This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Assume Good Faith - as far as is reasonable

WP:AGF says two important things: that we should assume that people who work on the project are trying to help it, not hurt it - until we see strong evidence to the contrary - and that when offering criticism, we should discuss editors' actions, not accuse them of harmful motives.

It is unnecessary, according to that page, to assign "evil" motivations to any editor. Indeed, an editor may be reverted, banned, or blocked, based solely on what they did without any consideration of why they did so.

Only a few examples are given of actions that provide clear evidence of bad faith. These are lying, disrupting wikipedia to make a point, and gaming the rules.

Such a useful tool as this policy should, on the face of it, be a perfect guiding principle for wikipedia editors who find themselves disputing any editor's conduct. Why, then, has it (in conjunction with ignore all rules) become the "defence of choice" for trolls and disruptive editors? And why are so many editors so eager to drop the assumption of good faith at the first significant sign of what might be bad faith editing? In short, why is it cited so often by both sides in long-running, complex and unpleasant content and conduct disputes?

I submit that it's because not enough editors have read and understood the second paragraph above. (Most read the "in a nutshell" summary and stop there. It's quite understandable, really, since "assume good faith" is quite a simple concept on the face of it.) Also, it is sadly much easier to make an edit comment or Talk page post labelling a problematic editor as being a troll, or a disruptive or tendentious editor, than it is to describe them as a good faith editor who either made a simple mistake or who acted out of ignorance. There are tools out there that make labelling a user's contribution as "good faith edits" or "vandalism" as simple as a mouse-click. Ironically, that user may be unwilling to assume that such a labelling error was made in good faith.

The principle isn't at fault. It's the tendency of editors to want to judge editor motives, and focus discussion on those, rather than on editor actions and their consequences. This leads all too quickly to exchanged accusations of bad faith and of violations of personal attack and civility policies.

The solution is to step back and realise that it doesn't matter why they did it. Consider the degree of overlap of WP:AGF and WP:NPA, and indeed WP:IAR: judge not the editor, but their actions.