User:Elen of the Roads/On editing in a collaborative project

This essay originated as an answer to a question that was asked at my Request for Adminship.

One problem with our civility policy is that civility is primarily a cultural thing - cultural meaning anything from national through societal down to the influence of one's immediate family, and these days we have a lot of different cultures editing in this project. Civility can mean showing appropriate respect (as in Japanese culture) or it can mean being friendly (as in stereotypical Canadian culture). Or at the other extreme, 'civility' can actually imply something false or phony - grinding out 'have a nice day' when you're actually thinking 'drop dead'. In closer knit groups such as project teams and families, civility can assume a level of familiarity, which can be affectionate but which can also be oppressive if a newcomer isn't 'in' on the rules.

I think another problem is that the principle from WP:CIVIL comment on the content, not the contributor fails because it takes no account of how we hear or perceive things. Most editors will not have been members of debating teams, will never have been exposed to the Socratic method, will never have studied any kind of philosophical reasoning process, and in many cases will never actually have had the opportunity to learn how to discuss something, rather than have an argument about it. So in an exchange, most editors cannot hear the difference between a comment on the content and a comment on them. This is even more so on talkpages, where an editor isn't just adding some content, they are explaining their beliefs, perceptions, opinions.

Take Editor A and Editor B arguing about whether Jade Goody can be described as a celebrity. Editor B notes that "Foo has written a new book: "20th century celebrity re-evaluated" in which he argues that the sheep-like rush to elevate each new unknown to a temporary place in the spotlight was the product of an ever growing media needing something to fill the 5000 tv channels now available. Editor A, who is a fan, hears Editor B as saying that they are a fool for being a fan, and responds "you just want to add that because you don't like her." This incenses B (who probably doesn't like her, and is quite keen to see this re-evaluation somewhere in the article), and off we go in a slanging match.

In my opinion, this is why civility is so variably enforced. Not because there is some kind of cabal :) but because everyone approaches it with a different internal view of civility, and a different set of internal logic/feelings that colours what they hear.

So how would I fix it? Well, my kids school had a 'learning agreement' which set out what they were all actually trying to achieve - something along the lines of 'children have a right to learn and teachers have a right to teach, and everyone must create a learning environment in which this can happen.' I thought that approach was rather better than just handing over a list of 'don't run in the corridor, don't dye your hair purple' type rules. The school did have those too, and I did have some lively debates with the head about how relevant wearing appropriate knitwear in the corridors was to creating a learning establishment.

I'm wondering if an approach like that might succeed, establishing a minimum standard of behaviour expected from people, couched in the aims of the project; rather than having an ideal that is unattainable outside a community of the angelic. To my mind, and this is a personal opinion, bullying and browbeating an editor away from a topic is the issue we ought to be dealing with. Good editors will leave a war zone - how often have we heard it said 'I stopped editing there because of X's attitude.' Reverting every edit in article space, rubbishing or ignored everything someone says, ignored any consensus that forms around them, jumping on any and everything (however little) said against their edit by someone else, regardless of the overall opinion of other editors, is as damaging to the project as the type of edit that will get you a civility block, but it is much harder to get it dealt with.

In fact, it's probably more damaging, because this kind of behaviour is frequently associated with attempts to either push a POV into an article, or prevent other editors from making it more neutral, and it can be subtle, and difficult to control. Unlike say the use of racist epithets, which are easy to spot, there is rarely one instance that one can point to and say 'that edit overstepped the mark'.

I don't think using a workplace or an academic setting as a model is as much help as others feel it to be. Academics can be terribly bitchy when arguing with each other. They do not hesitate to say "Everything Foo has written in the last ten years has been nonsense of one kind or another." And I have worked in places where workers regularly said the most unbelievably bitchy things to each other. Even without that warning from history, Wikipedia is not a workplace or a college. People edit here for all sorts of reasons, and while we can legislate to keep the troll and the vandal out, we cannot prescribe how good faith editors approach the project.

I am very tolerant - I have found from years in customer service that challenging the language at the outset rarely helps. Having said that, if I ask someone to modify an aggressive approach, I expect them to stop, and I think one key thing in improving the editing atmosphere would be the approach to enforcement. Much more use of intervention and warning would help - in an ideal world one might envisage a pool of editors prepared to go in and refocus a discussion that is going down the tubes, and warn people that they need to tone it down.

I do think civility blocks are a last, rather than a first move, one needs to look at overall conduct (was this a one off or does it fall into a category of bullying behaviour) and that normally some warning should be given first. I would block without warning for racist, sexist or other egregious abuse of the nasty kind (sadly there are plenty of examples out there on the Twitterverse that I won't repeat here). I wouldn't block just for swearing - 'that's fucking rubbish' is not particularly worse than 'that's rubbish' in western society. Indeed, 'that's bollocks' is perfectly polite in certain settings. It is persistence in nastiness, particularly persistence after warning, or as part of a sustained attack that would warrant a block.

What you have to be is even handed, and if we had some clearer minimum guidelines for how to achieve an environment in which people can edit, it would be easier for everyone to be even handed.