Every once in a while, you see a user come along who clearly is not acting in good faith with their edits, this guy being a good example: http://www.wikihow.com/Special:Contributions/71.232.167.115
I gave him a {{warning}} on his talk page for 2 articles he had written which blasted one individual and were clearly bad faith edits. I looked at the post on his page, though, and thought that it really doesn’t sound stern enough: “Greetings, and welcome to wikiHow. I noticed that one of your recent edits has not been conducive to the best interests of wikiHow. Unfortunately, people frequently place spam, vandalism, and irrelevant or abusive information on wikiHow. This is lamentable because it detracts from our goal of creating a useful, free how-to manual. You may have done this edit as a test or in error as you were learning how wikiHow works. If so, please stick with us and try to learn how to edit constructively. Take the wikiHow Tour, read our Writer’s Guide and Understand What wikiHow Is Not to learn how you can best contribute here. I would be happy to work with you directly to help you learn your way around wikiHow. Please feel free to contact me by replying to this message or contact an Administrator for help. Thank you!” Clearly, this user was not doing these edits as a test or in error, they were clearly malicious attacks on a person whom the anon apparently knows. As the title of this thread states, I think we should put out some sort of more stern warning for users who have put out edits clearly in bad faith, perhaps reserving the current {{warning}} for users who are posting repetitive nonsense, and the such. Thoughts?
Melwade
2
Overall I think the warning is good, but needs to be clearer about the consequences. We have two templates {{test}} and {{warning}}. The warning template was meant to be more stern while the test was for milder cases. IMNSHO, I think they have lost their distinctiveness and are petty much the same with the warning template just being more verbose.
system
3
Hi Metsguy, Yeah. I understand. Some vandals are extra irritating. However… perhaps a little history lesson might be in order here. Waaaaay back in the days when wikiHow was young… (lol and we walked to school… uphill both ways… in the snow… barefoot… lol) We tended to be a LOT less tolerant of vandals. We had around a dozen warning templates, another dozen templates aimed at curbing excessive chatting on talk pages, etc etc. The templates used to be QUITE strongly worded. The only problem was… there was no way for the average user to ENFORCE the implied threats of blocking, black listing, etc. You were still dependent on admins (who were fewer and further between back then) to back you up. It ended up all bark and no bite. Very embarrassing. And? The vandals LOVED it. It was like wrestling with pigs… you both got dirty… and the PIGS? LOVED IT. The vandals would openly boast that “so and so username gave me a warning, but I can still edit! ha ha!” on their talk pages. It became a game to see how many people they could rile up and how many warnings they could amass. The community had multiple discussions in the forums about how to handle this. Opinions were varied… and discussions were “interesting”. However, the consensus that emerged was forged by some of the older users… ones with children… who recommended a quite different approach. In short? The idea is this: Don’t feed the trolls. When you understand that the vandalizing behavior… the trolling… is merely an immature way to get attention, you realize that these folks don’t really care whether they get POSITIVE attention or NEGATIVE attention… they just want to be NOTICED for something. Our strong arm tactics gave them what they wanted… but it also completely cut off any chance of turning the situation around or helping a newbie become a better user. We had few enough new registered users sticking around to edit as it was… and we realized that quite a few of these “vandals” were just newbies doing test edits. So we adjusted our approach. We went softcore. We started sending blandly worded messages… giving friendly advice… posting warning messages which assumed that the user was just accidentally making mistakes, and offering personal help and advice. This did several things: 1 - It dialed back the tension of the conversations, thus making our communications friendlier and more helpful. It encouraged us all to take a deep breath and relax instead of bursting a blood vessel whenever we saw another “oops edit”. 2 - It deprived the attention seekers of their attention. 3 - It arranged things so that the attention grabbers had to interact in a more mature manner to garner the same amount of attention they were getting previously. And the nice side benefit was that some of our “vandals” ended up learning the ropes, investing themselves in the site, and becoming productive and valued editors. 4 - We reaped the benefits of “assuming good faith”. Note that one of the major comments we get from new users is that they stay because “everyone is so friendly and helpful”. So… while using a bigger hammer on vandals does have some appeal? We’ve found that no hammers works better. It’s slower… but it garners the better results long term. /history lesson
system
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PS… we still block the really bad editors… but we end up keeping a lot of the “middling” ones that are teachable.
I agree that {{warning}} has been been watered down over the years to a nice cuddly chat, but do also take heart from the fact that when it is really needed it isn’t read anyway. Regardless of the wording it’s a handy history on Talk Pages of previous behaviour.
Lois, I want to quote your whole post and add “Yes.” at the end, but that would be annoying. Superbly put, though.
Lois’s post summarizes 5+ years of wikiHow history brilliantly! Thanks Lois.
