Wikipedia:Acting in bad faith
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Acting in bad faith is much worse than stating that someone is acting in bad faith. There, someone had to say it. It's sort of obvious once you say that out loud—just like lying is much worse than pointing out that someone is lying—but somehow Wikipedia got to the absurd point where blatantly acting in bad faith, in all kinds of dishonest, devious, and hypocritical ways, as long as it's done "civilly" is tolerated but pointing out problems with such behavior can lead to a block.
And people fret and moan and wonder why we're losing editors, and in particular why we seem to be losing good editors while attracting more and more bad ones!
Examples
[edit]- Dishonest use of "diffs". Making a claim, then providing a link in a form of a diff which supposedly supports the claim when the diff actually shows nothing of the sort (often it points to a discussion where the same person made the same claim while others disagreed). The bad faith actor here is hoping that participants, commentators, or administrators will actually be too lazy to read the provided diff and will just take their word for it. "Oh, they provided a diff, so it must be true". Unfortunately they're often right, it does work like that. What ruins the sneaky little scheme is that someone might show up and point out that the diff actually doesn't support the claim and it's not entirely honest to pretend that it does. It's at this point that it's crucially important to accuse that party of "assuming bad faith" and try to get them sanctioned.