Noise

(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.

See also: Clogged talk pages, Refacroring talk pages and About assuming good faith

Talk page noise, occasionally also termed as drama, is tendency of contributors to perform actions, perhaps most often talk page messages,

• whose contents is not to the point of a current discussion or page.
• which are more than fixing the content or approaching a real problem would require.

For instance, in light of superprotect, a contributor posted this message onto mw:Talk:Compact Personal Bar:

Today I deactivated all Beta features. First: the talk-pages are only in English. I don't know whether I could only post feedback in English or in other languages and I know, many people don't give feedback at all because of this. Second: I will not test any software from the WMF, until the Foundation keeps the superprotect right, which is a thread to all communities. --here

• This message has some meaningful content.
• There are better venues for such complaint: there is an open RFC here at Meta already, and additional essays written by contributors on this topic: any of those may be brought to the attention of the WMF at a point.
• More meaningful things to do exist, such as investigating root causes of the phenomenon involved and helping to solve them.

A question is: why do some (very little, I need to say) Wikimedia contributors continue communicating and working with such low efficiency?

• Within the good faith assumption, such messages may be overlooked.
• People are spoilt with the notion of things being all-right as long as they're not vandalizing (and even then they'd receive a sincere apology for a supposed mistake and an encouragement to keep working).
• Unless such messages reach the point of a personal attack, such contributors aren't blocked (even if non-attack messages of dramatic sort are a habit which continues to waste everyone's time).
• ...

How can we aid in creating a mechanism to weed out drama and feeling of entitlement, so that contributors remain focused on content work and stop wasting eachothers’ time?

• Abandon the good faith assumption in favour of never assuming?
• Introduce robust control over specific instances of noise? (This is hard to design.)
• ...