Wikipedia talk:Remove personal attacks/Archive

message: Should we rewrite this page as a guideline or file it away? If it's rewritten as a guideline and the survey still applies it would be good to leave it in to see what people said about it. Zocky 12:50, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

message: All persons, including the one being attacked:
# —Eloquence 07:25, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
# Angela 07:34, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
# Tim Starling 09:24, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
# Martin 11:11, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Who can refactor/remove?

message: Whenever you see a personal attack:
# —Eloquence 07:25, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
# Angela 07:34, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
# Dandrake 15:53, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
# SimonP 00:43, Oct 27, 2003 (UTC)
# Cimon Avaro on a pogostick
# Arno 07:30, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)
replies: text:  anthony
#
Preserve flamewars indefinitely. Archive them when you run out of talk page space:
# This is important evidence when a user is up for being banned. This is important for all of us to read to understand that user in question. Do not censor someone's ugliness. Kingturtle 07:49, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: When to refactor/remove?

message: (in terms of the page itself - see What to do with the excised language? for suggestions on what to do with removed text)
Just remove them:
# —Eloquence 07:25, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
# Angela 07:34, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
# Tim Starling 09:24, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
# Fantasy 10:00, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)
replies: text:  anthony
# ugen64 01:55, Mar 26, 2004 (UTC)
# Rossami (talk) 17:31, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: How to deal with pure personal attacks?

message: Refactor [using square brackets]:
# —Eloquence 07:30, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
# Angela 07:34, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
# Fantasy 10:00, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: How to deal with part personal attacks, part factual remarks?

message: Just article talk pages:
# Martin 11:43, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Which pages do we care about?

message: Just remove it:
# Martin 18:36, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  What to do with the excised language? 

message: Orthogonal wrote: (It is suggested by whom? Based on what consensus? Is this like the Nixon White House where "mistakes were made" in the passive voice?)
:*By whom? It is not an encyclopedia article. It doesn't really matter "by whom" the term semi-policy was introduced. Anyway,  the answer should be normally sought at the page in question, i.e., at 'Wikipedia:Semi-policy'. 
:* Consensus: to make assugestion, no consensus required. 
:* Nixon: not applicable. Wikipedia keeps track of the history of edits and archives talk pages, in part, to have answer to your question. Mikkalai 16:02, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-policy 

message: The idea of removing personal attacks is abused by some people. Clearly it is not pleasant to be accused of, say, being biased - but if this is relevant to the discussion at hand, such allegations should never simply be removed. Instead, one should calmly explain why the excusion is ungrounded. As an extreme measure, cross out the attack, but do not delete it if it is relevant to the discussion.  Radiant_* 13:38, Apr 7, 2005 (UTC)
:Removing personal attacks is not Wikipedia policy, is not "semi-policy", and should not become either. The vote above shows that there is strong opposition to the censoring, silencing, defacing, or removing (however you choose to put it) of other people's signed comments.
:The last time this came up was on Wikipedia talk:Civility. The problems with this proposal that I described there still stand:
:# Defacing other people's comments is likely to escalate rather than defuse a tense or hostile situation. A person whose comments are defaced is likely to perceive the act as a further personal attack. This perception is entirely understandable and predictable. Therefore, the defacement is an uncivil act and a breach of more general principles of Wikipedia policy.
:# Removing part of a comment gives the appearance that a person wrote something other than what they did. Talk comments are not Wikipedia articles; they are here to record the views and coordinate the plans of Wikipedia contributors. They are also signed. To alter a signed document so that it appears to say something different from what it said when the author signed it ... is called forgery. Even where it is not a breach of the law, it is a breach of trust with the reader and of the moral rights of the author. Even a person who has written something nasty has the right to not be falsely quoted.
:# Removing, or particularly striking out, another person's words has the appearance and connotation of censorship or suppression of views, even when it is not technically an act of censorship. We do not want editors to get in the habit of deciding which of other people's opinions should be left to be read, and which should be stricken from the record.
:# Removing comments confuses the record, hiding problems from new contributors to the discussion. On an uncensored talk page, it is tolerably obvious to the casual observer when an editor is behaving uncivilly. (Often, it isn't just one editor who's doing so.) Since one of our responses to conflict on Wikipedia should always be to ask for help -- to solicit others' advice via WP:RFC or other means -- we need to be sure that these others can get to know what's going on. If there is a problem contributor, let that person make their problem status blatantly obvious so that others do not waste time trying to reason with the unreasonable.
:# Defacing or removing comments is simply unnecessary to the task of getting discussion back on track and improving the article. A talk page is a microcosm "marketplace of ideas" for the purpose of improving the corresponding article. And the cure for bad, wrong, and rude speech is not to waste time blotting it out, but to go do some research and come back with good, right, and polite speech -- not necessarly in direct response to the bad speech, but in contribution to the discussion.
:As before, none of this is about vandalism. It is about removing the words of a contributor because one judges those words to be uncivil or to constitute a "personal attack". However, it is also disturbing when people conflate the two issues -- for instance, calling someone's comments "tantamount to vandalism" or the like. Because Wikipedia policy is to remove vandalism, this is equivalent to calling for those comments to be stricken, and so is likewise an uncivil response as described above. --FOo 14:53, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Abuse 

