LifeWiki Edit War Reporting Thread

[dvgrn]

There seems to have been a significant increase in acrimonious discussions on the LifeWiki recently -- in the last year or two, let's say. Off and on people have been having what I would call edit wars -- multiple edit / undo / edit / undo / edit / undo sequences, for example, re-making and then undoing the same changes, with the same or similar edit summaries each time.

Now, it seems to me that a single edit, undo, and re-edit is generally a really good place to stop this kind of sequence, and move on to a different type of discussion.

Restoring an edit after an undo shows that two LifeWiki editors continue to disagree after explanations have been given on both sides. One way this can happen is because of conflicting opinions about which factors in the discussion are the most important ones -- different editors working from different premises, basically.

Disagreements like this can easily get buried and ignored on LifeWiki talk pages, and even on the Tiki Bar. Other LifeWiki editors don't necessarily get involved, and moderators may not notice a given argument, or may not know enough about the issue to think they can be much help in solving it. The usual solution has always been "wait and see" -- usually things get sorted out just fine in a year or three.

That hasn't been working so well recently.

Forum Post Reports
Unlike appeals for "executive decisions" on the Tiki Bar and in article talk pages, the reporting system on the conwaylife.com forums seems to get enough attention that it is reasonably well maintained. Post reports don't generally sit around too long before someone picks them up and does something with them.

It seems like a reasonable goal to continue to aim for zero open post reports, at least most of the time. Post reports can be simply closed if the issue doesn't seem to rise to the level of any action being needed -- but at least with reports, there's a record in the moderation queue that someone did make a definite decision on the issue.

Converting a LifeWiki Edit War to a Forum Post Report
Let's say that an edit / undo / edit sequence happens in an article. As soon as this occurs, the LifeWiki editor who performed the first "undo" should review and think about the reasons for the repeated edit.

If the "undo"-ing editor still thinks that it's really important that a second "undo" should occur, they can now post a link here in this thread to the "history" page of the article under contention. A summary of both sides of the issue could go along with that if possible. The "undo"-ing editor can then immediately report their own post.

That will put a post report into the moderation queue, same as other types of post reports. I'm hoping that having everything in one single clear queue will help with the goal of getting to zero unhandled incidents in a reasonable amount of time (usually).

Please bear in mind that this is a path for escalating an issue. It will be best not to use this too often, and it definitely shouldn't be used before other avenues have been tried and a definite impasse appears to have been reached.

-- Of course it's quite possible that this whole idea won't work out particularly well. If that's the case we'll eventually try something else... but let's give this method a try for a while and see what happens.

Discussion?
Before we get started, the beginning of this thread would be a good place for questions or comments on any of this.

[confocaloid]

[...] The "undo"-ing editor can then immediately report their own post.

That will put a post report into the moderation queue, same as other types of post reports. I'm hoping that having everything in one single clear queue will help with the goal of getting to zero unhandled incidents in a reasonable amount of time (usually).

Please bear in mind that this is a path for escalating an issue. It will be best not to use this too often, and it definitely shouldn't be used before other avenues have been tried and a definite impasse appears to have been reached. [...]

One question is, does this align with the rule of thumb/expectation that forum post reports are reserved for marking spam posts and significant rule-breaking behavior?
If I understand correctly, here people would be expected to report their own posts, even though those posts would not break any rules.

[dvgrn]

One question is, does this align with the rule of thumb/expectation that forum post reports are reserved for marking spam posts and significant rule-breaking behavior?
If I understand correctly, here people would be expected to report their own posts, even though those posts would not break any rules.

Yup, this thread is definitely supposed to be a clear exception to the normal use of post reports. It will be extra clear because people don't generally report their own posts (except occasionally when they want them deleted, but that's not going to cause any confusion.)

Basically, it's an experiment to try to get LifeWiki edit wars onto a moderation queue where they'll be noticed quicker and more reliably. No idea yet if the experiment will work or not. Of course everybody would be much happier if everybody would just figure out how to not have LifeWiki edit wars any more, so this is just a new alternate mechanism for emergencies!

