User:RexxS/CERFC

General questions

These questions are intended to try to determine what you may consider the "baseline" between what should be considered "valid collegiate discourse" and what should be considered "violation of the civility policy" (incivility). Please be as specific as you can in your responses.

Written versus spoken communication

When one is physically present when speaking with another person, body language, intonation, setting, and other physical factors, can suggest the intent of words in a way that words written on a page cannot.

Collegiality

Example: if a person is having a casual conversation with friends over a table covered with beer glasses and one of them wishes to contest a point another has made they might prefect their remarks with "listen up asshole and I'll explain it to you." If they are smiling and raising a glass towards the person this remark is pointed, it can help the words to be taken in the lighthearted manner in which it was intended.

Should such interaction as noted in the example above be considered incivility in the collegiate, collaborative environment of Wikipedia? Should the talk page location matter (such as whether the discussion is on a user talk page, an article talk page, or Wikipedia project-space talk page)?

• Reply: Certainly not, if there is any chance that the editors involved could take the remark as light-hearted (as they might in a pub). AGF applies.

Profanity

Should all profanity (such as the use of "bad words", "four letter words", "the Seven dirty words", etc.), be considered incivility?

• Reply: No, absolutely not. Incivility cannot be inherent in the words used.

All caps/wiki markup

There is an established convention when using technology to communicate through a typed format that WRITING IN ALL CAPS is considered "yelling" and is generally not acceptable. Individuals also sometimes use italics bolding green or other colored text or even enlarged text or other formatting code to attempt to indicate intonation, or to otherwise emphasize their comments.

Should there be limits as to when this type of formatting should be used in a discussion? Is there any type of formatting which should never be acceptable in a discussion?

• Reply: Italics is sensible for emphasising particular words. Coloured text is often useful for quoting examples or where the text needs to be distinguished from the surrounding content. All-caps, bold, enlarged, and other formatting 'tricks' are rarely useful in civilised discourse.

Enforcement and sanctions

Responsibility for enforcement

Who is responsible for maintaining a civil environment for collegiate discussion? Should it be it the responsibility of administrators, the arbitration committee, the broader Wikipedia community, or some combination of these?

• Reply: No, no, no, and no. Each editor is individually responsible for maintaining their own standard of civility.

Appropriate sanctions

What sanctions, if any, do you think are appropriate for incivility? Should blocking be considered an appropriate response to incivility? Should topic banning or interaction banning be considered an appropriate response?

• Reply: No sanctions are ever an appropriate or useful response to incivility. Incivility is either productive or counter-productive and that depends wholly on the recipient. It is each editor's responsibility to judge the likely effects of how their behaviour will be received, and to censor themselves if they judge it to be counter-productive. No outside 'authority' should ever set themselves up to make those judgements.

Context

Should the context of the situation be taken into account when considering whether to apply sanctions to the individual due to incivility?

• Reply: As above: No sanctions are ever an appropriate or useful response to incivility.

Severity

How severe should a single incident of incivility need to be to merit some sort of sanction?

• Reply: There is no such thing as a 'severe' incident of incivility. No sanctions are ever an appropriate or useful response to incivility.

Instances of incivility

Should multiple instances of incivility in the same discussion be considered one offense or several? If a user is civil most of the time, but occasionally has instances of incivility, should these incidents be excused? If so, how often should such incivility be excused?

• Reply: Incivility must always be excused. It's not our place to turn ourselves into judges of others. We may well complain that chronic incivility damages the collaborative editing environment, but attempting to enforce our own standards of civility on others is counter-productive. The best we can do is to regulate our own behaviour.

Weighing incivility and contributions

Should the quality and/or number of contributions an individual makes outside of discussions have any bearing on whether an individual should be sanctioned due to incivility? Should the incidents of incivility be taken on their own as a separate concern?

• Reply: As above: No sanctions are ever an appropriate or useful response to incivility.

Outcry

In the past, when an individual has been blocked from editing due to "violating the civility policy" (incivility), there has, at times, been an outcry from others concerning the block, and sometimes the block has been overturned subsequent to that outcry.

In an effort to reduce incidences of such an outcry ("drama"), should incivility be deprecated as an appropriate reason for blocking an individual? Should admins instead be required to have a more specific reason (such as personal attacks, harassment of another user, etc.), when blocking a user for incivility?

• Reply: No admin should be blocking anyone for transgressing that admin's idea of incivility, period. Genuine harassment should always be a blocking offence, but that should never be confused with what we are discussing in this RfC.

