Controversial contributors

(English) This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some Wikimedians but may not have wide support. This is not policy on Meta, but it may be a policy or guideline on other Wikimedia projects. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes.
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Controversial contributors are contributors whose actions or conduct often spark controversy, and disputed by other Wikipedians.

Contributors may become controversial within their local community for reasons such as incivility, edit warring, copyright violations, or other forms of disruptive editing, yet their positive contributions (e.g. good content creation or prolific upload work) earn them a lot of supporters.

Controversial contributors are often confused for vandals or trolls and are publicly treated as such, which makes them appear as such for the rest of the community through the looking glass effect.

Controversy is rooted in POV and changement, which leads to POV disputes and edit wars. POV disputes can lead to personal attacks and incivility, and edit wars can lead to vandalism accusations. These can involve any kind of wikipedians: contributors, vandals, trolls, sysops or other controversial contributors.

The annoyances of controversy are enough to drive away controversial contributors and contributors from wikipedia, but some manage to deal with controversy and this when Sysops actions come into the process.

Sysops often assume that a controversial contributor who is or has been involved in POV Dispute(s), edit war(s), part somewhere of the global trolling process, who has been call a vandal is indeed a troll or vandal, and so has to be thrown out of wikipedia for a better good: restoring order. This misconception comes from the idea that controversy is rooted by the controversial contributors and that controversy is bad for wikipedia because it is disrupting order.

The "order is a better good" subject have been controversial over ages in human history, applying it to resolve a controversy difficulty sounds dubious and conflicting. Preventing the controversial contributor from being part of the controversy resolution discussion cripples the controversy resolution. Controversy is disrupting order and so feed the need for admins, and as controversy does not require the sysop kind of action to be resolved, sysops are considered controversy consultants [1].

So the controversial contributor is blocked/banned in an unfair way, as what he/she did in the beginning was only regular contributing, no one really knows about it except the controversial contributor himself/herself, so no one really cares about it, and the few who stand for the controversial contributor are almost instantly called controversial contributor in return, and a new cycle starts again. this community exclusion phenomena is contrary to the community inclusive policy.

After a controversial editor is gone or has been kicked out, it is only a matter of time before the same controversy happens again centered around another contributor. And here goes the controversy vicious cycle again as a part of the Wikipedia Vicious Cycle.

See also

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