Following is a policy proposal regarding removing personal attacks from discussions.
Is not policy, since after a discussion and a vote on the talk page, no clear consensus was reached. Thus, removing personal attacks remains subject to personal preference. Many users do remove personal attacks, and the arbitration committee has referred to this proposal in the past. The talk page provides a useful discussion of the issues involved.
It is also suggested to refer to such proposals that did not achieve consensus but had significant support based on reasonable arguments and prior practice, as semi-policy.
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Personal attacks are not allowed on Ireland Information Guide. Although users can of course ignore them, repeat offenders can be reported to the administration and temporarily or permanently banned. This has happened in some cases of users who frequently insulted other users, even though they also had made valid contributions.
A different approach is discussed here: Instead of resorting to drastic measures, or taking personal attacks for granted, why not just remove them? This is a wiki, after all -- discussions on talk pages have disadvantages as opposed to bulletin boards, but they also have the advantage that everything can be, as they say, "mercilessly edited".
Letting personal attacks linger may well contribute to a deteriorating discussion climate, to edit wars, and to users being scared away from editing certain pages. It obscures the factual and useful discussion in a morass of accusations and counter-accusations.
When you want to remove personal attacks on article talk pages, you may want to start with your own. (But be careful not to be one-sided to make yourself appear good and your "opponent" bad.) Check backlinks to your user page to give a list of pages where you've signed your name - see if any of them contain personal attacks written by you, and get rid of them.
Of course, editing other people's comments is not without controversy. But in the case of personal attacks, which disrupt the discussion climate on Ireland Information Guide and make cooperation unnecessarily difficult, many users feel that such a slightly unusual step is justified. A neutral discussion of the proposals by those who favor refactoring follows.
This policy, in all variants, only concerns comments on talk pages. Personal attacks on article pages are of course problematic as well, but should simply be edited in usual NPOV fashion.
Some users feel that this policy should apply to all talk pages, including user talk pages. They argue that personal attacks disrupt Ireland Information Guide wherever they occur, and since no part of Ireland Information Guide is private, every part should be open to editing and refactoring.
Another group of users wants to see refactoring limited to article talk pages, because these are more directly linked to the encyclopedia creation process, and read by more people.
Should a person directly involved in a personal attack, e.g. a victim or someone who has expressed strong support for his position on the same page, be allowed to refactor a personal attack?
Some users are strongly opposed to that. They feel that allowing this to happen would make it very easy for personal bias to influence the refactoring process. Others respond that biased refactoring can always be reverted, just like biased edits on an article page. They feel that limiting the refactoring to uninvolved parties will make it so rare that in the few instances when it occurs, whoever does it will be attacked for intrusive behavior. They believe that if everyone can refactor personal attacks, those doing it will be justified by a widely acepted policy, and that bias can be kept at a minimum by using clear definitions and restrictions on what can be refactored.
Many users consider it a good idea to refactor later - wait until the hot blood has died down a bit, and then get rid of the junk. If you refactor as you go, that can inflame the discussion - in a flame war, people often fail to assume good faith.
Others argue that the whole point of refactoring, under a generally accepted policy, is to cool down a discussion and bring it back to the issues. They feel that when refactoring is generally accepted, there is really not much to get inflamed about -- the user whose personal attacks have been removed should in fact be glad that someone else is cleaning up after them. Under this logic, personal attacks are like spelling mistakes and should be removed whenever they occur.
Personal attacks are the parts of a comment which can be considered personally offensive and which have no relevant factual content. Examples:
Counter-examples which are not personal attacks -- they are not nice, but they are not affected by this guideline, but you might want to remove them anyway:
The trickiest part is, of course, how to do it. There is consensus among those who favor this guideline that egregiously offensive comments like this can be removed immediately:
There is consensus that refactoring (replacing old text with new text) should be done by putting the new text in [square brackets], as is done in newspaper articles, books etc. when text is not directly quoted. (Example: "You can kiss my [body part].") This makes refactored parts easy to spot and allows interested persons to look up the version history to see what has been changed.
There is also consensus that whenever a comment is part personal attack, part factual, it should never be removed but at most be refactored, if it is changed at all. Examples:
This could become:
If you're sanitising an entire flame war, it's probably easier to just slap a disclaimer on the top and link to the pre-refactored text in the page history. That makes it easy for people who enjoy rolling in the mud to see the original "conversation" in its full "glory".
