[WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
abd at lomaxdesign.com
Wed Aug 12 12:04:00 UTC 2009
At 09:59 PM 8/11/2009, FT2 wrote:
>On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:45 AM, Marc Riddell
><michaeldavid86 at comcast.net>wrote:
>
> > Any solution to this problem should start with the simple question: How do
> > you treat another human being?
> >
>
>The biggest clue isn't some "civility" standard - it's when some user says
>"please talk about the issues, actions, and evidence, rather than
>insinuations and ad hominen". Any user should have that right.
The problem with this is that the protest is itself ad hominem.
"Insinuations" is a complex negative judgment about the *intention*
of another.
I've seen practically a direct quote of the above in a discussion
where it was the "issues, actions, and evidence" that were discussed
by the other editor, as far as I could tell. The statement is an
insinuation that the other editor was *not* behaving properly.
We have open discussion, self-regulated most of the time, between
people who commonly have no experience with consensus process. We
have editors who have a strong agenda who complain that other editors
have a different strong agenda.
Consensus process can be tedious in person, where the communication
bandwidth is far higher than mere text, we have tone of voice,
pauses, body language (which is highly efficient compared to text at
communicating intention). Two people just looking at each other can
find agreement rapidly, if agreement is what they intend, yet, even
there, communication can break down if skills are lacking.
With text, without all those other cues, we still need to know,
often, what the *point* is, in order to understand. Yet in consensus
process, one of the steps is abandoning the point -- temporarily --
and exploring what is present. Where there is conflict, the roots of
the conflict may not be apparent, each party may have a complex of
opinions, including unexplored assumptions, and finding where the
true conflict lies can be difficult at best and may require
discussing aspects of a situation other than the "goal," which with
us is always, in the end, article text.
Where no underlying agreement has been reached, differences of
opinion about the result can be unresolvable.
There are people who are skilled at facilitating consensus, given the
opportunity. Dispute resolution process suggests bringing in a
neutral party to mediate, but we don't insist on that process.
Instead, we have editors who, when they oppose what another editor is
trying to do, go to a noticeboard to request that the other editor be
coerced into stopping. And the noticeboards are full of
result-oriented editors who are impatient with process.
Dispute resolution works best when discussions are very small-scale,
it should normally be three editors involved, not the whole
community, and the goal of one of these editors should be to help the
other two find consensus.
When I had a problem with Jehochman, who had dropped a warning on my
Talk page that seemed to me to attack everything I was doing as
useless garbage or worse, which warning then led to a block by
another administrator (complicated situation from which I learned and
accomplished a great deal), I first explored my own behavior, asking
for advice about it. Once I had that advice, from other editors, I
went to Jehochman and asked him to consider what I'd collected. He
didn't want to, and I can understand. Why should he read all that
stuff? So I asked that he suggest a mediator. He wrote "Carcharoth."
Brilliant, I thought, I couldn't imagine anyone better. So we went to
Carcharoth and asked for mediation.
Carcharoth was even more brilliant than I expected. Carcharoth agreed
to help, but was busy. Then, after some delay, when we asked again,
Carcharoth wrote, "Can't you guys work it out?" So we did. Quickly,
in fact. There was a shift in intention; our intention became to
resolve the dispute, not to promote our own purposes and convince the
other that we were right and they should change. Carcharoth had
reframed the problem. The problem was our apparent inability to
resolve the dispute by ourselves. We really unable to do this?
We need to recognize that there is a problem with our own intentions.
By focusing on article text and insisting on sticking to that, we
sometimes divert ourselves from the process of finding agreement and
what that takes. In real-life consensus process, the obstacle to
agreement often turns out to be something completely unexpected, and
to find it requires setting aside our preconceptions not only about
others, but about ourselves.
The practical suggestion here? If there is a dispute, working on it
with discussion limited to three people, one of whom has a known
agenda to help the other two find agreement, or, failing that, to
document the dispute clearly so that both of the others will say,
"Yes, that is a fair, accurate and complete statement of our
dispute." Then, and only then, would the discussion expand.
We have the mechanisms for it, the technology, but we don't insist on
it. When a complainant appears at AN/I, the first question should be
if there is any urgent need for administrative intervention. AN/I
should be 911 for Wikipedia, and not a court that sits in judgment,
AN/I has no structure for that, and frequently, when it takes this
on, it makes bad decisions, or simply wastes a lot of editor time. If
there is an urgent need, it should be quickly handled, without
debate. But that intervention should be non-judgmental, making no
assumptions or conclusions about who is right and who is wrong. The
police do not determine guilt, they maintain and restore order and
protect. Good police officers will, in fact, do some emergency
mediation, but they don't normally have the time for deeper dispute
resolution. AN/I needs some structure and discipline. As it is,
someone calls 911 to say that their house is on fire, and someone
else says, "That house is better off burnt down," and someone else
says, "Didn't you call us last year for this and it was just smoke
from a burnt pot?" and someone else says, "You shouldn't be burning
incense" and it can go on and on and when someone finally goes to
look at the house, it's in ruins. Put out the fire, if there is one.
There should be almost no discussion on AN/I. Complaint is filed,
uninvolved admin (one with no prejudgment if possible) takes the case
and investigates, takes action if needed, and then refers the
disputants to DR process, perhaps pointing them to a page where they
can find a mediator if they can't agree on one themselves. Actions
proceeding from an AN/I report, unless the cause is blatantly
obvious, should not represent definitive judgments, as if some
community consensus was determined that one side was right and the other wrong.
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