Frances makes a good point, and now I'm thinking about the different scenarios we're talking about. There are two big ones:
1) 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.
2) 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.
Danny Horn, in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow#Components_of_the_discussion_system I see that in Flow, "Users will also have the ability to delete/suppress entire threads," which is good, and that Flow will tie into AbuseFilter for spam prevention. I'd like to ask more questions about moderation and self-care possibilities in Flow; let me know where I should ask those (the design list, a different list, the Flow talkpage on mediawiki.org, elsewhere).
Sumana Harihareswara Senior Technical Writer Wikimedia Foundation
On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 4:12 PM, Frances Hocutt frances.hocutt@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 9:01 AM, Brandon Harris bharris@wikimedia.org wrote:
Ignoring people by actually ignoring people tends to work prettywell.
This depends on your background, your history with them, and why you are ignoring them. I'm more likely to just leave a discussion than to scroll past sexist/homophobic/transphobic arguments so I can continue engaging with other people I have more common ground with. Reading the beginning and scrolling past stuff like that stresses me out and makes it not worth my time or energy to stay.
-Frances
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