Ray Saintonge wrote: > Emily Monroe wrote: > >>> I am an aggressive argumentalist and some take that to be >>> insulting. But being aggressive is not the same as being uncivil. >>> >>> >> I think you're talking about assertiveness, not aggresiveness. >> Semantical, I know, but still. >> >> I think you're right, though. May I ask a personal question? What do >> you do when somebody gets insulted? Continue to bluntly assert >> yourself, or apologize and back down a little? >> >> >> > Backing down a little can be done without the need to apologize. In > some respects apologies are admissions of being wrong, and demanding > apologies does nothing to calm disputes. Backing down should always > allow for saving face. > I think there are cultural mores at play here. In some societies apologising is not a sign of weakness but rather a sign of moving past the issue. It's a social ciontract which needs both parties to apologise, though, and as soon as one party comes from a culture which reads apologising as a sign of weakness, you have a problem. Apologising is a very useful method for saving face, especially if you are wrong. I sometimes think the problems we face on Wikipedia simply reflect the problems in society. People simply don't know how to engage anymore, they don't know how to foster a sense of community because for the last however many years, politicians have been playing divide and conquer. Thinking of teh community as a "community", it suddenly makes me realise I have no idea who the "community leaders" are. We've perhaps been very bad at fostering a sense of community, although I think WikiProjects have played a wonderful role in that. The problem with WikiProjects is that they tend to get belittled as soon as they conflict with some policy or guidance page somewhere. But I guess that's another instance of divide and conquer. I really do think we need some formal dispute resolution body that can actually lead the community through a dispute, somebody was talking about facilitators the other day, is it not possible to have some formal body of facilitators? Ryan worked wonders with date delinking, I'd love to see the process used there rolled out to other disputes. I've long thought the notability divide could be solved if we had a decent facilitator in who could involve the whole community, rather than those self selecting elements that usually mess it all up. (self included) The episodes and characters arbitration cases were instances crying out for facilitation, not arbitration, and the arbitration that resulted really solved nothing anyway.
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