On Sun, 30 May 2004 06:05:42 -0600, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
A few thoughts. Clearly communicate with those who are "trolling" or edit-warring the nature of your difficulties with whatever they are doing. Give them a fair opportunity to change what they are doing, with edit warriors generally that involves them communicating better with their opponents and getting down to the business of looking up the facts, trying to find ways to satisfy both viewpoints, etc.
This is excellent advice.
My personal input on this matter: Trolling should be considered harmful. It disrupts the wiki. However, simply calling someone a troll is itself harmful, for there is far too much latitude in such a word, and the trolls themselves will use it to speak of their detractors.
Instead, clearly identify the problem behaviors. Disrupting policy pages like Votes for Deletion with absurd deletion requests? Nominating nonsense candidates for administrator? Engaging in personal attacks on other editors? Harassing editors or administrators by questioning every single thing they do? Reverting random (or nonrandom) edits without explaining or coming to a consensus on the talk page? Doing stuff like this repeatedly?
Then, you need to have some way for the community to decide whether a user needs to be banned/censured/etc. Establish reasonable guidelines there to prevent sock puppets, or allow an elected group.