AN/I prerequisite

Should a demonstrable consensus formed through discussion at WP:AN/I (or other appropriate forum) be required as a prerequisite to blocking an individual due to incivility? If so, should there be a minimum time frame for such discussions to remain open before the individual may be blocked?

• Reply: No consensus at ANI (The Great Dismal Swamp) should ever be sufficient grounds for sanctioning editors for incivility. Nobody is competent to judge civility in others, and all the attempts to do so inevitably come to grief, and only add dramah.

RFC prerequisite

A request for comment (RFC) gives the community the opportunity to discuss a behavioural concern (such as incivility) directly with the individual, with the intended goal of attempting to find a voluntary solution.

Should an RFC be required as a prerequisite for blocking a user of incivility? Should it be suggested and/or encouraged?

• Reply: RfC/U has an excellent potential to draw an editor's attention to how their behaviour may affect others, and persuade them to moderate it. Unfortunately it is all too often seen as a means of perpetuating a dispute - and even more unfortunately as another stage to be "ticked off" in an attempt to sanction (and remove or silence) an opponent. Editors should never be blocked for incivility; it's not an appropriate or useful reaction.

Personal Attacks

Requests for adminship

Wikipedia:Requests for adminship (RFA) is a place where an editor requests the additional tools and responsibilities of adminship. In the discussion concerning the specific request, each commenting editor is to convey whether (and why) they would (or would not) trust the requester with those tools and responsibilities. Due to this, typically the requester's actions, behaviour, and contributions are noted, evaluated, and sometimes discussed.

Due to the nature of RFA (a question of trusting an individual), should it be considered necessary for the standards concerning personal attacks be somewhat relaxed at RFA? What, if any, should be the limits to this? How personal is "too personal" at an RFA? What types of criticisms cross the line between being considered merely an evaluation of a candidate and being considered an unwarranted attack? Should comments considered to cross that line be left alone, stricken, moved to the talk page, or simply removed altogether?

• Reply: No, the standards for NPA should be maintained consistently throughout the project. The important part is not the "personal", but the "attack". For a comment to be construed as an unwarranted attack, it needs to be at least one of: (a) demonstrably untrue; (b) not relevant in the context; (c) unsupportable by sources (diffs, urls, etc.) if challenged; or (d) taken so far out of context that no reasonable reader would reach that conclusion. For what it's worth, NPA is a completely different topic from incivility, and only "muddies the waters" by being discussed in this RfC.

Attacking an idea

The Wikipedia community has a long tradition of not tolerating personal attacks. However, it may be difficult to differentiate whether an individual is commenting on a user's ideas or is commenting on the user themselves. The same is true concerning whether an individual may understand a particular idea.

How should this be determined? Should any of the following be considered a personal attack? Should any of these comments be considered the kind of incivility that we should not tolerate on Wikipedia?

"That idea is stupid"

"That is idiotic"

"That is yet another one of <username of proposer>'s stupid ideas and should be ignored"

"You don't understand/misunderstand"

"You aren't listening"

"You don't care about the idea"

• Reply: Neither you nor I can judge whether the above comments are uncivil. We have not been granted the power to peer inside other people's souls. Nevertheless, tolerance is the quality most needed in order to work on Wikipedia. The important part of NPA is not the "personal", but the "attack". For a comment to be construed as an unwarranted attack, it needs to be at least one of: (a) demonstrably untrue; (b) not relevant in the context; (c) unsupportable by sources (diffs, urls, etc.) if challenged; or (d) taken so far out of context that no reasonable reader would reach that conclusion. For what it's worth, NPA is a completely different topic from incivility, and only "muddies the waters" by being discussed in this RfC.

Rate examples

In this section example comments will be presented. You are asked to evaluate each comment on the following scale:

• 1 = Always acceptable
• 2 = Usually acceptable
• 3 = Acceptability entirely dependent on the context of specific situation
• 4 = Usually not acceptable
• 5 = Never acceptable

• Reply: Badly flawed. You haven't defined "acceptable", nor postulated to whom you expect it be acceptable (or not).

