[WikiEN-l] We need your advice!

[Fred Bauder]

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.

With respect to mediation, you can start with one or two of you offering
informal mediation, you probably have at least one person with training in
mediation, perhaps someone with union experience.

Arbitration is slow and rather unsatisfying to the participants since their
doctrinal disputes are not settled; rather an inquiry results into whether
they have followed the rules, usually neither have. It turns out that there
is reluctance to enforce some things that have been thought to be rules and
conversely new "rules" develop as a practical remedy is sought for some
variety of intolerable refractory behavior.

Fred

> From: Kurt Jansson <jansson at gmx.net>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sun, 30 May 2004 00:33:20 +0200
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] We need your advice!
> 
> Hello!
> 
> The German-language Wikipedia is more and more facing the same problems
> as the English one. We seldom used to have more than one troll at a
> time, but times they are changing, and we are a bit concerned about the
> future. At the moment we have to deal with a very persistent troll and
> another user who has been banned and keeps coming back. In addition to
> that we have a few long enduring edit-wars. I think we have to create
> new policies and develop processes to handle theses problems.
> 
> The English Wikipedia has much more experience in these things, good and
> bad, and we would very much like to profit from that. It would be very
> helpful if some of you could write a few paragraphs about your
> experience with trolls, how you handle them, how you enforce a user ban,
> and what your experience with the mediation and arbitration committees
> is. We could adopt mechanisms that work and avoid mistakes you might
> have already made.
> 
> I think the best thing would be to put you reports on meta, but I can't
> make up a good name for the page at the moment. Of course you don't have
> to write in German, most of us have no problem reading English, but
> writing is a different matter. Thanks for your effort!
> 
> 
> Kurt
> 
> P.S.: Any advice is welcome, but personally I'd be especially interested
> in the opinion of Cunc and Ray about these issues.
> 
> -- 
> http://leihnetzwerk.de -- Teile Bücher, Videos und CDs mit anderen!
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> Kurt Jansson, Wiener Str. 7, 10999 Berlin, http://jansson.de
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