Perhaps it’s blindingly obvious but the best solution is to prevent conflict happening in the first place. OK, that sounds a little trite, but what it means is to design your platform so it’s harder for conflict to occur. We routinely “design in” safety into engineering projects. Think about roads. Having everyone drive on the left (or right, depending on which country you are in) avoids a lot of road crashes. Traffic lights control busy interactions. There are many things we “design into” roads to ensure that people can co-exist on the roads without killing each other. Yet we seem to completely ignore such principles in the social aspects of projects.

For example, if a message in a forum contains words likely to cause offense or indicate aggression “you stupid moron, you dumb twat”, point this out to the user and ask if they really mean to send it (possibly reminding them that your Code of Conduct does not allow personal attacks, racist language or whatever the words suggest is going on, and suggest they rewrite or cool off for a while). At least then, if they proceed to send it and there are complaints, then it’s clear that they did use those words deliberately aware of their potential to offend and knowing that it was contrary to the Code of Conduct). No more “I didn’t mean to offend because I tell everyone, even my best friends, that they are stupid morons”. Or you can just quietly divert that message to a moderator for consideration before it’s posted.

In Facebook, we have the protocol of confirming each other as friends, which then allows us to see one another’s postings etc, as well as the ability to accept someone as a friend (avoiding the offence of refusing friend status) and still giving you the ability to avoid reading their posts and restricting which ones of yours they see. Again, this is an example of the system of allowing you to be “friends” but putting some boundaries on that relationship. “Good fences makes good neighbours” as they say.

Obviously, the way to “design in” conflict avoidance depends a bit on the nature of the platform, e.g. forums are different to wikis. For example, newspapers and blogs increasing disable comments because of the conflicts that can arise there. You could do something like limit people to only one comment per topic, this prevents the to-ing and fro-ing between a couple of people escalating their dispute and forces people to use their one-comment wisely, hopefully to address the substantive topic and not to criticise others. Indeed, if you restricted the ability to mention another user name in a comment, it would become much harder to make personal attacks (works best if you don’t allow anyone to register the username “the” or other common words though J)

Now in Wikipedia, we seem to like to do the exact opposite, we seem to “design in” conflict. Think about “undo”. It’s is a quick-and-easy solution for dealing with vandalism but it’s a terrible tool for dealing with a difference of opinion between good faith editors. By the time one of them gets blocked by the three-revert rule, you’ve got conflict well-escalated. So long as it is more work for people to “talk” about the issue than “undo”, what’s going to happen? Water and people take the path of least resistance. So make “undo” just that little bit harder. Pop up a box that asks them to tick one of “vandalism”, “spam”, “patent nonsense” (and whichever other reasons are appropriate, e.g. unsourced material on BLP if applicable) and the last is “discuss on the talk page”. This means that someone cannot undo unless they are prepared to declare it’s vandalism, etc. This takes away “undo because I don’t agree with you” or “undo because I think my source is better than yours”. That box could also highlight “This is a new contributor; remember not to bite”. The NOBITE rule is easily overlooked as it is not immediately visible that the person being reverted is a new user.

Also, think about the old saying “praise in public, criticise in private” and then remember that a user talk page is visible to everyone and watchlists bring changes to the attention of goodness-knows-how-many people. Can you think of a worse place for someone to come and say something critical? Is there a better way to handle this? Have some private channel? Allow users to decide which posts on their user talk page will be visible to all? Allow users to redact anything in their user space? And while Barnstars and other WikiLove are public (good!), thanks are not. Why not at least include that information on a User’s page or Talk page in some way (“SmellyJockStraps gave thanks 234 times and received thanks 432 times”)? We need to build a platform that makes positive behaviours and positive interaction easier and more visible than negative behaviour and negative interaction.

But start with a Code of Conduct. I would stick to the principles not the specifics. I would have an all-emcompassing “a panel of administrators/moderators can ban/block/suppress a user whose repeated behaviour violates these principles” to avoid wikilawyering leading to a never-ending proliferation of rules . E.g. Rule 1235. Not only is “moron” disallowed, so is “m0r0n” and “m-o-r-o-n” or …

Kerry

From: gendergap-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:gendergap-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Vicky Knox
Sent: Tuesday, 25 November 2014 7:13 AM
To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Conflict resolution resources for onlinecommunities?

Here is the very basic first draft of the article so far: https://localwiki.org/main/Conflict_resolution If you want to add anything directly into the article, please do so. :]

2014-11-24 12:20 GMT-08:00 Vicky Knox <vknoxsironi@gmail.com>:

Hi gendergap folks!

I hope you're well. :]

I'm writing conflict resolution documentation for LocalWiki (https://localwiki.org/main/Front_Page), a global local knowledge commons. Do you have any conflict resolution resources for online communities, or conflict resolution examples from Wikimedia projects you'd like to recommend? I'm particularly interested in examples of online nonviolent communication modalities, and intersectional feminist perspectives on online conflict resolution in communities of mixed real name and *nym identities. (This all said, I'm open to all suggestions--I've lurked this list for a while and highly value the perspectives I've found on it.)

Thank you!

Vicky