Wikipedia:Beyond civility
 | This is an essay on the conduct policy. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community. |
 | This page in a nutshell: To have productive discussions, civility is not enough. |
When a discussion is unproductive, incivility is often blamed, but this puts the cart before the horse: incivility is often a result of unproductive discussion, not its cause. Productive discussion demands going beyond civility: while civility is very important, five other patterns of behavior are just as important to reaching a productive outcome:
- 1. Acknowledge precedent.
- Ignoring precedent, intentionally or not, leads to repeating old arguments, which can frustrate everyone. In a discussion, you should try to understand how similar situations have been handled before, and act in light of that understanding. If there is a precedent for the present situation, but you think an exception is called for, acknowledge the consensus and explain why it shouldn't apply. If you want to challenge the consensus itself, do so at the right venue. ("Precedent" includes – in decreasing order of priority – all relevant policies, guidelines, and closed discussions. Global consensus supersedes local consensus.)
- 2. Avoid logical fallacies.
- Make sure your conclusions follow logically from the available information, and your argument is stated objectively. Justify your assumptions and generalizations. Be precise. Understand where the burden of proof lies, and what the status quo is. When you see logical fallacies, point them out – civilly of course.
- 3. Be succinct.
- No one wants to read a wall of text. Concision shows respect for other editors.
- 4. Don't go meta.
- Make sure you're talking about the original matter of dispute, and not having a dispute about a dispute (about a dispute...). If another editor's conduct warrants comment, you may do so, but if discussion continues along that line, take it to another forum (see Wikipedia:Dispute resolution). Once you get more than one level of abstraction away from the original dispute, it is very unlikely anything you say is going to help resolve that original dispute.
- 5. Don't repeat yourself.1
- Consensus is determined by the soundness of arguments and the support they receive from different editors, not how often they are expressed, or whether they have the last word. Closers will keep this in mind. Repeating yourself to someone who wasn't convinced the first time will only generate aggravation. If you need to clarify a point or address a misunderstanding, go ahead – but make sure you're not just saying the same thing again.
The point of any discussion is to get to a resolution. If you ignore precedent, employ a logical fallacy, bloviate, stray into meta-discussion, or argue by exhaustion, you make a productive outcome less likely. If you knowingly do any of these things, you are not acting in good faith, even if you remain civil!
Note
[edit]- ^1. This does not apply to user talk warnings; if an editor is engaging in behavior that the community has clearly defined as unacceptable, repetition and escalation of warning messages is standard procedure.
