Quoting William Pietri william@scissor.com:
fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
This appears in practice to work as "Please do not discuss personal attacks."
In some cases it might be better to discuss them privately. Fred
If the project had a "privately," that would be a lot more useful to me. But as what I suspect is the world's largest public project, we don't seem to have that option much. Aside, of course, from the ArbCom and the WP:OFFICE, but as has been discussed, their bandwidth is awfully limited.
William
On problem is that when people do discuss these things privately they often end up getting more attention than quiet discussions on user talk pages or AN or ANI. People need to learn that if they are going to discuss these sorts of issues privately they need to not shout out to the world that they are doing so. The most effective (although granted non-transparent) way of doing this is often not to even mention that a private conversation occurred. But telling people that a private conversation did occurr is just asking for trouble.