[Haycat2009]

What kind of edit wars can be reported here? Does a couple of undoes count as an edit war? And should vandalism leading to an edit war be reported here?

[confocaloid]

What kind of edit wars can be reported here? Does a couple of undoes count as an edit war? And should vandalism leading to an edit war be reported here?

These feel like somewhat "wrong questions".

If you edited an article, and then someone else did an undo of your edit, then maybe it is better to not repeat your edit again, at least not without further discussion (e.g. on the talk page of the article)?

Vandalism is basically when someone is intentionally damaging pages. That is clearly beyond simple edit warring due to differing opinions on content.

[dvgrn]

What kind of edit wars can be reported here? Does a couple of undoes count as an edit war? And should vandalism leading to an edit war be reported here?

Good questions. If there are "a couple of undoes", then that implies an edit / undo / edit / undo sequence -- probably with edit-summary comments along the lines of

(edit) a foo is a type of bar
(undo) no it isn't, because blah blah
(edit) yes it is
(undo) no it isn't, because blah blah as I already said

The last two edit summaries are both absolutely terrible, of course -- nobody should do that kind of thing! The second edit doesn't respond to the explanation or give any new information -- and the second undo also makes no attempt to figure out what the first editor's objection is or to try to explain the undo from a new angle.

So I'd say that if "a couple of undoes" are starting to look like the above sequence, and neither editor can come up with a way to usefully take the discussion somewhere else, then it's definitely in edit-war territory and could be reported here. If the edit-summary comments are still supplying new information and nobody is getting upset, or if the discussion can move to a talk page and continue without anybody accusing anyone of stubbornness or stonewalling, then of course that's much better!

Vandalism is a totally different category, as confocaloid described. It's usually pretty near instantly recognizable as someone being deliberately annoying and making no attempt to contribute anything good to the LifeWiki. Moderators will just uncheck the vandal's trusted flag in those cases, and then there's obviously not an edit war after that.

[hotcrystal0]

Shouldn't this thread be pinned?

[confocaloid]

Shouldn't this thread be pinned?

Why? I don't think it is a good idea.
I think a more reasonable way would be to create an issue-specific thread, whenever there's some nontrivial issue without an obvious solution that is not limited to just a few wiki pages.

Unrelated, I marked for deletion two of your subpages, as content unrelated to the purpose of LifeWiki. I think such content serves no helpful purpose.
User:Hotcrystal0/How likely will a thread get locked
User:Hotcrystal0/copy of unname66609's userpage

[confocaloid]

Unrelated, I marked for deletion two of your subpages, as content unrelated to the purpose of LifeWiki. I think such content serves no helpful purpose.
User:Hotcrystal0/How likely will a thread get locked
User:Hotcrystal0/copy of unname66609's userpage

"Just an archive" of content that does not contribute anything helpful, is again content that does not contribute anything helpful. The wiki is not supposed to be an indiscriminate collection of information.

I know that. The reason the article even exists is because the original one got deleted.

It's a userpage rather than an article. Even as a userpage, these pages are not part of any effort to contribute something helpful. I don't really know why those pages exist.

I don’t think that’s a valid reason to flag a page for deletion.

I think it is a perfectly valid reason to delete those pages. Any content not relevant to the purpose of LifeWiki should not be there.
If you need it for whatever reason, you can keep it locally for yourself, instead of using LifeWiki as a hosting for random stuff.

LifeWiki:Deletion_policy#Procedure_for_administrators

[dvgrn]

I think it is a perfectly valid reason to delete those pages. Any content not relevant to the purpose of LifeWiki should not be there.
If you need it for whatever reason, you can keep it locally for yourself, instead of using LifeWiki as a hosting for random stuff.

