User:TParis/Disputes and Drama

The Wikipedia community deals with a level of protracted disputes and bad blood that only continues to stew with no sight of a constructive conclusion. This toxic mess spawns from differences in political views, religious views, ethnic and regional disputes, personalities, biases, advocacy, differences of priorities, writing styles, language preferences, and every day run-of-the-mill misunderstandings. Our existing policies have failed to curb or otherwise slow down the rapid explosion of these disputes causing site bans and interaction bans to be at an all time high. Why does this have to happen?

Focus on the goal
We're here to engineer the only volunteer driven encyclopedia written by hundreds of thousands of people all over the globe. We have created over 4.5 million articles, 4,380 of which are featured and of the highest quality, the data is integrated into countless systems such as Microsoft Word, Google Search, IBM's Watson computer, Google Glass, Siri, Cortana, and hundreds of other data integration devices, and is invaluable as a research tool in universities and schools throughout the globe. It rivals the Library of Alexandria and opens the door for amazing future technologies. We are all part of that. We're part of the team that made that happen. It is an amazing accomplishment.

It shocks me that anyone would want to draw lines and set up camps in that group. We are all on the same side and we have the same goal. Any other goal, any other need by a member of our community should be second to that goal. And if that is so, than we have no sides. Only when we place other goals before the goal of building an encyclopedia do we begin to pick sides. Then the drama and disputes happen. If we could all appreciate each other for our part in the encyclopedia, these disputes could become professional disagreement rather than personal matters.

Drama
Drama is not lessened by blocking high profile users. Nor is it lessened by unblocking high profile users. And the administrator's noticeboard is not equipped to handle protracted disputes which develop battle lines ranges anymore than a dozen editors. Blocking, unblocking, and ANI threads involving our top users are pointless and achieve no result. That isn't to say that these editors are above policy, only that we need realistic dispute resolution methods of handling them. ANI is not dispute resolution. Dispute resolution involves laying out the facts and discussing outcomes based on facts in a calm and organized manner. Only when we can resist kneejerk reactions to block, unblock, create ANI threads, !vote along party lines will we have any chance of stopping the cycle of disputes turning into threads which achieve no result and create lasting bad blood and festering wounds.