Wikiquote talk:Civility

Draft policy
This document was brought by Essjay and labelled as "official policy" but left uncopyedited widely. I replaced "Official policy" tag with "Policydraft", for invite the community to review it. I tried to clean it up to adopt it to our project, but there could be still something unmodified. I'll appreciate your cooperation.

One thing I found difficulties to fix was the last part about "meditation". It is useful information how a third party can be invited to meditate, the description based on the Wikipedia system (official mediation system) and not completely fit to our community. I tried to clean it up too, trying to keep the core idea and how-to, but it would need more clean-up.

In my humble opinion, (in)civility is not a major issue among us for now, we could salt it for a while ...--Aphaia 15:09, 3 May 2007 (UTC)


 * The mediation part looks great as it is, you did a good job in adapting it! :) On your suggestion about salting, I don't mind either way, but we certainly have gotten more examples of incivility and vandalism since you last wrote that (as I know you have noticed).  I would support it either way (I think the proposed policy looks great right now).  Cbrown1023    talk   02:14, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I've done some tidying, though no change of substance. It's more or less there, I feel.--Cato 22:25, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Me feel so too, thanks! --Aphaia 04:05, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Striking / removing comments
I'm concerned about the "Removing uncivil comments" suggestion which says "Strike offensive words or replace them with milder ones on talk pages (this is often seen as controversial, as is refactoring other people's words)." There are similar suggestions found under "Rephrasing disputants' comments" and "Rephrasing flames," etc. As desirable as it may seem to follow these suggestions, I'm averse to the notion that anyone's talk page remarks should be reworded by another editor. Aside from the principle involved, it would also, I suspect, have the opposite result to what was intended. If someone writes an inflammatory message, wouldn't he end up feeling even more inflamed to discover that someone has tampered with what he wrote? - InvisibleSun 20:22, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Point taken. However I think too much aggressive / offensive comment could be removed and it helps community building. In my opinion there are some very offensive wordings even a criticism accompanied cannot redeem. I admit the last thing you pointed out would happen, but I don't think we should forbid such rewording without reservation. Sadly, there are extremely uncivil comments which are defamatory a/o privacy infringement and deserve deletion. We could add such rewriting and removal is consider to be the last resort, however.  --Aphaia 20:36, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Todo

 * Goings-on
 * Localization (WP -> WQ, fix links)


 * Todo
 * Fill the red links (Mailing list etc) or just remove
 * Refining meditation process mentioned part which has exists here yet

Some revisions and review
In reviewing the current draft, I've found a number of problems, most (if not all) coming from the original w:WP:CIVIL policy. (What I've noticed of the WQ updates look pretty good to me by comparison, so far. Thanks to Aphaia and Cato for working on it.) Because there are many different elements with varying levels of seriousness, I've split up my revisions into several parts.


 * My first edit was nothing but a set of spacing fixes to make it easier to edit. Since our history differencing mechanism badly fails to highlight diffs correctly when doing this, I felt it important to tackle this separately. You have my word that I made no content changes, but you're welcome to do the more challenging content analysis just to be sure.


 * The second was to reduce a lot of style problems. The folks who have edited WP:CIVIL don't seem to be concerned about consistent use of punctuation, case, style, or even sentences vs. fragments. It may seem minor, but it can be a real distraction from someone trying to learn an important policy.


 * The third and fourth edits were some wording tweaks I missed, and adding w:WP:CIVIL to external links.

The next step involves significant content. I see several problems of varying difficulty:


 * "Pagemove trolling". I haven't found a definition for this in Wikimedia so far, and newbies will need one. (Any we would insert here would have to be concise to avoid distracting from the point being made.) Futhermore, moving a user's user pages without their permission is almost always an uncivil thing to do, anyway. Can we address this more broadly? Are there situations where someone might move another's user page without permission that aren't considered rude?


 * Under "When and why does it happen?", I don't quite understand the paragraph discussing editor reputation. It seems to imply that some editors are more important than others, like a warning not to cross them. I think it's actually trying to say something about the increasing mutual anonymity in large communities. I'd like to rephrase it somehow.


 * The "General suggestions" section is lengthy and somewhat disorganized. It's so bad that no one here or on WP (which has the same problem even now) seems to have noticed the redundant "&bot=1" suggestion.


 * I'm very concerned about the repeated mention of "refactoring" users' comments. It seems to say that this should be used to reduce tensions, but it doesn't specifically acknowledge the massive potential for worsening problems by doing this. There's also the confusion caused when incendiary words that spawn new discussions are removed, making those subsequent discussions impossible to understand. I think we need to review this approach carefully and consider the consequences and alternatives.

Those are my thoughts for now. Any comments or suggestions? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 20:45, 22 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Thank you for cleaning it up. I don't find any major change in the spirit. Admittedly "remove/rewrite" clause can be controversial, I think the repeated mentions come from the fact it is indeed controversial, while my experiment says sometimes we need this way definitely. Raged people call others, Nazi, dog, whore, bitch or whatever. I don't think it controversial that we remove such nasty wording, but at the same time I would like not to stress this way, because I think it should be the last resort to deal with such situations. We need to word this part with full of our carefulness and discretion. --Aphaia 11:19, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Update and a list of banned terms.
I have been accused of having the reading comprehension of a five year old by another editor prone to calling for bans in edit summaries and was banned for a short time for suggesting said editor had failing eyesight, I'm confused why one was acceptable behavior and the other was not, as both seem uncivil. Last I checked this wasn't a comedy wiki, and making a medical diagnosis like a reading disability isn't allowed, would telling another user to go back to kindergarten and learn to read have been allowed, or would that have been going too far? What about the more nationally/ethnically charged variant, go back to ESL to learn to read and write proper English? I have no urge to trash talk and make others feel bad for their level of language fluency, given I'm illiterate in the vast majority of languages on earth, but I'm fearful others will continue to do so and that without clear boundaries their imagination will be the only limit imposed. I'm confused what is actually allowed here, as there is no list of what is unacceptable language, unlike the bad image list. Are there no bad words on wikiquote, only bad images? CensoredScribe (talk) 20:13, 12 May 2018 (UTC)