Proposals or content discussions

• I assume you realize how foolish this idea sounds to the rest of us

rating: -

• Typical of the foolishness I have come to expect from this user

rating: -

• After looking over your recent edits it is clear that you are incompetent.

rating: -

• Anyone with a username like that is obviously here for the wrong reasons

rating: -

• You seem to have a conflict of interest in that you appear to be interested in a nationalist point of view.

rating: -

• It is obvious that your purpose here is to promote your nationalist point of view.

rating: -

• You are clearly here to support your nationalist point of view, Wikipedia would be better off without you.

rating: -

• This is the stupidest proposal I have seen in a very long time.

rating: -

• Whoever proposed this should have their head examined

rating -

• I don't know how anyone could support such an idiotic proposal.

rating: -

• This proposal is retarded.

rating: -

• The person who initiated this discussion is a moron.

rating: -

• This proposal is crap.

rating: -

• This proposal is a waste of everyone's time.

rating -

• What a fucking waste this whole discussion has been

rating: -

• A shitty proposal from a shitty editor.

rating: -

• The OP is a clueless idiot.

rating: -

• Please just stop talking, nobody is listening anyway.

rating: -

• Just shut up already.

rating: -

• File your sockpuppet investigation or STFU.

rating: -

• Shut your fucking mouth before you say something else stupid.

rating: -

admin actions

• The blocking admin has a long history of questionable judgements.

rating: -

• The blocking admin needs to be desysopped if this is representative of their decision making abilities.

rating -

• The blocking admin is well known as an abusive rule nazi.

rating: -

• I'm sure their admin cronies will just censor me like they do to anyone who points out the hypocrisy of all WP admins, but this was a terrible block.

rating: -

• How could anyone with a brain in their head think it was ok to issue a block like this?

rating: -

Possible trolling

• Your comments look more like trolling to me.

rating: -

• Stop trolling or I will find an admin to block you.

rating: -

• All I can say about this user is "obvious troll is obvious".

rating: -

• Go troll somewhere else.

rating: -

• Somebody block this troll so those of us that are here in good faith can continue without them.

rating: -

removal of comments

(Assume all removals were done by a single user and are not part of a suppression action for privacy, libel, etc)

• Comment removed from conversation with edit summary "removed off topic trolling"

rating: -

• Comment removed from a conversation and replaced with <redacted> or {{RPA}}

rating: -

• Entire discussion closed and/or collapsed using {{hat}} or other such formatting

rating: -

• Comment removed from a conversation and replaced with "redacted twattery, don't post here again" with posting users signature still attached

rating: -

• Comment removed from conversation and replaced with File:DoNotFeedTroll.svg

rating: -

Enforcement scenarios

The general idea that Wikipedians should try to treat each other with a minimum of dignity and respect is widely accepted. Where we seem to have a serious problem is the enforcement or lack thereof of this ideal. This section will submit various scenarios and ask to you to suggest what an appropriate response would be. Possible options include:

• ignoring it
• warning the users involved
• WP:RFC, WP:ANI, or other community discussions,
• blocking, either indefinitely or for a set period of time
• topic or interaction banning
• Any other response you feel would be appropriate

Please bear in mind that what is being asked for is not what you believe would happen but what you believe should happen.

Scenario 1

Two users are in a dispute regarding the name of a particular article on a geographic region. The debate is long and convoluted, and the motivations of the two users unclear to those unfamiliar with the topic. They have not used any form of dispute resolution to resolve the content dispute. They have not edit warred in the article but the discussion on the talk page has gotten extremely long and seems to be devolving into the users accusing one another of having ethnic/nationalist motivations. One users has said "You only believe that because you were educated in the Fubarian school system which filled your head with their lies." To which the other user replies "That is exactly what I would expect from someone who live in Kerzbleckistan. Everyone knows that Fubaritol has always been part of our great empire. Only Kerzblecki fat heads believe it isn't. "

• Response: Current damage to encyclopedia: very small. Potential for damage: limited. Response: ask each of the editors to consider the other editor's viewpoint; explain that overwhelming the talk page hinders others from improving the article; post a request for more eyes on the page at the Lower Corkublingians WikiProject.

Scenario 2

A long term user is blocked for edit warring. The proof that they did edit war is clear and obvious. On their talk page they are hosting a discussion regarding the block but are not formally appealing it using the unblock template. The blocking admin, seeing this discussion of their actions, attempts to explain that they are not making a value judgement on the appropriateness of the edits, just doing their job by enforcing the edit warring policy. The blocked user removes the admins actual comments but leaves their signature attached to the phrase "asshattery removed". Several of the blocked users friends comment on what a dumb block it is, how the blocking admin is a disgrace, that they should be desysopped, and sp on. The blocking admin comments again, asking that they either be allowed to participate in the discussion or that their comments and all discussion of them be removed entirely, not replaced with an insult with his signature attached to it. The blocked user again removes the admin's comments and adds the same insulting phrase in their place.

