On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Matthew Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 4:47 PM, Marc Riddell
<michaeldavid86(a)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.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com