On Sat, 9 Jul 2005, Jack Lynch wrote:
We need better ways of catagorising one another than troll, admin, left -right, or whatever. These are ambiguous terms, and with the possible exception of "admin", each person who uses them defines them differently.
Well, having given this some thought for my presentation last Thursday, the way I explained the issue was to first categorize conflicts into "good faith" & "bad faith". Good faith is where two or more people disagree on the matter, but are willing to discuss the matter in a civil manner towards a consensus -- even if the consensus is nothing more than to agree to disagree (which is one way *I* explain the NPOV).
Bad faith are specific destructive acts or types of people -- vandals, cranks & troublemakers. And these labels shuold only be applied where there is no ambiguity about the situation:
* A vandal is someone who thinks adding nonsense or offensive material to an article is proper behavior -- e.g. taking the statement "George Bush is president of the United States" & changing "president" to another word like "war criminal", "wanker" or "donkey".
* A crank is someone who insists that her/his POV is the only correct one, & that anyone who does not agree with her/his POV is absolutely *wrong*. When confronted on this assertion, the crank will not provide logical positive arguments for the POV, but use various non-logical arguments to defend her/hisself -- e.g., attack the other person, claim that a conspiracy is "keeping the truth from being known", etc.
* A troublemaker is someone who has no clear agenda for their acts like a vandal, but unlike a vandal does not limit their actions to simple edits. I feel that in many cases where people on Wikipedia use the word "troll", they mean "troublemaker".
In my presentation my audience did not need me to explain these terms, but I did make the point that people with good faith conflicts, if not treated civilly & with respect often lapse into the bad faith behavior I listed. (Unfortunately, there are some people who are treated civilly & with respect who lapse into bad faith behavior -- but there is rarely any way to know this beforehand.)
Geoff