User:ATren/Civility

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[edit] Why Civility is So Important

In a nutshell:

  • Incivility makes good faith users act like trolls.
  • Incivility makes trolls act like good faith users.

[edit] Incivility makes good faith users act like trolls

For a good faith contributor, aggressive acts, condescending attitude, and uncivil discourse are enraging, especially coming from an administrator, because the user knows (s)he is acting in good faith. To be treated otherwise is extremely frustrating. The result: this good faith user starts acting like a troll to counter what (s)he believes to be an injustice.

[edit] Incivility makes trolls act like good faith users

Usenet has taught us an imporant lesson about trolls: the best way to deal with them is to ignore them. Don't feed the trolls. Any response to a troll is bad, but when you lose your temper and respond incivilly, you give them exactly what they want, what they crave.

Trolls must instigate you to get the response they crave, but if you don't respond in kind, they must continue to instigate. Eventually, if you ignore them long enough, they'll escalate their trolling to the point where their trollish motives are obvious, and they can be banned.

This is also known as letting the troll dig his own grave.

But when you respond harshly, well, you've just made his day. Trolls enjoy any response at all, but an aggressive, attacking response is a special treat for them - they love to see you lose your cool. You've given them the match and shown them the fuse. They no longer need to spread random agitation to locate a target, because you've given them a roadmap to your own instigator button.

The result? They stop acting like a typical troll, and focus solely on you. Why should they keep trolling random users when they can get all they need from you? Not only that, but your hostile reaction muddies the waters for potential mediators, because the troll can always claim "he attacked me first", and a provide a neat and tidy diff to prove their case. In essence, they can now use your own words to attack you, and no longer need to disrupt others.

In other words, trolls start acting like good faith users.

[edit] Thought experiment

So given these premises, let's try a thought experiment. Assume a new user is raising a ruckus on some talk page. There are two possibilities for this user:

  1. He is acting in good faith - in other words, his disruption is just misplaced passion by a newbie who doesn't know what he's doing.
  2. He is acting in bad faith - in other words, he's a troll.

The key point to remember is, when we first encounter new users, we don't know what their true motives are. Our challenge is to discover their true intent, but how?

If we approach the situation with hostility and incivility, we immediatly make this task more difficult. If the user is acting in good faith, we've agitated him to trollish behavior. If the user is a troll, we've shown them how to push our buttons so they no longer need to escalate their trollish behavior.

In other words, incivility not only creates needless drama which impacts the business of writing an encyclopedia, it also makes it nearly impossible to distinguish good faith users from trolls.

Now consider the unwaveringly civil but firm approach. Good faith user will react well to such treatment, and might learn something in the process. Some might even become long-term productive editors; others certainly will decide that they don't like the way Wikipedia really works and leave quietly. No drama.

And when you take the same civil approach with a troll, they have no choice but to escalate their trolling until they get under your skin. Eventually, their trolling will become blatant, and because they can hold nothing over your head, it is an easy decision to ban them from the project. So, a little bit of drama followed by a quick ban, and the troll is history.

So a civil approach serves to disambiguate the troll from the good faith user. It pushes the good faith user to becoming a better editor, and pushes the troll to more disruption and an eventual ban.

In other words, unconditional civility is essential for the health and growth of the project, and without it all we get are fewer productive users, more trolls, and more drama.

[edit] A final note on enforcement

Civility does not preclude enforcement. Dispassionate blocking of troublesome users is not uncivil, and indeed, a disruptive user who does not respond to civil attempts to calm him down should be blocked. Usenet is an example of what happens without enforcement.

In the immortal words of Theodore Roosevelt, "Speak softly but carry a big stick."