message: Perhaps a distinction needs to be drawn between pure or de minimis personal attacks, accusations of wrongdoing, and uncivilly-phrased comments.
A pure personal attack would be if someone posted, for instance, "Fuck you" or "You are a jerk" or "Everyone who edits this article is obviously Nazi scum". There's nothing else in the edit, just the insult. I don't object strongly to the deletion of comments like this -- there really isn't a view being expressed here, just an attack.
(Note that "You are a jerk" is a pure personal attack, but "You jerk! Every one of the references you just cited is to your own Web site" is not a pure personal attack -- it is an uncivilly-phrased comment. This sort of comment should not be deleted or edited at all.)
Accusations such as "User:Padberson is a sock puppet of banned User:Badperson" are not personal attacks, but allegations of policy violation. Sometimes such allegations are made out of spite -- however, if they are true then they are still actionable. (If Joe and Bob are long-time enemies and Joe assaults Bob, the fact that Bob presses charges in part out of spite doesn't militate against the seriousness of the charges.) There is no sense in deleting accusations, and doing so leads directly to arguments about abuse of process.
Uncivilly-phrased comments are another matter. If someone makes a meaningful comment adjoined to an insult (such as "You jerk! Prof. Elbow Fitzsnuggly disproved your lies in 1983 in Why Everyone Else is Wrong, . But you're so stupid you never read it") then it may be tempting to try to edit out the insulting parts and leave the citation. However, we should not do this. Doing so would be changing someone else's signed words.
It is true that making uncivil comments is a violation of Wikipedia policy. However, a violation of policy does not justify simply any sort of response we may think up. Altering the signed words of another editor is itself an uncivil, provocative, and unethical response, and is not justified simply because the other guy broke the rules first.
Moreover, we need to be really careful of the slippery slope: if editing out the insulting part of signed comments becomes acceptable, then people will push the envelope towards taking more liberties with other people's signed words. This is not a desirable result. --FOo 16:28, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I take "remove personal attacks" to mean "leave in substantive comments." Perhaps that should be emphasized.  In the example you give I'd change it to "Prof. Elbow Fitzsnuggly disproved your assertion in 1983 in Why Everyone Else is Wrong, ."  The implication that someone is lying is removed without removing the refutation. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 16:42, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  And I would change the example to "Prof. Elbow Fitzsnuggly disproved your lies in 1983 in Why Everyone Else is Wrong, . (Personal attack removed)" which leaves a clear flag in the comment so that anyone interested can review the redaction by looking at the edit history.  Rossami (talk) 20:36, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  That is an improvement, since at least it makes clear that the words have been altered by someone not the original author. I am still, however, concerned about the forgery issue: if Joe writes some words and signs them, and Bob comes along and alters those words, but leaves Joe's signature, then a forgery has been committed -- words Bob wrote are left signed in Joe's name. --FOo 22:22, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Personal attacks, accusations, and uncivil comments 

