Commons talk:Disruptive editing

Editors or editing?

Is this about disruptive editing or disruptive editors? At present it seems to mix-and-match the terms quite freely. Yet we need to distinguish these two things clearly, mostly because our responses to them should be different. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:56, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

To be honest, I don't understand your point here. The disruptive editing is tied to the one who is performing it, which is the disruptive editor. So I don't see any reason why our responses to both would be different, if that at all is possible. pandakekok9 10:52, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

The problem both here and at WP has long been that "disruptive editors" are most easily defined as those performing "disruptive edits", which is equally easily defined as "edits against policy or practice". In such a case, we don't need any discussion of "disruptive editors" as such, because they're already covered.

That approach has been a failure.

There is a problem (again, across all WMF projects) that there are many disruptive editors who are harmful, yet have learned to do so without breaching any of the specific rules. They are polite, so they cannot be addressed under CIVIL etc. A favourite tactic is to provoke an outburst in response to harassment, at which point the victim can be blocked. WMF law is Roman law: policies exist not to protect editors, but to avoid disruption to the state - banning the complainant is an effective solution.

If this current effort is a welcome effort to redress this, then it needs to recognise that there are also disruptive editors, and we have to identify those by their broad outcomes, not by the small-scale validity of individual actions. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:33, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

"Campaign to drive away productive contributors: "

This is an important issue and an unwanted behaviour displayed by some disruptive editors. I would note though that:

• They're not necessarily driving away productive editors. Sometimes these targeted editors are very new editors and it would be hard to see them as having yet contributed much. Often they have made just one edit or upload, and which was clearly inappropriate, but they're now being hounded by another editor as a result. Yet even new editors making sincere mistakes deserve protection from such hounding. Yet Commons has often acted as "New editors are such a problem, let's just get rid of them" which is not the way we should handle this. We have truly disruptive editors here who have a long term habit of, and relish for, driving away such editors. But if we phrase this narrowly as "protecting productive editors", we don't protect many who should be.
• This is described as " attempt to exhaust the community's patience by acting contrary to policies and guidelines and engaging in sockpuppetry/meatpuppetry.". Yet what they more commonly do is the zealous application of Commons rules with absolute politeness. That is what makes such a disruptive editor such a problem: they do it without breaching any of our specific rules. A typical action might be to tag uploads for deletion, or to request OTRS confirmations. Yes, any editor is at liberty to raise a DR on any content - but that also makes it a great tactic for harassment. Similarly we have a large grey area where OTRS is so rarely needed, yet anyone might put forward that it should be needed on a particular upload, without having to justify that, and again this makes a great tool for harassing others whilst staying within the rules.

Andy Dingley (talk) 14:04, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

@Andy Dingley: For point 1, I think that is out of scope for this guideline. That would be something a civility and harassment policy would tackle. I could mention those though. For point 2, I have addressed this on examples 4 and 5 of the "Examples of disruptive editing" section. pandakekok9 02:39, 19 December 2020 (UTC)