LifeWiki:Deletion_policy#Procedure_for_administrators

I suppose the presence of this discussion here serves as a request for a moderator-type executive decision. We've actually had a three-person edit war recently that hinged on the question of whether user pages fall under the same rules of "relevance to LifeWiki purposes strictly required", or whether user pages belong to the user that created them and the rules are a bit looser for those pages.

I don't think very many definite rules about user pages are written down anywhere, but as I understand the current general consensus:

1) In general, people shouldn't edit other people's user pages without their permission. Some types of user pages are deliberately designed to be edited by other users, but some are just local sandbox content, and there's generally no reason for other users to make uninvited edits there. They are considered to be more experimental, not subject to anything like the notability rules of regular articles.

2) As the guidelines say, there are some exceptions to the above rule. For example, I removed a section that could be read as a rule-violating attack on a specific forum member, from one of the two pages -- while also removing the proposed-deletion flags. Those both seem like moderator-type things to do.

Besides that one detail about avoiding attacks ... very similar to the edit-war case linked above, it doesn't look to me like there was anything terribly wrong with the pages, so I don't see why deletion would be a good idea. User pages belong to the user in question, and generally everything will be fine if other people just stay out of them when their input is not appreciated.

3) There's an exception to the "user pages shouldn't be judged by LifeWiki notability guidelines". Experimental usage should definitely be minor and occasional. The exact level that's considered excessive is going to have to be up to individual moderators and/or the community in general, but obviously it's no good if someone starts trying to hide an entire unrelated wiki inside their user pages, or starts making hundreds of edits per day and flooding the recent-changes list.

But if it's just a few occasional edits, it definitely seems better to just make a policy of ignoring them, rather than starting any arguments about them or trying to get them deleted.

[confocaloid]

I disagree with dvgrn's 'solution'. I think keeping these pages is a disservice to the community.

Besides that one detail about avoiding attacks ... very similar to the edit-war case linked above, it doesn't look to me like there was anything terribly wrong with the pages, so I don't see why deletion would be a good idea.

Looks like I already removed a deletion tag from this page once. unname{xxxx} has a tendency to delete old discussion about their past behavior, but it's not really clear that they've learned all the LifeWiki rules thoroughly yet -- so it can be useful to have some record of their past behavior

What I see as an obvious problem with this 'solution', is that

(a) The page does not serve as valid report of their past behaviour. As can be seen https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... on=history there are no edits from any of the accounts in question. In addition, the page already differs from the "original", and the original page (before it got deleted) already was edited several times, including editing replies by other people. In other words, the source page was not a valid report of anyone's past behaviour either.

(b) Continued presence of these pages on the wiki serves as evidence that spam is not deleted by moderators, and its disruptiveness is ignored.

The page consists of content that will never help to improve LifeWiki or otherwise contribute to the community. The content is detrimental to the website (this is essentially spamming the wiki by posting modifications of discussions from elsewhere). To me that is a clear reason to delete such pages.

(Even if it was a good evidence of someone's behaviour -- which it is not -- it would still be a Bad Thing to use the wiki to keep track of misdeeds or wrongs by someone. See also WP:POLEMIC.)

[Nathaniel]

I disagree with dvgrn's 'solution'. I think keeping these pages is a disservice to the community.

Disagreeing of course is fine, but as stated at LifeWiki:Deletion policy, the decision to delete a page or not is made at the discretion of Moderators. Undoing a Moderator's decision on the wiki is not OK. In a moment, I will be reverting that page back to the state that dvgrn left it in.

I have written up a new page at LifeWiki:Dispute resolution which outlines procedures to follow for disputes from now on. Right now, I consider this particular dispute to be between Stages 4 and 5: a moderator has been contacted and they have given their judgement. Let's all leave this particular topic for at least a week (Step 5). If dvgrn's judgement still feels bothersome, I will rouse the troops (Moderators) and we'll vote on a course of action (Step 6).

