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 Trimming sounds fine, but where a dispute comes up, I would recommend slowing things down.  Focus on one or two specific quotes, and if someone reverts, instead of immediately reverting back, try to come up with a compromise version.  Ditto with the other person reverting, instead of immediately pushing the article back to your own preferred version, try to come up with a compromise.  With each person changing each other's work, rather than reverting, it will probably be much easier to try and come up with a consensus version. Also, use clear, calm, and neutral edit summaries, referring strictly to the article, and not the editors.
 In terms of refactoring, what I was referring to was cases where a particular editor was being referred to.  When a post is phrased such as ""You did this wrong"" or ""He is unwilling"" or ""He's just always stubborn"", then that's getting away from discussing the article content, and is veering off into discussing the editors.  Better is to try and phrase talkpage posts without referring to editors.  Good habits to develop (though they can take  time to get the hang of it), are to avoid the words ""you"" and ""your"". Also, avoid naming specific editors in a post, as that often has the immediate result of making someone defensive, and then they may miss everything else that's said. Instead, when it is necessary to refer to a specific thing that was done, diff the edit without mentioning the editor.  Like, ""I disagree with this edit (diff), as I feel it's a violation of (policy/guideline).  A better way to handle things would be (suggestion)""  I know it may sound a bit confusing to do this, but I have seen that using this kind of third-party discussion technique, can work wonders in de-escalating disputes.  It also tends to make whoever is using the technique, sound extraordinarily calm and thoughtful, even if off-wiki they may be hopping mad. ) It also has the added benefit of making things much easier for administrators to take action.  When an uninvolved admin comes to a page in dispute, and they see everyone yelling at each other, the admin normally assumes that everyone is a bit in the wrong.  The admin won't care ""who started it"", they'll just address things as they see them in that moment.  But if an admin comes to a page and sees five editors discussing things calmly, and one editor being uncivil, then it makes it much easier to figure out how to reduce the disruption.  Caveat: Just because one editor is being uncivil, doesn't necessarily mean that they're in the wrong.  But if the discussion has degraded to the point where all they're doing is name-calling, rather than actually discussing the article, then that's a problem that an administrator can easily address, by removing the non-constructive editors from the discussion. onka "