[WikiEN-l] Beat Cop Syndrome, and is there anything I can do about it?

[Steven Walling]

First try putting in a RFC to get some more voices in on the debate. If he
is being obviously unreasonable (or you're overreacting and you're too hot
to realize it), getting a few outside opinions is a good way to make people
see sense.

If getting more users in on the debate doesn't work, first try Mediation
before you go to ArbCom.

On 6/20/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> For the past week or so I've been involved in a small-scale but rather
> frustrating and depressing dispute with another user. He's a long-time
> contributor who I've bumped into a few times before; he tends to focus
> his attention on a particular group of articles that receives higher
> than average amounts of spam and other bad editing and is quite vigorous
> about keeping them clean. Perhaps too vigorous, IMO, but in the past
> things have usually worked out okay in the end.
>
> Problem is, I think he's been getting worse. This time around he removed
> something that looked reasonable to me, or at least debatable, and when
> I argued that it might be good to keep he instantly became very
> aggressive and appears to have concluded that my disagreement with him
> indicated that I must be pushing an agenda. The same seems to apply to
> everyone else who's disagreed subsequently - they're either pushing an
> agenda, "stalking" him, or are otherwise biased or meat-puppets called
> in specifically to load the debate against him. I think that he's spent
> so much time fighting vandals and POV-pushers that he no longer
> recognizes that anyone not completely on "his side" isn't necessarily
> one themselves. Since he's taking such an absolutist approach in his
> interpretation of the guideline in question it doesn't leave much, and
> it's made him thoroughly entrenched against any consideration that he
> might be incorrect.
>
> I'm not looking to go into the specifics of the debate here, I'm just
> trying to figure out what I should do if it continues to prove
> impossible to get through to him that I'm not his mortal enemy. I've
> been pondering arbitration, since IMO his editing style has become
> problematic due to his absolute refusal to brook any debate or dispute,
> but it also seems like that would only be another step toward cementing
> his negative view of any people who disagree with him. For now at least
> he's still engaged in discussion. But I'm not optimistic about it ending
> well this time and I'm hoping that someone might have some advice.
>
>
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