With that said: confocaloid's point re: WP:POLEMIC is well-taken. I don't read that particular user page in that way, but if unname66609 disagrees and wants the page gone, they can message me and I will delete it.

[HerscheltheHerschel]

Can an admin pin this thread?

[dvgrn]

Can an admin pin this thread?

It's already pinned (sticky).

[HerscheltheHerschel]

Can an admin pin this thread?

It's already pinned (sticky).

Oh, I thought only those with a star were pinned.

[hotdogPi]

Star = you've posted in it.

[confocaloid]

EDIT by dvgrn: I've moved this post and responses to it out of the Edit War Reporting Thread.

That thread is meant for self-reporting new edit wars that have started up, not for long discussions of any particular issue. Those discussions should find their way onto some separate dedicated thread on the LifeWiki Discussion Board -- like this one.

I think the posts should be moved back to this thread, to avoid unnecessarily polluting the forum. Those posts are on-topic here. They are about a recent edit war involving myself and dvgrn.

The self-reporting idea in the first post is inherently destructive to the community. People don't report themselves. Demanding that they do amounts to serious psychological abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

[dvgrn]

I think the posts should be moved back to this thread, to avoid unnecessarily polluting the forum. Those posts are on-topic here.

There seem to be a couple of significant misunderstandings here -- not at all surprising, again, because this is a completely new system that we're setting up here.

Those posts were definitely not on topic here, because this is the LifeWiki Edit War Reporting Thread. Those posts discussed an edit war, but did not report one. Discussion is supposed to happen in discussion threads -- so I created an appropriate discussion thread, also on this LifeWiki Discussion board.

Discussion is what this newly created board is supposed to be used for, so those posts pretty clearly don't constitute any kind of pollution (in my opinion).

The self-reporting idea in the first post is inherently destructive to the community. People don't report themselves. Demanding that they do amounts to serious psychological abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

This seems like a much bigger misunderstanding. None of these three sentences seem even vaguely true. I've seen people report their own posts on several occasions, whenever there's something they can't do themselves and they want to draw moderators' attention to a post.

This new type of self-reported post will be created for the specific purpose of reporting an edit-war problem. Notice that there is absolutely no expectation that anyone will self-report (what they consider to be) their own bad behavior. That would be an extremely silly thing to expect anyone to do. Anybody that's self-aware enough to realize that they're the one who is behaving badly ... will perfectly well be able to stop edit warring without any moderator interference. That's a much better option than using this new clunky reporting system, for sure!

But it looks like sometimes potential LifeWiki edit-war situations are likely to continue to happen. A self-reported post in this thread will generally mean that the author is saying this:

• "Another LifeWiki editor has made a 're-do' type edit on the LifeWiki, that I strongly disagree with."
• "After careful review and repeated good-faith attempts at discussion, I still really think that that 're-do' change change should be reverted."
• "I'm aware that it's against LW:DR rules to make that next 'undo' edit myself, because that would (very likely) start an unpleasant and unnecessary edit war that has no clear path to resolution."
• "Attempts to discuss the issue have failed, so I want to escalate this this issue and bring it to moderators' attention."

Writing a summary of both sides of the issue, posting it in the LifeWiki Edit War Reporting Thread, and immediately reporting that post, is the new standard procedure that we're trying out. That's the current way of getting the attention of a moderator who has time to review the issue and make an executive decision, without unnecessarily taking up the time of other moderators/admins.

[Haycat2009]

EDIT by dvgrn: I've moved this post and responses to it out of the Edit War Reporting Thread.

That thread is meant for self-reporting new edit wars that have started up, not for long discussions of any particular issue. Those discussions should find their way onto some separate dedicated thread on the LifeWiki Discussion Board -- like this one.

I think the posts should be moved back to this thread, to avoid unnecessarily polluting the forum. Those posts are on-topic here. They are about a recent edit war involving myself and dvgrn.