message: I suggest that there is still insufficient evidence to suggest that this "semi-policy" represents acceptable behavior in the Wikipedia community. There certainly was not consensus in favor of it the last time it was put to a vote. In the absence of demonstrated consensus, and in the presence of substantial objections, this should not be promulgated as any sort of Wikipedia policy or "semi-policy".
=== Non-answers to concerns ===
I do not think the "Answers to concerns" section of the page treats the issue honestly. It represents the personal views of a few people who want altering other people's signed words to be acceptable. It fails to take the "concerns" it "answers" as serious practical or ethical objections to the practice. It is moreover not seemly for a text which purports to be policy to be so much on the defensive. 
There has not yet been any response to my foremost ethical objection to the practice: that altering other people's signed text constitutes forgery and misrepresentation of that person's words.
There has also not been much serious response to my foremost practical objection to the practice: that when the editing gets hot, altering or deleting someone else's text will make the interpersonal situation worse, not better. The answer posed under "Answers to concerns" here seems to rebut this objection, but does not:
:Isn't editing a comment a kind of attack?
:Only when that action is perceived as unilateral and without basis in policy. Often the ones removing attacks will be the ones being attacked. That is acceptable. However, when the other user acts surprised about this, they need to be pointed to this page, so that they understand that removing personal attacks is a widely accepted procedure on Wikipedia.
This response has three chief problems. First, it really doesn't answer the question it poses. Whether a particular behavior is a kind of attack isn't the same issue as whether there's a policy page to cite in defense of that behavior. Policy cannot define whether people will feel attacked -- and it is people's feelings that are at the core of why we have to deal with personal attacks in the first place. If the response to a personal attack is to do something that can be predicted to provoke original attacker further, that response is an unacceptable one.
Second, it treats a serious problem as if it were a beneficial feature: "Often the ones removing attacks will be the ones being attacked."  This is bad!  When the editing gets hot, editors should not be looking to find greater fault with one another, as by accusing the other of making personal attacks. They need to be moving towards agreement, or bringing in impartial (or less-partial) editors (as on WP:RFC) to contribute to the decision of what to do on an article. Telling people in an already-heated situation to handle it themselves, and giving them greater ammunition such as deleting each other's comments, will provoke worse situations.
Third, it presumes that "removing personal attacks is a widely accepted procedure" [sic] -- which, of course, has simply never been demonstrated. When the practice has been put to a vote, it has failed to achieve consensus or wide acceptance. It's true that voting is not a perfect way to detect or demonstrate consensus, but it is certainly better than simply declaring that a consensus exists without actually going to the bother of asking the populace who are claimed to have arrived at that consensus.
=== Let's have another vote ===
People who are in favor of altering other people's words are quick to claim that this practice is widely-accepted. I suggest that this may easily be a misperception or cognitive bias. Most people do want to feel that their own actions are acceptable to the community. (It's really not that different from everyone wanting to think their own children are "above average". Cognitive bias isn't anyone's fault, but it happens.)
Let's have another vote to find out where the community really is. OK? --FOo 21:30, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  It's premature to call this any kind of "policy" 

message: People who are in favor of altering other people's words are quick to claim that this practice is widely-accepted. I suggest that this may easily be a misperception or cognitive bias. Most people do want to feel that their own actions are acceptable to the community. (It's really not that different from everyone wanting to think their own children are "above average". Cognitive bias isn't anyone's fault, but it happens.)
Let's have another vote to find out where the community really is. OK? --FOo 21:30, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Let's have another vote