• Response: Current damage to encyclopedia: very small. Potential for damage: limited. Response: explain to the admin that they are probably better off leaving the long-term user (LTU) to vent on their own talk page as they are obviously feeling upset (although real LTUs like Malleus rarely react in the way described); wait a couple of days and them engage with the LTU if they are still blocked to see if some common ground can be found to persuade the admin to unblock.

Scenario 3

A user is apparently an expert in the field of eighteenth-century horse drawn carriages. Practically every word Wikipedia has on this subject was written by them. Their content contributions are generally above reproach. Unfortunately they are also extremely abrasive in interpersonal conversations. They routinely tell any user who disagrees with them to fuck off, that they were obviously educated in a barn, that their ignorance is matched only by what a douchebag they are, and so forth. They also exhibit a tendency to actually be on the correct side of an argument when they are at their most abrasive. They apparently believe that this excuses their condescension and insults. One such incident is brought up at WP:ANI. It is approximately the fifteenth time such an incident has occurred. Again, the user is making excellent content contributions and is probably right as to the facts of the actual dispute, but they have verbally abused the user who disagrees with them, insulting their intelligence and using profanity. An admin decides to block them for chronic incivility about three hours into the conversation at the noticeboard.

• Response: Current damage to encyclopedia: very small. Potential for damage: larger (eventual loss of LTU). Response: Engage the blocking admin as politely as possible on their talk page and explain that civility blocks are inevitably counter-productive (even more so in the case of real LTUs like Giano who don't suffer fools gladly); remind them that a controversial block (when half of the potential commentators at ANI are asleep) usually produces more damage through dramah than the damage it could possibly prevent; if the blocking admin does not change their mind, then explain why the block is a bad idea at ANI, organise sensible opposition, and politely suggest to the admin that they consider their position.

Scenario 4

Users A and B are in a dispute. They have already stated their positions many times each. As previously uninvolved users begin commenting on the situation user A stops commenting on the relevant talk page. User B opens a thread on user A's user talk page relating to the dispute and challenging user A's position. User A posts a reply indicating they feel they have stated their position enough times and they do not see any purpose in continuing. User B replies, asking for more details about some aspect of the dispute. User A closes the discussion on their talk page and in both a closing comment and their edit summary they say "User B please stop posting here." User B posts again anyway. User A removes their comments and in their edit summary they write "Stay the fuck off my fucking talk page, LIKE I SAID ALREADY."

• Response: Current damage to encyclopedia: very small. Potential for damage: limited. Response: Explain to user B that by convention we do not continue to push the same point multiple times on another user's talk page; draw their attention to our harassment policy; engage with user A to reinforce his initial good responses, and express solidarity with his right to request that user B not post on his talk page. Note: this is not about incivility!

Scenario 5

A user is unfailingly civil in their on-wiki interactions with other users. They have never been blocked. Yet it is discovered that on an off-wiki forum dedicated to discussing Wikipedia they constantly make grossly insulting profane remarks about other WP users. Another user emails them asking about this discrepancy, and they receive an email reply through the Wikipedia email system that is equally insulting and profane. When the issue is brought up at WP:ANI the user is again perfectly polite. They openly acknowledge that they are in fact the user making the comments on the off-wiki forum, and that they sent an insulting email. They feel none of that is relevant as their on-wiki communication has been above reproach.

• Response: Current damage to encyclopedia: none. Potential for damage: very limited. Response: Politely explain to the first user that they are a hypocritical arsehole, and commiserate with the other user for their misfortune; suggest that disengagement by both sides would be best, considering that everybody now understands their positions.

Scenario 6

(Please bear in mind that this is a hypothetical scenario, not a description of the current situation)

The Wikipedia community is in a time of crisis. Arguments about civility are leading to more and more disruption and the project seems in danger of losing many long time contributors as a result. In desperation, the community decides to appoint one user to modify WP:CIVIL in any way they see fit in order to resolve these issues and restore order. In their wisdom they select you as that person.

• Response: Current damage to encyclopedia: significant. Potential for damage: large. Response: Thank the community for their trust, and then modify WP:CIVIL so that has it has the same status in Wiki-law as some parts of the Highway Code have in English law, i.e. breaches of the civility code are not sanctionable per se, but failure to comply with them will compound liability when another offence is committed; lay down my office of magistratus extraordinarius for the clavi figendi causa immediately thereafter.

Comments

Please use this section for any additional comments, observations, recommendations, etc.