The self-reporting idea in the first post is inherently destructive to the community. People don't report themselves. Demanding that they do amounts to serious psychological abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

Agreed. You cannot trust people to report themselves, as they think that they are right and their opinion is the only correct one - if they did not, there would not even have an edit war in the first place, as they would adknowledge that they should not undo the next edit, preventing the chaos before it starts. It would probably be better for this thread to be for others reporting threads.

[dvgrn]

Agreed. You cannot trust people to report themselves, as they think that they are right and their opinion is the only correct one - if they did not, there would not even have an edit war in the first place, as they would [acknowledge] that they should not undo the next edit, preventing the chaos before it starts.

That is precisely what I just explained in my last post.

So we are all in agreement on this point, in a sense.

However, please read the current LW:DR rules carefully. Step 5 links to this thread. The best way to bring an early-stage edit war to the attention of moderators is to post a summary to this thread, then immediately self-report that post. That puts the issue in the queue of problems for moderators to deal with. The report will be a sign that the reporter is following the rules, and that they believe that an unproductive edit war would get started/continue if they didn't escalate the issue. It does not imply that the reporter thinks they are wrong about the issue described in the post.

This is how you escalate an issue to get moderators' attention. That's all. It's a clunky mechanism, but it will work fine once people get used to it.

The Other Options That Don't Work Very Well
1) A reported post in this thread is likely to work a lot better than directly contacting a moderator. The moderator that you pick might well be busy at that moment. With a self-reported post, you'll get the first moderator who has time to review things and make an executive decision.

2) Spamming all the moderators at once with an edit-war notification in a PM is also not the best option.

... That's obvious, right? You'd be getting everybody's attention at once, when you only need to get one person's attention. Then the mods have to do some further negotiation to figure out who is actually available -- it's kind of a big waste of everyone's time.

With the reporting system, the first available moderator will simply close the post so that other moderators won't see it any more. That lets other moderators know that the issue has been claimed and will be addressed.

[confocaloid]

Edit war in 0-degree colour-preserving reflector (March 2023). Context:

I think recent edits in the infoboxes in pages 0-degree colour-preserving reflector (March 2023) and Galumpher should be reverted, to restore the plain black-and-white display (default theme).

Unlike the embedded viewers in the main part of the article, there was never any discussion of non-default themes in the infobox, as far as I know. Almost all pages with an infobox and a viewer in the infobox use default theme in the infobox, and it makes sense to keep consistency on this.

In addition, infoboxes (unlike embedded viewers in the main part) lack an associated caption that could be used to explain the meaning of different colours in the highlighted reaction envelope to a LifeWiki reader.

Re: the edit summary -

The envelope is important for visualising when it can be used - will the envelope hit a catalyst near it?

If you are going to use the pattern in a construction, you will likely have to try it in Golly to see whether or not it works. I don't think the animation helps with that.

I think "envelope via THEME Book" works best under the following conditions:

• The affected pattern is placed in an embedded viewer outside the infobox, in the main part of the article.
• The affected pattern is shown without any animation (a static pattern), and STARTFROM is used to choose the initial generation.
• A concise explanation of the meaning of additional colours can be placed in the caption for that embedded viewer, and/or in the preceding text.

[confocaloid]

An edit war in https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=131196
User:DroneBetter readded content which I previously reverted ( https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=131195 ).

In particular, I believe discussion of details of LifeWiki contributions of the person is not appropriate in the article about that person. Especially details such as some IP addresses labelled "Spam User". Many other such details should be also removed, as (a) information potentially of interest only to some editors but not to readers, (b) potentially incorrect/harmful information about a person.

Quoting from LifeWiki:Style guide:

The purpose of LifeWiki is to provide encyclopedia-style content describing Conway's Game of Life and similar cellular automata. All articles should be informative and targeted at the site's audience. Information that is only of interest to the writer or to other editors should not be included in articles.
[...]
Only information of interest to almost all readers should be included: 90% of the readers should not have to wade through uninteresting information just so that 10% of readers can find the information.
[...]
It is better to have no information than to have inaccurate information because inaccuracies mislead readers and are hard to find and correct.

