Wikipedia:WikiProject Sri Lanka Reconciliation/Experience

About this page

This text is taken from the Wikipedia Working group on ethnic and cultural edit wars, Reconciliation projects page. The Experience section was originally written as a statement by me (signed 01:18, 10 February 2008 (UTC)) with the headline Good experiences in reply to the following question:

In the Sri Lankan case, a reconciliation WikiProject has been successful. Some people report positive results from an Israel-Palestinian project. Balkanian cooperation projects have existed but never become very active. I'd like to hear more about people's experience with this. What are the preconditions for such initiatives to be successful? Are there users who are incompatible with them? Is it necessary, to make such a project work, to push certain hardline editors to the margin first? Or is that counterproductive? Is the balance of costs and benefits of such projects worthwhile?

I'd be happy if it became a community project for all our members, please feel free to edit it. — Sebastian 17:42, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Experience

Very good questions! I can say a bit about that, being involved both in WP:SLR and WP:IPCOLL.

Positive results: In the year since SLR's foundation, we resolved about 40 "issues" (approximately similar to mediation or arbitration cases, but all of them about content. Cases about editors are harder to count since many of them were handled by e-mail. About 30 of them were reported and handled as "incidents".) The success rate was a staggering 95% - compare that with MedCom's 20%([1][2])! In the same period, the number of reverts has dropped significantly, especially among established editors, where I would estimate that it dropped by a factor 10. In terms of article quality, the result is ambivalent. (On one hand, we are now at a stage where constructive editors say they feel they can edit articles without fear of edit wars, on the other hand, this isn't actually happening. This may be because there are only few constructive editors in this area, and they seem to be currently busy off-wiki.) In the two months of November and December, when we . IPCOLL has a nice list of positive results, which HG modestly called "Mild accomplishments".

Preconditions for the SL Reconciliation project: Some conditions were just fortuitous, while others may be reproducible

1. There was already an earlier attempt at a related project "Neutral coverage of the SL conflict". That project had failed because it was started by someone on one side of the conflict and had attracted only members of that side.
2. Editors knew each other. In hindsight, I feel that there was an atmosphere of "belonging" that in some way also included enemies.
3. Some of the established editors had been banned, which served as a warning to others.
4. There had been a MedCab mediation case, which had first failed. After a change of mediator, the new mediator (me) spent about 20-40 hours writing an inventory and overview of facts (now at Wikipedia:WikiProject Sri Lanka Reconciliation/LTTE digest, history at [3]) and built up private e-mail communication (using Nonviolent Communication techniques) with both parties before proposing a compromise on the talk page. This not only made acceptance of the compromise easier for both sides, but also built up trust, which showed when editors from both sides urged the mediator to help in conflicts after the first mediation was completed.
5. At this point, establishing the Reconciliation Project was a relatively straightforward institutionalization of an existing process. It would not have been possible without the trust from both sides put into the project ab initio.

Preconditions for the I-P Collaboration project: This is something that could be better written by HG, which is a reason why I would like him to be a member of this group.

Incompatible users: In the SL conflict, we have some users who never joined the project. Most of these users are on the Sinhalese side, which represents the majority in Sri Lanka. At one point, the Tamil members of SLR tried so hard to get the Sinhalese hardliners to join, or at least accept the project, that they bent over backwards. Paradoxically, the mediator (SH) found himself at the far edge of the spectrum, so there wasn't anything left to mediate. At that time, SH took a wikibreak. The other side became fiercer and in October, a number of administrators stepped in and got the main parties to sign the WP:SLR#Sri Lanka Dispute Resolution Agreement (SLRDA). A number of pro-Sinhalese hardliners did not sign the agreement and continued with well measured disruptive edits to try their limits. A couple of blocks were issued, and we set up a warning system, whereby WP:SLR kept track of which editors had been warned and might get blocked. Consequently, disruptions decreased dramatically.

In this context, I should mention one important success factor: Part of the agreement is the WP:SLR/bluebox, which limits editing of pages softly - without having to protect or semiprotect them. Some people feel the most important part of this restriction is that it directs all talk to a central, moderated talk page (WT:SLR; for the moderation, see the blue box on top).

Pushing hardline editors to the margin: I wouldn't advice to actively do that, because it is counterproductive: I feel most POV editors are here because they want to be heard. If we deny them that a priori, we only make them unnecessarily mad, and deny them a way to reconciliation. I think there are more natural ways for this selection, anyway. In WP:SLR, we had a policy that members could object to new members, which worked out surprisingly well. True to the goal and spirit of reconciliation, it never happened that a member objected for partisan reasons. All people who applied got eventually accepted; in some cases after agreeing to certain neutral conditions, such as writing edit summaries. Maybe because of this selection, some hardliners never applied. But this was their own choice, and since we had the SLRDA, we had a way to deal with these editors.

Is the balance of costs and benefits of such projects worthwhile? This is a very good question. Speaking for myself, the time I put into this was enormous. It was basically my full-time job for several months. If my only goal had been to improve some Wikipedia articles, then my time would have been much better spent with FA drives. But I was (some people might say: religiously) motivated by doing something for peace and reconciliation. I was impressed by Nonviolent Peaceforce, an organization that sends mediators into conflict areas, beginning in SL. I feel that I not only made a difference there, but also learned a lot about how to handle such conflicts, and how to motivate and guide people in the process. So, for me, it was worth it.