User:Legoktm/CERFC

General questions

These questions are intended to try to determine what you may consider the "baseline" between what should be considered "valid collegiate discourse" and what should be considered "violation of the civility policy" (incivility). Please be as specific as you can in your responses.

Written versus spoken communication

When one is physically present when speaking with another person, body language, intonation, setting, and other physical factors, can suggest the intent of words in a way that words written on a page cannot.

Collegiality

Example: if a person is having a casual conversation with friends over a table covered with beer glasses and one of them wishes to contest a point another has made they might prefect their remarks with "listen up asshole and I'll explain it to you." If they are smiling and raising a glass towards the person this remark is pointed, it can help the words to be taken in the lighthearted manner in which it was intended.

Should such interaction as noted in the example above be considered incivility in the collegiate, collaborative environment of Wikipedia? Should the talk page location matter (such as whether the discussion is on a user talk page, an article talk page, or Wikipedia project-space talk page)?

Reply: Location and context do matter. If it's on a user talk page with a friend, and no offense is taken, there was nothing wrong with it. But if it was on an article talk page with a new user, saying something like that is WP:BITE-y.

Profanity

Should all profanity (such as the use of "bad words", "four letter words", "the Seven dirty words", etc.), be considered incivility?

Reply: No. There are legitimate uses of profanity, and not all profanity is uncivil.

All caps/wiki markup

There is an established convention when using technology to communicate through a typed format that WRITING IN ALL CAPS is considered "yelling" and is generally not acceptable. Individuals also sometimes use italics bolding green or other colored text or even enlarged text or other formatting code to attempt to indicate intonation, or to otherwise emphasize their comments.

Should there be limits as to when this type of formatting should be used in a discussion? Is there any type of formatting which should never be acceptable in a discussion?

Reply: USING ALL CAPS IS JUST OBNOXIOUS AND ANNOYING. IT'S PROBABLY NOT UNCIVIL THOUGH. SAME WITH <big> TAGS. Using italics and bolding can be useful when trying to give emphasis, though bolding an entire statement is also obnoxious. IMO {{xt}} and friends should only be used to quote others, or provide example text, not format what you were saying to make it stand out more.
I think putting any type of limit on what can be used and what can't is a bit CREEP-y and a waste of time.

Enforcement and sanctions

Responsibility for enforcement

Who is responsible for maintaining a civil environment for collegiate discussion? Should it be it the responsibility of administrators, the arbitration committee, the broader Wikipedia community, or some combination of these?

Reply: Ideally each user is responsible for their own civility. In reality, if there's a major problem with a certain user's incivility it should be taken to WP:AN/I and dealt with. Except when something gets taken to AN/I it normally just drums up old disputes and what not. I'm not really sure I have an answer to this.

Appropriate sanctions

What sanctions, if any, do you think are appropriate for incivility? Should blocking be considered an appropriate response to incivility? Should topic banning or interaction banning be considered an appropriate response?

Reply: I like the idea of topic banning better than blocking. If they can work in other areas without causing disruption, that's a net benefit to the project.

Context

Should the context of the situation be taken into account when considering whether to apply sanctions to the individual due to incivility?

Reply: Always. A blanket rule in this case does not work properly.

Severity

How severe should a single incident of incivility need to be to merit some sort of sanction?

Reply: Context is important. There is a difference in saying "go the fuck away" and "get the fuck of my talk page you motherfucking asshole". Though I'm not sure how severe something should be before sanctions should kick in.

Instances of incivility

Should multiple instances of incivility in the same discussion be considered one offense or several? If a user is civil most of the time, but occasionally has instances of incivility, should these incidents be excused? If so, how often should such incivility be excused?

Reply: I don't think it really matters if someone is being repeatedly incivil in a discussion, realistically only once should matter. That being said, to handle sanctions (w/e you call them), it would probably be easier to lump them into one issue. At the second question, it depends on how severe it is. I mean if you give someone a [serious] death threat, thats an immediate block, no matter how significant their contributions are.

Weighing incivility and contributions

Should the quality and/or number of contributions an individual makes outside of discussions have any bearing on whether an individual should be sanctioned due to incivility? Should the incidents of incivility be taken on their own as a separate concern?

Reply: In the end we are here to build an encyclopedia, so all we should value is content contributions, except realistically, we need to work with one another, and if someone can't get along, it doesn't work. So I suppose it really depends. There will eventually come a point when the community loses it's patience, and deals with it.

Outcry

In the past, when an individual has been blocked from editing due to "violating the civility policy" (incivility), there has, at times, been an outcry from others concerning the block, and sometimes the block has been overturned subsequent to that outcry.

