Guild Wars Wiki talk:No personal attacks/ChangeA

Discussion

I added in Rezyk's comments as well as did some tweaking. Also, I noticed that *Reiteratively posting of comments not related to wiki content or operation in a user's talkpage after being asked not to. was removed, but I think it should remain there since it's considered a form a harassment and thus a targeted harassment. -- ab.er.rant 03:18, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

I liked having it too, it was more specific and clearer.reanor 04:49, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

While generally sympathetic to the goal here, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. Foremost, I don't want to develope a wiki legaleese, so policies should deal with what their name indicates in natural language. See personal attack. Secondary, this policy is one of the most used and it has worked well, so I'm loath to fiddle with it. Thirdly, this is specifically about user talk pages while the current policy is general, thus the issue seems out of place. Fourth, harassment is so much more than posting on a users talk page. I don't know when we started using the two interchangeably, but it's not what you'd expect a user new to the wiki to think. Fifth, problems with the lack of talk page policy and too strict user policy has been a topic several times before, and is a semistalled issue now.

I would suggest writing a talk page policy, or if that is too much, taking this to the discussion about changing the user policy's talk section. Backsword 09:01, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

"Spamming "bananas" in someone's talkpage after being asked not to by that someone, is a personal attack since it involves disrespect and makes the user uncomfortable, both things bad for users and the wiki. Being a clear personal attack, this policy should cover it clearly."reanor 22:18, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Could we take the "directed against another contributor" part out of "Racial, sexual, homophobic, ageist, religious, political, or ethnic epithets directed against another contributor. Disagreement over what constitutes a religion, race, sexual preference, or ethnicity is not a legitimate excuse."? -- Gordon Ecker 02:03, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

While we could replace contributer with user, the "directed against another" part needs to stay since we dont want to forbid any political, sexual, etc comments. --Xeeron 12:19, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Or tack something like "derogatory", "disparaging", "insulting" or "negative" on to the front. -- Gordon Ecker 13:03, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Untargeted Harrassment is OK?

So targeted harassment is OK? What is meant by Harassment? I can harass people by "stalking" their posts and criticising them at every move. I can harass someone by criticising them and then asking my friends on the wiki to "back me up" and criticise them in a group. Anon

"Reiteratively posting of comments not related to wiki content or operation in a user's talkpage after being asked not to" should be enough, I don't get the "targeted harassment" either.reanor 01:27, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Untargeted harassment isn't a personal attack, this policy is meant to prevent arguements from degenerrating into flame wars, not to prevent trolling in general. -- Gordon Ecker 03:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Rezing the discussion

Well I read this earlier today, and then just read it again 5 mins ago. I think this is a wonderful change and should be implemented soon. With the recents events that have been happening around the wiki, this could help out allot. Adding what has been added to this change could help sysops (and users alike) make better descions imho. So I guess I am saying, I support this change. --Shadowphoenix 01:19, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Same here, I believe NPA needs an explicit harrassment clause. -- Gordon Ecker 03:17, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Agreeing, since the change would make explicit what is usually enforced anyways, even if on a lesser degree. After all, we have had several cases of harrasment already in the past.--Fighterdoken 05:57, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Supported once, still supporting. -- ab.er.rant 06:50, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Support. It's a nice addition to GWW:NPA and makes it more clear. — ク Eloc 貢 16:08, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Reiterating the same critique as last time, which was never adressed: While I don't think anyone seriously supports harassment in the normal meaning of the word, this has no place here. NPA is a good policy, attatching unrelated policies to it's rear end is a bad idea. Revive GWW:Harassment instead, which I believe failed only because of bad wording. Backsword 04:54, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

some opinions

As a preface, I support the general idea behind this policy; who supports harassment, after all.. but:
First and foremost, given the description on the Policy page, I don't think benign neglect or silence should be considered acquiescence; this is not, based on what I see on the talk page, ready for final implementation. Not to say that its flawed, but I think it needs more input and explicit consensus first. Unless that's been done elsewhere; I have seen chatter about harassment here and there, so I may just be missing it.
Secondly, reiteratively? Could we come up with a more awkward combination of letters to get at the idea of repetition? Besides, the sentence as constructed needs an adjective, not an adverb, since it uses a prepositional phrase: It should be Reiterative posting of comments, if you're fond of that particular combination, or reiteratively posting comments. I'd go for something less esoteric, personally.
Also, how is this already not covered in the policy? As I see it, harassment is a series of recurring attacks. But wait! We have a section for that. How is explicitly calling that harassment any different from not? There's also what I see as a nice catchall in the phrase There is no clearly defined rule or standard about what constitutes a personal attack -- meaning if someone is feeling attacked, that's probably good enough.

So, what I'm seeing is that this is a redundant explanation of harassment, plus trying to expand the idea of NPA into greater ownership of a person's talk page. In my mind, harassment is already implicit in this document, but it expands the policy to allow someone to request someone to stop using their talk page, after which ceasing to do so would be harassment (unless it has to do with wiki content?). The only time I've seen something like that come up was here, but feel free to enlighten me with further examples. If that is in fact the only use of this policy change, I don't see a huge need for it. Granted, I don't plan to harass or attack anyone, so I suppose in that regard I don't really care if its implemented, but at the same time I don't see a need for it. Can someone clarify if I'm missing the point? — THARKUN 04:22, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

If someone is feeling attacked, he/she will report it. Then Sysop discretion comes in. If it's not a clear personal attack like an insult, Sysops may have trouble dealing with them due to the very real posibility of negative feedback, so we need the policy to back them up. I don't know where you've been lately, but this issue was discussed many times during a few older months.reanor 16:33, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Mostly I agree with Tharkun. We all oppose harassment, but no one here has demonstrated to me in what way this is not already covered by the current policy. Rather, this seems to be an unnecessary change under the veil of adding some words that don't hurt and sound good but are already covered, while maybe changing some other things that expand the scope of this policy in ways that don't seem to be needed. Also, Ereanor mentions Sysop discretion, except it seems to me that the more detailed a policy is, the less discretion the Sysops actually have. What does change, if anything, is how often uninvolved parties to a discussion/conflict quote "NPA" which is usually just plain annoying. Anyway, if any Sysops see a way in which the current policy limited their ability to do something that this would help, I'd like to hear about it and examples would be great. ...

Okay, I went to reread something in the proposal and it occurred to me that accusing someone of "NPA", especially repeatedly, would likely be a violation of the policy as proposed, so I must consider this further. -- Inspired to ____ 17:26, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

It seems we should've bulldozed this while the topic was hot. There are cases, and clearifying a policy is never unnecesary, words do matter.reanor 15:47, 7 May 2008 (UTC)