User talk:Heimstern/Ignoring incivility

The idea of ignoring incivility in order to deny the person attention they are seeking would be great if not for the fact the it fails to protect the victims of the incivility. While ignoring incivility against oneself may be noble, ignoring it against another user is harmful to the project. We should defend each other against abuse. Chillum 18:23, 6 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for reading. I do agree that we shouldn't completely ignore incivility targeted at others (dependent on the situation, of course), but I disagree with the idea of using blocks against it. That does nothing but stir up drama except in the clearest-cut cases of personal attacks. I believe in modelling civility in our own actions and instructing those who go against it, but not in blocks.

I'm afraid I can't take the notion of "victims" of incivility all that seriously, anyway, since I rarely see a case with a genuine victim. Those on the receiving end of incivility are most frequently there because of their own incivility, their abuse of our content policies or severe lapses in judgment. This is not meant to excuse incivility, but it causes me to be unwilling to buy into victim-related arguments. Let me explain this a bit better: there are in fact many cases where those doing good things for the encyclopedia are, in fact, on the receiving end of incivility, but in these cases, the offenders are typically guilty of more serious things than the ambiguous charge of incivility: things like trolling and POV-pushing. Those are the true offences against Wikipedia, not mere incivility, and it's for those reasons that users should be blocked. Heimstern Läufer (talk) 19:06, 6 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

While I will concede that sometime the victim is "asking for it", I don't accept that this is the norm. In fact I would say that in the majority of cases incivility are not provoked, and that blaming the victim is far too common. I also don't think that provocation excuses incivility in any way, most people learn that "he made me do it" is not much of an excuse by the time they are a teenager. I guess we are in agreement that it depends on the circumstance. Chillum 22:02, 6 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

To be completely clear, I don't think we should always ignore incivility, but I do think we should do so much more often than we do now, indeed, that it should be something of a modus operandi where there's any doubt. Heimstern Läufer (talk) 23:26, 6 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A not negligible proportion of the editor population are guilty of overreacting to incivility, and so this essay would probably be good advice for them. However, I would disagree with this essay as a proposed general approach to incivility: in many cases, not stamping out incivility causes people who are acting as dicks to become even larger, more disruptive dicks. And then, in place of a problem, we have a larger problem. AGK 19:55, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Stumbled across this again. Read carefully, and noticed: "Nonetheless, blocks based purely on civility issues where the user has any valuable contributions at all typically cause more problems than they solve" (emphasis added). If and only if the block is the kind of one handed out by those on "civility patrol", then it's usually not going to be terribly helpful. Good essay. AGK 23:07, 28 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, AGK. Thanks for reading! I only just saw both this and your older comment, so now I'll reply. This essay probably overstates its point a tad, particularly in the title, which might imply that we should always ignore incivility. That's not what the essay really means, but I feel that overstating the point is the only way to get it across in our block-happy admin community by making people fundamentally rethink what they assume about how Wikipedia needs to work. Blocks for personal attacks are sometimes needed, especially if the user does it repeatedly (even a personal attack block based on a single instance seems whack-a-mole to me). So anyway, those are basically my thoughts. Thanks for reading, again. Heimstern Läufer (talk) 01:42, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Whilst ignoring it is ideal and the victim can sometimes brings it on themselves, I do not think it is that black and white. Sometimes the perpetrator simply has issues. Sometimes it is simply someone on a power trip who thinks their opinion overrides all else, including the cited facts presented by others and the consensus that was arrived at. I have recently experienced this, along with an abusive and dismissive tone towards the content of my cited edits....after ~7 days of discussing the edits in detail with other users. It was from an administrator (one that has a history of incivility, but also impunity). There are a lot of messages to take away from that. Sincerely, Romaioi (talk) 04:11, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]