On Tue, 12 Aug 2014, at 07:44, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
Frances makes a good point, and now I'm thinking about the different scenarios we're talking about. There are two big ones:
- A has a policy or editing dispute with B and they just sort of get on
each other's nerves a lot, so they try to avoid seeing each other's edits, talk page messages, and so on. This is like what svetlana originally brought up. I agree with Brandon that in this case users should use their willpower to skim, ignore, or avoid reminders of each other. This is kind of like how one avoids one's ex at a party.
- X consistently makes anti-[insert group here] comments that marginalize,
belittle, and demean Y, and the wiki's community is not getting X to stop or otherwise backing up Y's right to participate in the community. In this intimidating atmosphere, Y tries to ignore seeing X's talk page messages and edit summaries. Here, there's clearly been a failure of community moderation - no moderation techniques http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Moderation are being employed, and/or people are mistakenly saying "don't feed the trolls" http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Don%27t_feed_the_trolls . The process of improving a community's level of hospitality takes time; while we're doing that, it would be nice to give Y some respite from seeing X's comments.
3) Another contributor's contributions look disgusting, as he's inserting what I consider rubbish into articles and discussions, but I couldn't convince him to understand me. It's something against Wikimedia mission in my view, but not a blockable offense on that Wikimedia project. I'd like to avoid engaging into educational rants with the contributor (he's not young either and he can't hear me), and to do this, I need to stop seeing his messages.
Hence a need to have the software impose an interaction barrier between me and another contributor: - when leaving messages at my talk page, he's warned that I'll not see them at all (and potentially prevented from doing so) - when leaving messages in discussions, he's warned that I'll not see them - where a discussion involves my participation in the specific thread - when reviewing a page or an edit I made, he's warned against that (and potentially prevented from doing so, where a page is stabilised - i.e. no harm is made if it stays in queue for a longer bit and someone else reviews the edit) - when editing a page I created, he's warned that its content will be hidden from me by default (with an unhide button available, if I want it) - etc