Value, respect, and strive for diversity in editors

From my experience as an arbitrator on the English Wikipedia, I must say that increased, and strict, enforcement of civility has diminishing returns especially as attention turns to subtle forms of disrespect. Essentially, your putting yourself up for a game of whack-o-mole as convincing the community that subtle insults are a serious matter is a losing proposition. The clever individual always has the advantage over a committee.

Yeah, I sometimes want stronger enforcement of civility, but then I worry it would just become a game of Wikilawyering and passive aggressive "did you see what he said? I believe that editors would construe that as disrespectful."

That said, there are some editors who manage to operate at the borderline of good behavior for years before they are eventually banned. There has to be something we can do to improve our behavioral standards.

I think that coming together to say "Hey, there is a problem here," is a good first step. Wikilawyering becomes possible when rules and guidelines are detailed. When they are vague, it is less possible. For example, if the civility guideline simply said "Be respectful of each other," and administrators gave a warning the first time and then a 24 hour ban the second, people would quickly realize that the best way to "play the game" was not to get near the boundary in the first place. While some would argue about the interpretation of "respect," all would quickly figure out that conservative definitions serve them better. Sure, we might lose a few editors, but I think we're losing more now from how loose the civility rules are. To be frank, I don't deserve to be treated with disrespect because of my opinions. I'm a volunteer and volunteers are generally treated well by the organizations they volunteer for (because those organizations want them to continue volunteering).

Further, nobody deserves to be treated with disrespect, even if they act badly. Administrators can (and should) be respectful even when applying bans, in the same way that a judge will still address a murderer as "Mister" when delivering a jail sentence. Basic respect should be suspended for no one.

If the civility rules were tightened, we'd of course have to have some training to make sure that warnings and bans were handed out properly, but I think that's do-able.

It's a huge change that you're asking for. I kind of wish we had done this right from the start. You're right that training would have to become a part of it. But we wouldn't just have to train admins. We'd have to train editors as well.

And even then, the biggest challenge is distinguishing between legitimate criticism and "disrespect". I mean, if you said "Randomran keeps re-adding information that is untrue and unverified", I shouldn't be able to say "Noraft should be banned for calling me a liar".

I think you're right about everything you've said. And I agree that it is a huge change, but I think it is one that we really need to make.

Regarding differentiating between criticism and disrespect, I think clear, nonspecific guidelines again save the day. In this case, establishing a guideline that editors should request things for themselves, not for others (i.e. it is okay to say "I feel I'm being disrespected and I'd like administrator intervention," but not "Ban Noraft for calling me a liar.")

In the same way that current rules (such as WP:Notability) give rise to typical/common outcomes in Articles for Deletion discussions, the new rules will also have common outcomes. For example, I would suspect that if we instituted the aforementioned guideline, a common outcome of requesting a ban on another user would be an administrator warning and referral to the guideline stating that calling for bans on others is not respectful.