Talk:Harassment consultation 2015/Ideas/Redesign dispute resolution

• Dispute resolution (both content and user conduct) is at the heart of the issue of harassment. Harassment can not be seen in a vacuum but instead needs to be addressed in context of the way it occurs. As an example, misogyny is less common on Wikipedia than second generation gender bias. But when women speak out about sexism on wiki, they open up themselves to misogynistic harassment. The same issues exist for other types of identity based harassment with the worst possibly being directed at people who are LGBTQ. Sydney Poore/FloNight (talk) 21:28, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Struggling on without software changes

A possible roadblock to any reform of dispute resolution could be that the Wikipedia discussion "system" is technologically ancient, and its sole advantage is that talk pages are just pages so it is relatively easy to edit a talk page if you know how to edit an article. Although the WMF have funded at least 2 attempts to rewrite the discussion system, both of them have been shelved. I don't know why this is but it is quite frustrating. I suspect it is because they were done as "waterfall" projects or similar, rather than agile, incremental improvements. The notification system, on the other hand, was an incremental improvement, and has been a success!

Some of the problems with the existing discussion "system" I could cite are:

1. individual threads cannot be watched as individual threads
2. it is not very convenient to track a user's discussion posts, even over one site, let alone over multiple sites. Also privacy concerns make this more difficult - a user can have multiple identities over multiple sites.
3. abusive messages which are later edited or removed can be harder to find after the fact, to establish/detect a pattern of harassment. Note that harassers do not always target the same users - they may harass multiple users in ways which individually don't seem that major, at least to an outsider.
4. as with most things wikimedia, the documentation (especially regarding dispute resolution!) is tucked away and rather sprawling and split up, and not always completely up-to-date.

Only the last problem can be fixed by the community alone - although due to the resistance to change of some editors, even that might not succeed if it were tried.

However, we have struggled on as best we could with this system for over a decade, so perhaps we can continue to struggle on - with the concomitant waste of person-hours in doing things which should be done automatically - with this system and still meaningfully reform dispute resolution. One thing I would suggest here is we need to make the whole process more formalised. There are alternative dispute resolution mechanisms in existence such as Third Opinion on the English Wikipedia, but there is insufficient awareness that they exist. As someone who has been involved in content disputes, both on user pages and on article talk pages, on the English Wikipedia, I also find it very confusing that you don't necessarily know for sure:

1. Where other users are going to reply - in the same thread? On your talk page? Then perhaps on their talk page? (That's another source of confusion - still no common convention about whether to reply on your interlocuters talk page in a talk page discussion - after 15 years!!)
2. When they are going to reply
3. If they are going to reply at all
4. Most importantly, what you should then do if they don't reply at all - so an agreement has not been reached but neither have they responded to your counter-argument

I am not suggesting that "taking it to user talk" should be discouraged - that can be very appropriate in certain cases - but I think the whole process could do with being a bit more formalised, and in the absence of any software improvements, that means changing policies and guidelines and possibly Help documentation.

I actually think, contrary to one other proposal that has been made in this consultation, editors should be expected to reply to discussions or accusations against them within a reasonable period of time, or their right to reply should be forfeit. We cannot wait forever for other editors, otherwise editing disagreements among a large number of editors could become completely untenable to solve. I also think that any suggestion in certain guidelines or essays that excessive verbosity and/or frequency of replies should be discouraged because it "privileges editors with more time", is nonsense and should be excised. If editors cannot or do not wish to commit to the time needed to conduct a reasonable discussion in good faith, again, they should forfeit their right to reply.--Greenrd (talk) 16:59, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Precautionary block

I am not sure that I agree with Greenrd's suggestion that if a reader does not respond in time, they lose the right of response. I am aware of two instances where an action against an editor has been opened as they were leaving home on vacation with no access to a computer and returning to find that disciplinary action had been taken against them without them having had the opportunity to defend themselves.

Since we are not aware of the personal circumstances surrounding individuals, I would like to suggest the concept of a "precautionary block". Such a block, which would not carry any stigma, would be served on an editor who is facing disciplinary action but who has not responded in a reasonable time to the accusation. When a precautionary block is served, the case is put on ice, nobody may add to it and the editor is blocked. The block can be lifted at the request of the editor concerned and the case would then be resumed. In the case of genuine delays (including illness, bereavement, exams, holidays etc), the accused will have an opportunity to get their defence together in a fair manner. If however somebody is playing the system, they will have been blocked so they will have very little to gain. Martinvl (talk) 18:25, 17 February 2016 (UTC)