Wikipedia talk:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Personal attack intervention noticeboard (0th nomination)

What's wrong and how to fix it
This is my effort to examine what is wrong with the structure of WP:PAIN, and then turning those cons into pros. Please note each bad point as a subsection, e.g.:

Encourages incivility
blah blah blah WP:CIVIL WP:BEANS WP:DICK ~

Overly bureaucratic
blah WP:NOT blah blah Jimbo Wales ~

etc. ★ MESSED  ROCKER ★  02:31, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Proposal to deprecate deletions and archive instead
Not strictly the right place to mention this, but as this is the most active MfD at the moment, I thought the people here might be interested in the proposal I have made here. This is to make clearer the differences between deletion and archiving. Comments over there would be appreciated. I've also posted a notice at the policy area of the Village pump. Carcharoth 11:48, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for you comment. If the page was deleted, I wouldn't object to anyone posting to a short explanation of the notice board and the consensus to delete. I don't expect that many non-admins would be very interested in trawling through page histories, consequently I would suggest the difference between "delete followed by posting an explanation" and "close down followed by posting an explanation" is very subtle. Addhoc 12:41, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Really? The difference is not very subtle at all. Deleted pages shouldn't function as an "admin-only archive". If something needs to be kept as an archive, then archive it properly and keep it accessible to all. Deletion should be reserved for rubbish that really can be deleted completely at some point, and that no-one will be interested in. Deleted pages have been lost completely before, so anything that should be archived should be tagged that way and (if necessary to properly 'disconnect it') blanked, not deleted. Blanking a page and adding an explanation is much more of an open approach than deleting. Note that I am only referring to the Wikipedia namespace here, not article space, which (for various reasons) does need outright deletion to take place to keep things under control. The Wikipedia namespace is a lot more about organisation and planning and strategy than the other namespaces, and the history is often useful. Carcharoth 12:58, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Long live Personal Attacks!

 * Rant warning.

Well, I never thought it would come to this, but... when are we going to get rid of WP:CIV, WP:NPA and other useless pages that cannot be enforced anyway? Oh right. There is of course the WP:ANI (i.e.'roll a die: your report may be deleted because it is not admin-related, ignored, commented upon without any change or if you are really lucky a random admin will enforce a random rule, then likely get wheel warred') or WP:ARBCOM (i.e. after months of WP:DR procedure the most serious abuses of civility may be addressed by now even more overworked ArbComers). If you are a new user, don't have the stomach for long DR and are just getting offended by some more experienced flamers... tough luck. Grow a thick skin is a good advice. Or just learn how to flame back, because it's not like anybody apparently cares...
 * Rant ends.
 * Seriously: I am very, very disappointed that we seem to be turning away from dealing with incivility. If there is something that can destroy this project, it is allowing some foul-mouthed individuals to scare away decent folks. This is a dark day for the project - and I just hope I am very wrong on this.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 20:57, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Yup. The corrosive effect of incivility is that it hurts articles more than anything else because of its polarizing effect. People are driven farther apart than they would ordinarily be, and because of that, collaboration becomes very difficult. I've seen several cases where the departure of an uncivil contributor resulted in the remaining editors finding common ground that they'd never been able to before because they weren't willing to budge previously due to possibly being associated with the "other side". - Merzbow 21:10, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Okay, now that this is all over (and probably overlooked) I'll comment what I would have suggested if people had taken that nice cup of tea and waited two weeks before putting this noticeboard on the block. WP:PAIN and WP:RFI are functionally very similar.  It was impossible to be effective at WP:PAIN without investigating each complaint because the chances were good that a given complaint was filed as a preemptive strike by the dispute's main instigator.  WP:ANI and WP:RFI deal with pretty much the same problem to more or less the same degree.  So rather than toss all this personal attack stuff to WP:ANI where it gets lost in the salad how about sending more of it to WP:RFI?  Durova Charge 04:30, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
 * It looks like there is and has been a significant backlog there, and that the cases there are more complicated then WP:NPA violations. Why move more complaints, of a lesser nature, to that page?  John Broughton  |  ♫ 20:31, 16 January 2007 (UTC)