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