On Tue, 12 Aug 2014, at 07:44, Sumana Harihareswara
wrote:
Frances makes a good point, and now I'm
thinking about the different
scenarios we're talking about. There are two big ones:
1) A has a policy or editing dispute with B and they just sort of get on
each other's nerves a lot, so they try to avoid seeing each other's edits,
talk page messages, and so on. This is like what svetlana originally
brought up. I agree with Brandon that in this case users should use their
willpower to skim, ignore, or avoid reminders of each other. This is kind
of like how one avoids one's ex at a party.
2) X consistently makes anti-[insert group here] comments that marginalize,
belittle, and demean Y, and the wiki's community is not getting X to stop
or otherwise backing up Y's right to participate in the community. In this
intimidating atmosphere, Y tries to ignore seeing X's talk page messages
and edit summaries. Here, there's clearly been a failure of community
moderation - no moderation techniques
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Moderation are being employed, and/or
people are mistakenly saying "don't feed the trolls"
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Don%27t_feed_the_trolls . The process of
improving a community's level of hospitality takes time; while we're doing
that, it would be nice to give Y some respite from seeing X's comments.
3) Another contributor's contributions look disgusting, as he's inserting what I
consider rubbish into articles and discussions, but I couldn't convince him to
understand me. It's something against Wikimedia mission in my view, but not a
blockable offense on that Wikimedia project. I'd like to avoid engaging into
educational rants with the contributor (he's not young either and he can't hear
me), and to do this, I need to stop seeing his messages.
Hence a need to have the software impose an interaction barrier between me and another
contributor:
- when leaving messages at my talk page, he's warned that I'll not see them at
all (and potentially prevented from doing so)
- when leaving messages in discussions, he's warned that I'll not see them -
where a discussion involves my participation in the specific thread
- when reviewing a page or an edit I made, he's warned against that (and potentially
prevented from doing so, where a page is stabilised - i.e. no harm is made if it stays in
queue for a longer bit and someone else reviews the edit)
- when editing a page I created, he's warned that its content will be hidden from me
by default (with an unhide button available, if I want it)
- etc
p.s. in addition to the above, his edits are not visible in RC and watchlist to me, but
obviously it is not something he's warned about