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Civility, kindness, and respect are necessary if you are editing anywhere on the wiki. This includes articles, project pages, talk pages, or even in the Discord server. Although you may dislike some of your fellow users or not get along with them, you still must make an attempt to be as civil as possible. Please try your best not to create tension whenever you are interacting with other users.
Examples of incivility
- Rudeness
- Judgmental terms in edit summaries, especially when it comes to undoing edits—please take in mind when new users edit. They are new users and may not know their way around a wiki yet. Try to make a good first impression than a horrible last one.
- Belittling other users due to their writing style, artwork, or what they choose to do on the wiki—this includes kinds of articles written.
Some more serious examples include
- Personal attacks on a user or group of users.
- Sockpuppetry or meatpuppetry to evade bans, harass another user, or continue to edit the wiki.
- Constant fighting even after being asked to stop—any member of the wiki staff is permitted to ask you to stop. Remember to act in good faith!
Why does this happen?
Most of the time, personal attacks are used in heated conflicts. They often are ways to end discussions, or a disrespectful way to try and get their point across. These are come common instances of personal attacks:
- Not agreeing with another editor's addition to an article (quotes, images, general content)— the removal of this content in a back-and-forth between users is commonly known as edit warring.
- During said edit war, people may be convinced they are right, and unwilling to consider otherwise.
- Genuine tension between the two users, not caring whether they insult them or not.
- In some cases, users will intentionally be disruptive to the wiki. This is often done to distract from any ongoing discussions or issues, or to drive others away from the wiki. In some cases, a user will push another one—typically in a nitpicking/harassment-like style—to either leave the wiki or give up on something they were doing. In the most severe cases, someone will lash out and get themselves banned instead of the agitator—this is bad faith behavior and is not tolerated. These instances will be looked at case-by-case instead of a blanket sweep.
General suggestions
Preventing arguments and edit wars
- Prevent edit wars. If you have an edit you disagree with, contact the user who made them, a third party, or the project where said edit would be underneath.
- Admins may lock certain pages that have edit conflicts with them.
Reducing the impact
- Please do not respond to offensive comments, even if you feel obligated to, or you feel as if you are inferior by not doing so. If you avoid answering them, you prove yourself to be stronger than said person. Forget about the edit, do not escalate the conflict even more. You are letting them win.
- Ignore incivility. It will be dealt with.
Managing incivility
Sometimes, two people may be unwilling to negotiate something that will work for the both of them. In some cases an administrator may need to intervene, but it is best if they do not. A dispute resolution may also be necessary, in which a user would post a discussion on the talk page of a project the edit would be associated with. It is best to clear the issue as soon as possible.