User:Mendel/Democratic wikis – a primer

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Democratic wikis – a primer
For a wiki to be fun, you ought to contribute as if it was your own. If you see an opportunity to improve it, make it so. That this wiki is not yours alone is an advantage: others do some things you would have done, posted knowledge you don't (yet) have, and make your own contributions more pretty, correct, and extensive.

Until you run into problems. You see things that ought to be done differently, or not at all. Others disagree. Everyone thinks they own the wiki. What do you do?

You might be tempted to look for a ruler, or failing that, rules to decide, ideally in your favor. This is a fallacy. Rules („policies“) have been written by specific people to solve a specific problem in a specific situation. They may provide a satisfactory solution for the situation you are in, but if they don't, a new solution needs to be found. You need to be involved in that process to ensure the solution will work for you.

The following guidelines are intended to help you find solutions that work for you and the other on our wiki.

First Guideline: Include!
Try to include everyone. If somebody wants to contribute something to a wiki about your topic, better make sure it's ours. Wikis that manage to be the only wiki for their larger internet community thrive better than communities that are split, and the space on most wikis is for practical purposes infinite. (WP:NOT PAPER)

Your first thought in a conflict should be for a way we can include the topic on the wiki so that everyone is fine with it. Experienced editors know several ways to separate and segregate content.


 * Sidenote: Usually a wiki community has decided on information they absolutely do not want to keep. Look for policies on maturity, hate speech, vandalism, spam, or copyright to find out more. Remember that libel is illegal in most jurisdictions. 
 * Generally speaking, libel is badmouthing someone without supporting evidence or in an inapproate place. „He killed a man“ may be true, but if you're on a gaming wiki, it really doesn't matter because he's not going to kill you over the internet. It's libel in some jurisdictions!

Second Guideline: Improve!
If you see something that is bad, maybe you can improve it to a point where you can tolerate it. If you don't see a way, ask around: maybe somebody else knows how.

Explain to others how you knew to improve their edits. Most likely they would have done it themselves if they had known how. (How did you learn?)

It helps to be conscious of your goals when improving. Sometimes conflicts occur when content is „optimized“ for different goals. Collecting the goals of everyone involved is a good basis for discussing how to best serve these diverse goals.

Third guideline: Discuss!
The aim of a productive discussion is not to „win“, it is to come to an understanding. You need to understand why somebody else wants something done differently than you do, and they need you to explain why you see things differently. Enlarge your understanding until you can both discern a way forward that suits both of you. Achieving this will make it more likely that it will work for most everyone else later.

If you cannot understand someone else at all, try looking for an experienced community member who understands both of you and can mediate.

Fourth guideline: Get personal!
Show others that you appreciate their contributions. Write something nice for them. Run a community activity, maybe a contest or a game. Show wit and humour. Try to use „personal“ or „community“ pages for this.

However, there are those people. They're not willing to include, improve or discuss, or so it seems. They haven't learned how to discuss properly. They disrupt everything. They need to be taught a lesson. On a wiki, this is difficult to do, because most aspects are, for the sake of transparency, public.

First of all, separate the personal criticism from any other ongoing discussion. On editing discussions, you should always adress the content of other people's statements, and not the manner in which they were made. Take your personal criticism to their personal page; link it to the editing discussion(s) that prompted it for clarity.


 * You can use email, or ther social media outside the wiki to solve your differences, but then other people who run into the same problems with you or the other person won't know how you dealt with it.

Now this may well be the hardest part of this page of advice: respect them. Take them seriously. They may not know how to behave properly on the wiki or at all; they may be immature, mean-spirited or evil; but you know, and you are not, so you need to show them that. Explain why you do not like how they act. Suggest ways to achieve their purpose better and not make themselves unpopular. Listen to them. Stay polite.


 * Some editors are even polite to their vandals and explain why they offend. People who vandalize are interested in our topic, know how to find the edit button; if a courteous response causes them to change their preconceptions about us and why we suck, we may gain valuable editors – if not now, then when they grow up, if they remember us favorably.

If you see someone else involved in an attenmpt to explain community etiquette, please support them. They stand up for our community, and it helps them to know they're not alone; it helps show to the outsider that they're not dealing with a lone „marshal“, but with a community who is prepared to stand up for their values.

Fifth guideline: Share!
Solutions that took a lot of effort deserve the extra effort to preserve them – not as a „policy“ or rule, but as an aid for future editors who run into the same problems (or the same people) and are looking for ways to solve them. You worked hard to expose conflicting goals – help others realize their goals might lead to conflict by showing them the whole picture. These solutions should not be a rulebook: if they seem to be accepted as one, it is because they keep working, but if they're challenged, they need to be renegotiated.

Sixth guideline: Ignore all rules!
If you have read and understood this page, you know everything you need to know about wikis but the details. Do not let anyone „hit you over the head with the rulebook“. Respect rules for solutions to problems that took a lot of effort to arrive at. Do not question them blithely; but do not follow them blindly either. If somebody quotes a rule, „policy“ or „guideline“ at you, they think it applies to your situation. Try to understand why, then reason with them (if still necessary).

It is possible to ignore anything on this page. If your standing in the community is exceptional, you may even get away with quite a lot. However, our wiki will be the worse for it. Don't.