User:Friday/drama

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Wikidrama is harmful to the project. It wastes time, causes unneccessary and undesirable ill will, and even sometimes drives off contributors. I think everyone agrees on this mostly, but people have vastly different approaches.

Sometimes, an editor will make a mistake (or sometimes, just be seen as having made a mistake), and get the attention of an admin. This is all well and good. However, admins, like all people, have their own individual temperaments. Too often, I've seen drama escalation because someone has gathered the attention of the wrong admin for dealing with the problem.

Some admins are like drill sergeants- very loud, very aggressive, and always ready to slap down wrongdoers. Sometimes, this is necessary; nobody's suggesting we shouldn't block vandals. However, in many cases, an admin who's more like a kindly uncle than a drill sergeant will produce better results. If you find yourself frequently being the drill sergeant and never the kindly uncle, consider re-evaluating your approach. Or, make sure you're only being the drill sergeant when that's what it takes. If it's possible that the kindly uncle approach will work, step back and let somebody try that.

As a general rule, I'd rather see editors first encounter the kindly uncle type admin than the drill sergeant type. It may well result in less drama all around. Remember, even when you're doing the right thing, doing it with excessive drama often causes unneccessary complications.

If you find that drama follows you around, look closely at the situation and try to understand it. If your interactions with other editors are too frequently dramatic, realize that the common factor is you, so it's fairly likely that you're doing things to contribute to the drama. However, to be fair, it's certainly true that certain legitimate activities (deleting articles, for example) can help draw drama to you. Often what happens is that an editor comes out of the blue and makes a dramatic complaint on one's talk page. The receipt of such a complaint does not automatically indicate dramatic behavior on the part of the recipient. Of course, a drama-escalating response by the recipient would speak for itself.

On the other hand, going too far to avoid drama might not be good, either. At a certain point, this becomes equivalent to saying "Whoever is willing to complain very loudly will always get what they want". That's no good, either.