User:Jade Harley/Training/Simplecorbin377/Lesson02

Proper Communication

When communicating with other editors, you want them to feel comfortable with communicating with you. The following are links to the various pages regarding proper communication followed up by brief summaries:

WP:NPA - Please do not purposefully insult or disparage other users no matter how rude or insulting they've been. This may be hard sometimes, but if you keep in mind that no doing so will be what makes you better than them.
WP:CIVIL - Remember to maintain a respect for wiki policy, and to be nice to other users.
WP:AGF - Assume good faith. If an unconstructive edit appears as so that the user making it did not mean for the edit to be unconstructive, please assume that the edit was made in good faith. That means not warning the user and explain what was done wrong in the edit summary.
WP:HA - Harassment is totally unacceptable here on Wikipedia.
WP:COOL - Remember to stay cool to stay cool when the editing gets hot, i.e. when things begin to escalate into heated debate. No matter how much things escalate, under no circumstance should you ever resort to personal attacks and the like. The founder's talk page and the Administrators' Noticeboard are common locations for heated debate.
WP:OUTING - Posting personal information about other users is not only utterly unacceptable, but also poses a potential danger to the user being outed. Attempts to out other users require immediate oversight (permanent deletion of edits), and a long-term – if not permanent – block on the user perpetrating the outing.
WP:TROLL - Do not deliberately anger or upset other users. This is a surefire way of getting kicked out of Wikipedia.
WP:DICK - Abide by this, and you would most likely fulfill the previous behavioral policies (still, be sure read up on them).

Failure to comply with the above behavioral requirements may lead to you getting blocked or, in extreme cases, banned.

When to stop Talking

Sometimes, no matter how civil you are to another editor, he or she will regard you as an attacker. I've recently encountered one such user. This editor (no need to name any names) has made many good contributions in the main space, but when it comes to other editors, he has had a long history of making personal attacks. Naturally, these attacks provoked a response from the victims and the topic first went the said user's talk page, the ANI, then back on the talk page. When the victims went to confront him about it, things got a little out of hand. So I decided to be the voice of reason and stepped in. I gently rebuked the harsh words and gave the guy some advice. When I later very civilly chided him for insulting some admins and gave him links to some of the pages I've shown you, instead of receiving a "Thank you", I was slapped in the face and told (very rudely) to leave. I gave him a soft word of caution before doing so, but even this was met with thinly veiled hostility (though it was not as rude as the previous statement). After a small misunderstanding with a couple other editors regarding me sticking a "Done" template (which I intended as a sign of compliance, though it turned out that it can be considered insulting; but that's another story), I (as well as a wiki-friend of mine) decided that trying to talk things out with this guy will do no good, and that he is just too proud to admit he's wrong.

So the moral here is: If a user refuses to admit his mistake and would sooner cut off the hand of his rescuer than believe he needs rescuing, leave him be. There is no point in giving help to someone who doesn't want it.