User:Robert McClenon/Problematic Editors

Easily Provoked Editors

Two of the cases about to be taken up by the Arbitration Committee involve a particular type of problematic editors who polarize and divide the community, and the community is unable to deal with them effectively. These editors typically have lengthy block logs, often for incivility, as well as for other disruption, which show that their blocks were controversial. These editors are often typically provoked into profanity by other editors, some of whom have mastered the ignoble art of taunting them. At the same time, these editors are often good content creators and have admirers as well as detractors. (If they did not have supporters, the community would have banned or indeffed them.) Because they make a mixed contribution, both positive and negative, to the Wikipedia environment, and because the controversy surrounding them is not entirely of their making, but also of the making of their opponents, they pose a challenge for the Arbitration Committee that the Arbitration Committee must address boldly. Dealing with difficult cases, such as those of polarizing editors, is why the Arbitration Committee was chartered and elected. The Arbitration Committee has a few other responsibilities also, such as revoking administrator privileges for breach of trust, and hearing appeals, but the primary function of the Arbitration Committee is to deal with cases that the community has not succeeded in addressing. It is not enough to sanction editors who respond to provocation without sanctioning the editors who engage in the provocation also.

The principle that blocks are meant to be preventive and not punitive complicates deliberative quasi-judicial action against editors who regularly provoke other editors, but it need not prevent appropriate action against such editors. Editors who have a history of taunting or annoying other editors can be the subject of an ArbCom (or ANI) finding, and can be given the equivalent of the yellow card in association football, a warning that any future misconduct may result in a more draconian penalty than would otherwise be the case, such as a one-month block for incivility. (The yellow card in association football is a warning that future misconduct will result in being sent off. I am not proposing that an editor be banned for a second infraction, but I am also not proposing that warnings be issued to editors for a single episode of incivility.) At present, in the absence of any sort of warning, some editors have learned that they can get away with taunting or harassing an irascible editor, because by the time the details are considered, the provocation is in the past. The community, reasonably, does not want to drag itself through the past. However, if the past is not examined and addressed, it will make itself the present over and over.

In both of these cases, I urge the ArbCom not only to impose sanctions on the subject editors, but to identify, warn, and if necessary block editors who taunt or provoke them.

Ultimately, in cases involving habitually uncivil editors, the ArbCom should determine which of three classes the subject editor belongs to. The first is editors who are net positives to the encyclopedia project in spite of their lapses into incivility. The ArbCom should deal with these editors by warning them, and by warning and sometimes blocking the editors who provoke them. The second is editors who, at present, do more harm than good, but only in particular areas. The ArbCom should consider topic-bans for such editors to keep them out of the areas in which they have demonstrated that they are troublesome. The third, unfortunately, is editors who are net negatives to the project, and whose damage is not localized to one area. In such cases, the ArbCom should consider whether extended blocks (three to six months) may allow these editors to reconsider their behavior, or whether it is necessary to give up on them with site-bans.