On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 4:47 PM, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
Incivility should not be met with more incivility; this merely
perpetuates
and expands to problem.
Certainly. However, proposals to treat incivility as a bright-line auto-blockable offense, like 3RR, have the problems that the bright line isn't really all that bright or that definite. They become very game-able, as well; if such a rule was instituted, being treated uncivilly is something every canny edit warrior will be playing for, since it gets their opponent blocked. Expect it to encourage a hyper-sensitivity to incivility and even more attempts to label honest disagreement and argument as uncivil.
Especially, I'd expect, there will be much screaming that criticizing anyone's behavior is uncivil, which is a problem we already face. Sometimes the person really IS the problem, and we should not outlaw mentioning that.
There are at least two poles with a spectrum in between:
Single-offender incivility, where one person has (something between bad day and bad entire Wikipedia experience) and goes off on people.
Multiparty incivility, where people taunt each other back and forth to some degree and one person finally goes too far.
I think it's entirely reasonable to ask of anyone who is going to be acting to respond to civility problems on-wiki that they take a look at the situation and determine where it falls on that spectrum, and whether someone was unprovoked or was provoked, and whether the other side need to be calmed down / cautioned / warned / blocked as well as the immediate offender.
2 of the last 3 things I responded to were single-offender incivility incidents, where nobody really had provoked it at all and it was just one person going off on something.
The third was clearly a one-person minor abuse incident that was escalated by a small pack who responded provocatively and baited him and it then escalated it into intermediate. In that case, the initial offender got a mid-range warning and the pack of them / thread got a "Don't provoke or bait people" warning as well.
It's important in this to acknowledge that there are both single-party incidents and more complex ones. Treating more complex ones as if they were single-party will become a tyranny of the mob in short order - a bunch of people show up and bait someone with a short fuze, and then call for ANI, and that's all she wrote. That's not right at all.
But sometimes, there is no second side, it's just party A going ape over something.