The ideal reaction of someone who's had their words refactored for WikiLove is gratitude, which happens more times than you might think. When both sides have thrown insults, often both sides are grateful when things are cleaned up. Often with a positive word and friendly advice, you can get people to clean up after themselves in future. Or, best of all, refrain from flinging mud in the first place!
Whenever you refactor, do not destroy the context of a conversation -- all statements in the discussion should still make sense after the refactoring. So if you refactor a personal insult, but do not refactor an insulting response, that destroys the context in which the response has been made. Don't do that.
What if a user constantly breaks the rules?
Pointing out that a user is violating a rule is not a personal attack and should not be removed. (Example: "Your edit was in violation of our policy on names, see .."). Do avoid using terms like "violation" and be as kind as possible when dealing with first time offenders.
There is an established policy for dealing with repeat offenders. You can either send all evidence of violations to Ireland Information Guide founder Jimbo Wales, or you can use the procedure described on Ireland Information Guide:Bans and blocks.
Won't this "sanitize" Ireland Information Guide?
Not necessarily in the sense of making things "sanitary" (general crude remarks are not affected), but hopefully in the sense of making things sane.
Who are you, the moral police?
Remember that personal attacks are not allowed and people can and will be banned for making them repeatedly. Banning a user for attacking others fits much better into a police analogy than simply removing the personal attacks from his statement. If you are opposed to banning users for personal attacks, you should be in favor of this policy, as it moves away from banning.
Can't we just ignore personal attacks?
We can certainly try, but it is not that simple. Recent research has shown that social rejection elicits similar brain activity as physical attacks [1] (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0002F56D-E5F6-1F85-A5F683414B7F0188). To oversimplify things, trying to ignore constant personal attacks can be like trying to ignore constantly being hit in the stomach. In case of non-physical attacks on discussion pages, the intensity with which they are felt varies greatly according to the victim's own psyche, whether they consider discussions on the Net fundamentally social in nature or more like abstract conversations with a machine, whether there exists a history of conversations with the attacker, and what the attacker's (and the victim's) standing in the community (in our case, Ireland Information Guide) is.
So what may seem simple to you may be very difficult to someone else in a different situation, or even in the same one. Aside from that, ignoring personal attacks leaves them in the public record -- whenever someone visits the talk page in question, the attacks are there again, creating negative impressions, harming the reputation of the participants and of Ireland Information Guide. They will show up on Google and on every Ireland Information Guide mirror. They are like an untreated lesion.
But I really mean it! That user is a jerk.
See Ireland Information Guide:Staying cool when the editing gets hot and try to talk calmly and reasonably to the user. When nothing else helps to remedy the behavior you consider problematic, try using one of the established banning or mediation procedures.
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 Ireland Information Guide.
How do we make sure that facts and context are not lost?
If you think about it, questions like these are already answered on Ireland Information Guide:Replies -- the same principles that apply to general wiki editing also apply to the refactoring of comments and the removal of personal attacks. It's just that we are more careful (and rightly so) not to distort what other people have said and signed. But a principle like NPOV is much harder to maintain consistently than trying to make sure that you do not accidentally refactor a factual statement. If we can write a neutral encyclopedia larger than the Britannica, we can certainly be careful with each other's words!
Aren't we rewriting history?
Well, we're rewriting history all the time. As of this time, the last time it was rewritten was 12:06, Oct 15, 2003 ;-). Yes, refactoring discussion changes the track record, but the idea is to only change it for the better. Or to use another, less Orwellian analogy: The idea is to treat personal attacks like one would treat a disease. And remember that anyone who wants to see the full record can view prior revisions, back to number one.
Won't this make banning attackers harder?
That may well be the case -- if you think it is very important to get repeat offenders banned, you should probably not support this policy. On the other hand, isn't it a good thing if we have to ban fewer people? Consider the possibility that people might learn, through positive reinforcement, that personal attacks will get them nowhere.
What about attacks elsewhere?
Personal attacks on the mailing list, by email, or off-Ireland Information Guide, cannot be solved by this process. All we can do is encourage people to stay cool, and not say something that they'll later regret.
How about mediation instead?
Mediation in heated discussions is certainly a good idea, but incredibly hard to do properly. Often the mediator may come across as being biased because of his past dealings with parties to the conflict -- we do not have totally independent mediators, and most regular Ireland Information Guide users come into contact with one another sooner or later. Furthermore, it solves none of the problems that personal attacks create, it can only, in some cases, cool down the conditions from which they result. Consider mediation prevention and refactoring treatment.