[DroneBetter]

An edit war in https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=131196
User:DroneBetter readded content which I previously reverted ( https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=131195 ).

I thought your reversion was only cautionary, not out of any kind of fundamental reason (since your explanation for it in the edit summary was "I'm not sure userspace pages should be linked from the main namespace," and my summary noted that the respected contributor David Raucci/HotdogPi did so without issue two years minus two days ago).

In particular, I believe discussion of details of LifeWiki contributions of the person is not appropriate in the article about that person. Especially details such as some IP addresses labelled "Spam User". Many other such details should be also removed, as (a) information potentially of interest only to some editors but not to readers, (b) potentially incorrect/harmful information about a person.

I unburied some pages he'd written in his userspace to make them easier for those curious to see (all aggregated in one place), just like the bibliography of his scientific papers on CA I added also.

I'm not sure what I added that could be deemed harmful, he is dead and his memory should be preserved by sharing the things he wanted the owrld to see.

The purpose of LifeWiki is to provide encyclopedia-style content describing Conway's Game of Life and similar cellular automata. All articles should be informative and targeted at the site's audience. Information that is only of interest to the writer or to other editors should not be included in articles.
[...]
Only information of interest to almost all readers should be included: 90% of the readers should not have to wade through uninteresting information just so that 10% of readers can find the information.

I think it's fair to assume that someone reading a page about him would like to know what he's done, recall also another quote from the LifeWiki editing advisory pages (as added 14 years ago),

Users should assume good faith, be bold, avoid conflicts of interest, and so on.

and that Wikipedia:Be bold links to Wikipedia:Ignore all rules, which says

If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it.

(ie. one should use their better discretion where necessary)

It is better to have no information than to have inaccurate information because inaccuracies mislead readers and are hard to find and correct.

I'm not sure why you included this one as well, he wrote the articles and the only alterations from other users since then have been very minor and in the interest of preservation, I'm not sure what is inaccurate about it.

[confocaloid]

It is better to have no information than to have inaccurate information because inaccuracies mislead readers and are hard to find and correct.

I'm not sure why you included this one as well, he wrote the articles and the only alterations from other users since then have been very minor and in the interest of preservation, I'm not sure what is inaccurate about it.

Your edit ( https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=119371 ) added an excessive amount of details, which I believe go against one or more guidelines I mentioned.
I reverted your edit in https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... did=131195
You added the content back in https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... did=131196 which constitutes an edit war (albeit delayed).

In particular, the footnote you added should be removed. LifeWiki readers who are looking for information about a person do not really need or want to know exactly how many edits they made on wiki; whether or not their user page/talk page were created; how many of their articles were created without an account (which is not really verifiable, and therefore an inaccurate information about someone else who can't defend themselves against this at this point).

The detail about edits from IP addresses merged into a single account is irrelevant to the topic of the article, regardless of how the merged account was named. And that detail becomes more inappropriate given the name of the merged account.

All those details might possibly be of interest to a small subset of LifeWiki editors, but not LifeWiki readers. Hence they should be removed.

Regarding the rest of your edit, I think a bulleted list with dates is unnecessary. It would suffice to add a single sentence listing the userpages (if that is considered appropriate at all), either at the end of an existing section or in a footnote, without having to create a new section.

Even though this is mostly irrelevant here, in your edit summary you linked to Category:Patterns found by David Raucci (which is a category page, rather than an article). I don't believe all those links are needed or appropriate on that category page. If considered appropriate, then just a single link from the category page to a summary/overview userpage would be sufficient. All other links can go on the linked overview userpage.

[confocaloid]

https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=145706
Edit war in Table of oscillators by period over the issue of whether same-lane/overlapping-lane 180-degree reflector shuttles can be meaningfully described as "loops", or that is incorrect/misleading.
Further context viewtopic.php?f=16&t=6376