn't you call us last year for this and it was just smoke 
from a burnt pot?" and someone else says, "You shouldn't be burning 
incense" and it can go on and on and when someone finally goes to 
look at the house, it's in ruins. Put out the fire, if there is one. 
There should be almost no discussion on AN/I. Complaint is filed, 
uninvolved admin (one with no prejudgment if possible) takes the case 
and investigates, takes action if needed, and then refers the 
disputants to DR process, perhaps pointing them to a page where they 
can find a mediator if they can't agree on one themselves. Actions 
proceeding from an AN/I report, unless the cause is blatantly 
obvious, should not represent definitive judgments, as if some 
community consensus was determined that one side was right and the other wrong.