In an effort to reduce incidences of such an outcry ("drama"), should incivility be deprecated as an appropriate reason for blocking an individual? Should admins instead be required to have a more specific reason (such as personal attacks, harassment of another user, etc.), when blocking a user for incivility?

Reply: Personally I'm not too fond of civility blocks, but I would say yes, a more specific should be given. Whether it should be a hard-fast requirement is a bit WP:CREEP-y to me.

AN/I prerequisite

Should a demonstrable consensus formed through discussion at WP:AN/I (or other appropriate forum) be required as a prerequisite to blocking an individual due to incivility? If so, should there be a minimum time frame for such discussions to remain open before the individual may be blocked?

Reply: Again, CREEP-y. I would recommend something like that, but no requirement. A minimum time frame should be long enough for involved parties (and probably some un-involved ones) to comment.

RFC prerequisite

A request for comment (RFC) gives the community the opportunity to discuss a behavioural concern (such as incivility) directly with the individual, with the intended goal of attempting to find a voluntary solution.

Should an RFC be required as a prerequisite for blocking a user of incivility? Should it be suggested and/or encouraged?

Reply: Suggested and encouraged yes. Requirement, no. That being said, there should be a pretty good reason to block someone without one.

Personal Attacks

Requests for adminship

Wikipedia:Requests for adminship (RFA) is a place where an editor requests the additional tools and responsibilities of adminship. In the discussion concerning the specific request, each commenting editor is to convey whether (and why) they would (or would not) trust the requester with those tools and responsibilities. Due to this, typically the requester's actions, behaviour, and contributions are noted, evaluated, and sometimes discussed.

Due to the nature of RFA (a question of trusting an individual), should it be considered necessary for the standards concerning personal attacks be somewhat relaxed at RFA? What, if any, should be the limits to this? How personal is "too personal" at an RFA? What types of criticisms cross the line between being considered merely an evaluation of a candidate and being considered an unwarranted attack? Should comments considered to cross that line be left alone, stricken, moved to the talk page, or simply removed altogether?

Reply: No, it shouldn't be relaxed. It's not wrong to question a person's judgement or say you don't trust them. I think there are certain times when users have a tendency to go overboard in trying to either oppose or support a candidate. Ideally if an uninvolved user/admin/etc. tells you to tone it down, it probably means you are. I think common sense can be applied here.

Attacking an idea

The Wikipedia community has a long tradition of not tolerating personal attacks. However, it may be difficult to differentiate whether an individual is commenting on a user's ideas or is commenting on the user themselves. The same is true concerning whether an individual may understand a particular idea.

How should this be determined? Should any of the following be considered a personal attack? Should any of these comments be considered the kind of incivility that we should not tolerate on Wikipedia?

"That idea is stupid" <-- Unnecessarily flaming

"That is idiotic" <-- Unnecessarily flaming

"That is yet another one of <username of proposer>'s stupid ideas and should be ignored" <-- PA

"You don't understand/misunderstand" <-- Totally fine, provided there was more to that comment

"You aren't listening" <-- Ok if someone is being like WP:IDONTHEARTHAT

"You don't care about the idea" <-- Ehhhh. Context would depend

Reply: See above

Rate examples

In this section example comments will be presented. You are asked to evaluate each comment on the following scale:

1 = Always acceptable
2 = Usually acceptable
3 = Acceptability entirely dependent on the context of specific situation
4 = Usually not acceptable
5 = Never acceptable

Proposals or content discussions

I assume you realize how foolish this idea sounds to the rest of us

rating: 3 <-- I would only say this is acceptable at the end of a long discussion

Typical of the foolishness I have come to expect from this user

rating: 5 <-- This comment doesn't add anything to the conversation

After looking over your recent edits it is clear that you are incompetent.

rating: 3 if it were accompanied with a longer comment. Otherwise 5.

Anyone with a username like that is obviously here for the wrong reasons

rating: 5 <-- Take it to UAA/ANI or don't say it.

You seem to have a conflict of interest in that you appear to be interested in a nationalist point of view.

rating: 2 <-- Not how I would have phrased it, but provided with diffs, evidence seems fine.

It is obvious that your purpose here is to promote your nationalist point of view.

rating: 3 <-- Ehh...should only really be said at/after an ANI discussion

You are clearly here to support your nationalist point of view, Wikipedia would be better off without you.

rating: 4 <-- Moving into the PA zone.

This is the stupidest proposal I have seen in a very long time.