---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Romaine Wiki <romaine_wiki@yahoo.com>
Date: 2014-05-16 14:13 GMT-03:00
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How to Criticize with Kindness
To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Cc: fflorin@wikimedia.org


Hello all,

I had a discussion with Fabrice about how a culture of Kindness and Fabrice also made a submission for Wikimania about it: https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/A_Culture_of_Kindness

In the past years I notice very much how easy discussions can go in the wrong direction as all the facial expressions and intonation are lost when users write a message on a talk page. Many many times this goes wrong, and users have a different interpretation of what someone else said what causes a fight on the wiki. If users are smart they find out that in fact the difference between them is very small with (usually) only a very slight difference in focus, but in general they agree with each other, but they don't realize that on the moment of the discussion. (If users with good will aren't that smart to discover that, such can grow out to a fighting situation for many years.) If I estimate I would say at least 50% of all troubled discussions are causes by miscommunication as the result of words being read differently as result of missing facial expressions and intonation what most people are used to have in the communication with people around them.

If certain users are deaf, autistic or dyslectic, or have such background, this is even worsened.

For some years I say that if I can follow a training to improve textual communication to better understand how things are perceived, I really like to follow such training. As I don't know of any, I started to figure out and collect what communication mistakes are made what cause troubles between users with the intention of creating a guide for users, to let them understand why some communication gives worse results.

Romaine