Incivility: Difference between revisions

Incivility : behavior that creates an atmosphere of animosity and disrespect. Incivility is a source of conflict.

Wikipedia as a whole is not especially respectful of other contributors. This directly affects the quality of the community experience at Wikipedia. By hurting the community, the quality of articles is affected as well.

Petty examples that contribute to an uncivil environment:

• use of profanity
• racial, ethnic, and religious slurs
• judgemental tone in edit comments ("fixed sloppy spelling", "snipped rambling crap")
• belittling contributors because of their language skills or word choice
• ill-considered accusations of impropriety of one kind or another

More serious examples include:

• personal attacks
• lies
• defacement of personal pages
• calls for bans

This style of interaction between a Wikipedian and another Wikipedian drives away contributors, distracts others from more important matters, and weakens the entire community.

• In case of an edit war, when people support different opinions, or for power sharing
• When the community grows big. An editor do not know all the others, he may not perceive their individual importance in the project, so do not feel like preserving bonds that do not exist. Reputation do not count so much.
• Sometimes, a specifically impolite outsider unfortunately gets in the project

• because it makes people unhappy, resulting in discouragement and departure
• because it makes people angry, resulting in non-constructive or even uncivil behavior themselves, further escalating the uncivility level
• because people lose good faith, resulting in even less ability to resolve the current or the next conflict

Uncivility happens for example when you are quietly creating a new page, and another user tells you If you're going to write a pointless page, you could spell check it.
You tell him to mind his own business.

• striking offensive words or replacing them by milder ones on talk pages (often seen as controversial, as it is refactoring other people words)
• removing offensive comments on talk pages (they stay in the history however, anyone can find them back or refer to them later on)
• revert an edit with &bot=1, so that the edit made by the offender appears invisible in recent change (do-able on ip contributions, require technical help for loggued-in user)
• deleting entirely and permanently an edit made by the offenser (require technical help)
• delete permanently an offensive comment made on the mailing lists (require technical help)
• replace a comment made in a comment box by another comment less offensive (require technical help)

• prevent edit war and conflict of persons (constraints set by the project itself. Community answer essentially)
• compensate each uncivil comment by providing a soothing or constructive comment
• preventing the access of Wikipedia to some class of people more likely to be offensive (reduce openness)
• force delays between answers to give time to editors to recover and avoid further escalation of conflict (protect pages, or temporary blocks of editors in case of conflict)

• Do not answer offensive comments. Forget about them. Forgive. Do not escalate.(individual answer)
• Make as if the offender does not exist. Set a wall between the offender and the community.
• Revert edits with a veil of invisibility (&bot=1) to reduce the impact of the offensive words when made in comment box

• offer feedback (praise the ones who did not answer to uncivility by uncivility themselves)
• play on negative feedback (let or suggest an editor in conflict to leave wikipedia, whether he the offender or the one cible of the offenses, to reduce level of conflict)
• apply peer pressure (voice displeasure each time uncivil words are used)
• solve the root of the conflict between the offenser and the editor or the community. Or find a compromise.

• block a user from editing specific pages which often trigger violence
• set a new rule based on word usage, that will allow temporary blocking or banning an editor using them more than xx times. Enforce it.
• request the use of real names to force editors to take responsability of their behavior (generally considered not desirable on wikipedia)
• filter mails by the offender, or filter mail based on some key words, and reject an email to the mailing list when offending

• consider that uncivil words can't be avoided in such a project, and accept their existence.