Beyond War And Casualties

The EditWar of 2004, carried into 2005 has resulted in lots of casualties in the communities.

I am not sure whether CureWorseThanTheDisease or not, as perhaps responding directly, forcefully and promptly to inappropriate actions could have been the best solution. Question is at what point this consideration becomes more important than MakeRoomForAllViewpoints, and for how long?

Some of the people gone (for now) include:

KrisJohnson

People went missing include

JimShore
LayneThomas
MossCollum
PaulHudson
TaroOgawa
JonathanTang
GarryHamilton
MarkIrons
ScottJohnson went for lawn mowing job

People stopped using RealName in posts

heaps

Stopping future Edit Wars

Taken from now unneeded StopTheEditWarDiscussion

ToFightEvilWorkOnTheGood (not my page) is my only remark in the peacemaking process. And I laud the tremendous energy and creativity exhibited by the peacemakers.

comments directed to peacemakers

There are no genuinely disputed pages
PS: I don't think we qualify as a neutral party. Even though we never took sides, we (and some others as well) have been involved in trying to end it, so the sides involved may not see us as neutral.''
How does one know when it ends, given that one side won't even say what he wants?

Peacemaker plea

Just stop it. Be the wiser one and let it go
* Victims - pages that were somehow caught up. no real conflict there.
...(peace) Not at all costs, but as a temporary ceasefire.

A ?part-time participant comment

I prefer this wiki being disabled rather than usurped. Heck, even if Ward pulls the plug, that is far more preferable to some anonymous usurpers seizing control by force and blackmail.
Well-intentioned and misguided is a bad combination, and desperation can only make it worse.
how are you going to convince 2 anonymous people who fight each other without letting me know their motivations and their intentions?
Emotional appeals are not going to make any headway unless you appeal to some kind of logic.

A peacemaker observation:

we now have exactly two parties, each calling the other vandal
We know that even if both of you are not brave enough to assume more than an AnonymousCoward position, you do care (rather irrationally imho) about "saving face" and would not like that your "public anonymous image" to be damaged by the resolution of this conflict.

CC with Chicago guy discussed

One side viewed it was fight over editorial control on specific pages (if those pages stayed as they are, we'd institutionalize that anybody can get possession aka editorial control of a piece of wiki by acting irrationally enough and blackmailing the wiki community), as well as basically you have nothing at all to gain by defending them, other than you do it as a matter of principle.

217 discussed his views about the perplexing war with WBL

One side explained he does not understand the reasons for war to continue. WBL did not seem to have participated in this page. I do not know for sure, tried my best to ignore hot pages at the time.

This part served to show in the end, everyone loses. And degenerates into a war of attrition.

Unsound idea(s) being floated here

"Change wiki to be more like a magazine than instant messenger"

What if the RecentChanges has a one day lag? And a separate page is generated to log instantaneously cases where external links are added?

We probably continue to have a need to discover and revert spam quickly, but if "RecentChanges" got delayed then there would be less over-reactions to edits by people here? Wouldn't it?

Assumption is also made that if there are real BarnRaising type collaboration, then contributors all need sometime to stop and think, or is realtime collaboration (which I think is good for Brain storming) essential in creating pages that will endure the test of time?

If RecentChanges are closer to the "Changes in week x" type, most people reading RecentChanges would see a more peaceful wiki, even if there are constant edit and reverts between two persons fighting over "version A" vs "version B".

It was noted elsewhere that people who read wikis (e.g. got to wiki via a link elsewhere, then start reading the links in the page) probably did not know about the edit war. WikiPedia looks very peaceful to me as a casual user too.

With a slooow RecentChanges, individuals can still home in to edit pages they know and care about, whilst general browsing on what else is going on is delayed.

CategoryWiki