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

[The Cunctator]

To be perfectly honest, public humiliation works surprisingly well.

What I mean by that is getting the user to defend himself to those he
considers his peers. For example, by making a stink about the militaristic
attitude of the Counter Vandalism Unit I got them to change their logo to a
cute anime maid from the original pseudo-official swat-team logo and they
moderated their language. And by "I got them" I mean "enough other people
got involved, many of whom are considerably more diplomatic than me". Which
was really all that was needed, since the intentions were good.

It sounds like this is a similar case.

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.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>