Excellent comments Sue. I personally am fond of the direct approach for the simple reason that I am capable in this area, and because other approaches are less honest. I was on Medcom for several years and found it was not too difficult to deal with any personal or editorial disputes if I understood the substance of the issues involved, and was able to make a simple qualitative points about what concepts each person was missing.

Sometimes individuals are both highly valuable contributors as well as highly antagonistic toward others. For example the subject of our first major Arbcom case was for years quite antagonistic toward people, and yet people did not know how to deal with him, and in a certain way they just failed to do so. My role in that was to help bring about a formal concept of how to basically deal with everyone (WP:CIVIL), and a concept of how to deal those who get into disruptive or aggressive behavior (our first "community case").

Unfortunately even Arbcom can at times have difficulty separating issues of substance from the personal characterizations, which is why I proposed a separation in how we handle personality disputes and editorial disputes (WP:DRREF). But I wrote that in 2005, and it got little attention - mostly because of "difficult people."

Regards, -Stevertigo

Many of us talk/think a lot about how to reduce conflict in our projects. For those who're interested, I was recently pointed towards two relevant videos -- I'm posting them here in hopes they might be useful for others.

So, for whoever's interested, here is:

• Donnie Berkholz's recent talk at Open Source Bridge, titled

"Assholes are killing your project." Donnie, a council member at Gentoo Linux, advocates establishment of a friendly culture including a code of conduct, and maintenance of that culture via simple mechanisms for problem reporting and resolution, plus a clear focus on mission. Unfortunately the audio here isn't terrific, so it's not super-easy to follow. http://blip.tv/file/2444432

Personally, I have also gotten some good value out of Bill Eddy's book High-Conflict People in Legal Disputes. Bill is a mediator, lawyer and former social worker who found himself repeatedly encountering destructive people in his work, and not knowing how to disarm them or disengage from them.