Absolutely - the term is not helpful in combatting vandalism, as it has just become a term of abuse that is levelled both a genuinely problematic users and users with contentious but potentially legitimate views.
Let's try to focus on behaviors, and try not to label users. Mark
--- Theresa Robinson robinst@MIT.EDU wrote:
Maybe there's a lot of this and I'm not seeing it,
but what I do see
is a lot of good-faith edits characterized as
trolling. The edits may
be poor or mistaken, and the person may be very
stubborn in their
defense of a bad edit, but if they sincerely
believe that the edit
is making the encyclopedia better, then it's
inaccurate to call them
trolls. For instance, a rightie who hates WP's
leftie-ness can
generate a huge ruckus by trying to "balance" what
he/she perceives
as slanted articles, but every one of those edits
is in good faith,
and the editor will think of him/herself as just
as good and
dedicated an editor as anybody else here.
I absolutely agree with you. I find that the term "troll" means pretty much nothing, or it just means "somebody doing something I don't like." Even "vandal" is used by an awful lot of people for things other than "joe is gaaaaaaaaaay" edits, which to me are pretty much the only things I'd call vandalism. And calling someone a troll, or a vandal, or whatever, rarely solves the problem. It would be much more productive to be very specific about what the person is doing, and say "I disagree with the tenacity with which you exclude all but one POV from this article" or "it would really help if you told us why you were reverting all our edits" etc. This is much more likely to result in a resolution.
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