heros and villains

No general attacks. No attacks on people.

If there is a specific action you think is wrong then criticise that specific action, with citations and a specific suggestions for what that user should have done differently.

If someone has made an attack on some person ask them to edit their comment to criticise that persons actions instead - yes let us encourage people to edit and rewrite their contributions to discussion pages!

81.187.181.16819:44, 4 May 2010

I think 81.187.181.168 is on the right path when he says "if there is a specific action you think is wrong then criticise that specific action, with citations and a specific suggestions for what that user should have done differently", yes, I don't need to be vilified on a voluntary project and we shouldn't criticize people just because we think his work is not good enough. However it is hard to write a policy that allows people to express their disagreement and prevents trollism, mainly because we cannot confound expression of critic with trollism. Internal disagrement will always exist in any free community, the problem is that trolls will certainly use it as weapon to disturb.

I don't know how to deal with trollism but I think that we can't fight trolls face-to-face because you have much more to lose than they do. I think it would be more effective if we could make Wikipedia a less fruitful place for them. The first think to do is understanding why there are trolls and I think there are 3 common reasons to become a troll:

  • Needing of attention: some trolls just want to perturb community because it makes them feel special.
  • They are authoritarian people: they never accept to compromise in a discussion, so they use disruption as an instance of power taking community hostage as they will only stop perturbing if community do what they want.
  • They are saboteurs: they had some previous bad experience on Wikipedia and they want revenge.

My proposal is make community strong enough to support disruption and not try to stop disruption.

Lechatjaune01:10, 5 May 2010

I think you nailed the three main reason for troll-ish behavior. You're also right that we want to draw a stronger line against attacks, but without censoring ordinary disagreement or criticism. Especially criticism of legitimately bad behavior.

Even when you look at the "no personal attacks" page, they have to clarify "what should you do instead". Trying to find a way to generalize that policy to "no attacks, period", we'd have to outline what people should do instead of making general "group attacks" and battleground behavior.

Randomran05:37, 5 May 2010

Yes, you're right, we could have guidelines on how to critize and where.

It would be also useful if there was a safe place for meta discussions. When I say a safe place, I mean a place where you don't disrupt the project and its editors. Indeed I think wikiproject entangles too much those different kind of discussions.

Lechatjaune16:57, 6 May 2010