Moratorium Period

A tentative pattern.

Context: A ThreadMode page is threatening to veer out of control as increasingly acrimonious exchanges take place; name-calling and AdHominem arguments abound. The page's topic is interesting enough that a DocumentMode synthesis may yield valuable content, but only insofar as a more harmonious mode of conversation is agreed on by (some of) the participants.

Problem: how do you prevent the dispute from escalating and degenerating, defuse the conflict, and foster a more productive type of thread ?

Proposed solution: One participant, or a third party, takes the initiative of a MoratoriumPeriod. She replaces the entire page with a message to that effect. She takes her concerns with the mode of conversation to the relevant contributors' home pages, or emails them directly. ThreadMode can be resumed if and the contributors at least "agree to disagree" and can see a path toward a balanced synthesis (or dialectic) of opinions.

The person declaring the MoratoriumPeriod promises to keep a backup copy of the page. Anyone feeling that her decision to enter a MoratoriumPeriod is unwise may restore the page from EditCopy, if still possible (others should therefore refrain from further edits), or request to have the backup restored.

If there were several contributors the page, it might be nice to announce how long the moratorium will last, so they don't feel "locked out".

Resulting context: not quite determined...

MoratoriumPeriod works best on small pages since large pages are likely to contain multiple discussions unrelated to the problematic thread. (A corollary is that it will also work well on large pages which are - shudder - entirely taken up by a single flamewar.)

Replacing part of a page is very problematic since other people may not understand what the moratorium is about and might even bring back the problematic topic accidentally. Therefore, extract the problematic thread to a separate page before calling a Moratorium. But, first observe the results of extracting the venomous thread.

In the past, this technique has shown to be too weak. There have been two ways of doing this. The first is to place a small banner at the top of the page requesting the argument suspend for a while. The second is to replace the page entirely with a small banner. If the first is done by anyone but a third party, it is just ignored (and sometimes seen as a "sign of weakness.") If the second is done by anyone but a third party, it considered to be an underhanded "move". Third parties--provided they are perceived as true third parties--can often be the voice of reason. This is related to the "Seek third parties" strategy on

: http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?ConflictResolution

except that here the third parties jump in of their own accord.

One might observe the same conventions over a classification scheme for pages wherein a WikiWord has been used to tag a page as belonging to a set of pages with the same characteristics. Such as those about editing, moving, deleting and categorizing. Under such an observation it might be wise to allow the passage of time and whether or not the scheme has been used or not before deletion activities begin.

CategoryDelete