[Wikipedia-l] I'm seeing a trend here or How to keep drivingaway good contributors

[Toby Bartels]

Ed Poor wrote in part to another poster:

>Should I go back,
>say, 15 edits ago (to yesterday's "clean" version) and edit that? I can't
>figure out whether that's bending over to accommodate anti-social behavior
>-- or that's anti-social in itself.

I don't know about Mark, but I think that you should do just that.
It's safer than banning people and easier for the ordinary user
(that is, a regular contributor that has not undertaken admin duties)
to revert in the case that you've made a mistake.

Is it antisocial?  To an extent, but it's less antisocial than banning
(even for just a short time) or locking a page (even for just a short time).
You need to make sure that you're certain (and that others agree)
that the antisocial "contributor" deserves this kind of treatment --
just as you'd have to make sure before banning them or locking the page.

A soft security programme of reverting the edits of the antisocial writer --
but after waiting a little while for them to wander off
(as Jimbo has suggested) in order to avoid immediate edit wars --
has all the functionality of the advanced (and as yet unprogrammed)
hard security measures that have been proposed:
* There's a cooling off period (because you wait a bit before reverting);
* The talk pages are still available (because you don't revert those);
* The contributor can continue to do good work on the other articles
  (because you're only reverting certain pages where their work is bad).
And if this is not the desired behaviour
(for example, you *should* revert their edits to talk pages
if they're forging other people's comments there),
then it's easy to adjust; there is no special mechanism to go through.
Also, different users can react in different ways,
depending on their own estimation of the situation,
rather than following the decision of the first admin to respond.
This is the power of devolution.

Ed, you're famous for trying to (and often succeeding at!)
working with recalcitrant newbies and turning them into good Wikipedians.
I too would be quick to give up on somebody that you couldn't help.
And it's no surprise that other people (like Julie Kemp)
burn themselves out by trying to work with some of these people.
I certainly agree that there are people that simply
aren't willing or able to work with the rest of us in good faith.
But I think that, in almost every situation
(not counting vandals and copyright infringers,
which admins regularly ban under current policy),
we can deal with them without resorting to hard security measures.
Once we have decided that they are impossible to work with
(which is a precondition for a hard security measure like banning),
then we should save our sanity and stop *trying* to work with them.
But this doesn't require asking an admin (or using our own admin power)
to lock a page or ban the user; ordinary users can do it on their own.
And if we're wrong, if the person *can* be worked with by superhuman effort,
then there is still an opportunity for SuperEd to come along and find a way.
In the meantime, we just get on with our work.

Mav spoke (sarcastically) about pride in "bending over backward"
to work with antisocial people, with the result that good people quit.
Trying to work with people is good, but that's not the source of my pride
when it comes to Wikipedia.  I'm proud of our devolved power structure,
our openness to newbies, and our ability to deal with whatever they give us.
I don't think that the last of these requires us to sacrifice the others.
Soft security is powerful, and way cool ^_^.


-- Toby