Χρήστης:ManosHacker/πρόχειρο/Asaf CEE meeting 2016 (Wikimedia School)

Summary

All wikis experience conflict. It is as inevitable as taxes. But there are some well-understood principles to navigating inevitable conflict better and less painfully, and I would like to offer some concrete distinctions and mental models that could help us be better participants in conflict when it occurs, and to better avoid conflict the rest of the time. Asaf will present concepts and the participants will have brief exercises in groups. This session is based on a condensation of a 2-day workshop on conflict management Asaf has produced for the Ukrainian community in Kyiv in May 2016.

Expected outcomes

The outcomes may be quite hard to measure, but are expected to be a more sophisticated and less instinctive approach to conflict by workshop attendees in their respective wikis. Even a single person's changed attitude can transform a conflict for the better.

Session notes

....

Outcomes

....

ELEPHANTS AND MAHOOTS

(elephant drivers of India, it's an art to navigate Elephants in India) <== what is a Mahout)

If you have issues with humans - we'll talk about it today. How to have *better* conflicts. Because you cannot not have conflicts with other humans. Conflicts are inevitable, we can learn to cope with them better.

Condensing 2 days of workshop to 90 minutes.

Conflict is not just a disagreement. We can disagree about a plethora of stuff without being in conflict. Conflict is a disagreement that activates us emotionally. Something that upsets us, or puts us in despair. Or drains us of energy.

To prevent activating such conflict is easier than to get out from it once it starts. One answer to the question of dealing witrh humans is clear and open communication.

Start by framing what your communication is about. "This is about the budget". People might mistake your frame when you forget to set it. Are you upset about what the article says, or how it says it? Frame it!

Advocate for it. Say what you think is right. Don't skip right to the evidence. Say what you think. Illustrate/support with examples.

Inquire what do others think. It might be clear to you that you just presented all arguments, but you may be wrong. Even if others don't convince you, they deserve a chance to feel they were heard. Not just be heard, but also feel heard. When the people feel they are heard, they calm down. When not, they might react with sarcasm or aggression.

Lots of conflicts on Wikipedia because it's made by humans. Would be so much easier if it was only made by bots :)

Two types of conflicts on Wiki

Content conflicts are common, because it matters whether X is described as Y, or whether the page exists at all.

behaviour conflicts. You are an idiot, he insulted me... well, we're not that advanced primates at times.

The best articles on WP are usually those that had a lot of questioning, arguing, that excite people. When a lot of people kick the ball their way, the result is usually good content.

content conflicts are solved by discuusing and it produce good content . We have all kinds of rules to regulate conflicts or prevent them altogether. We also have methods to resolve conflicts. Group discussions, Arbitration Commitees and so on.

Finally we have sanctions and exclusions. Topic bans, or blocks if it comes to that.

Wikipedias are a living system, they need inputs and outputs.

People (editors) move on for all kinds of reasons to survive we need new editors.

sometimes they rage-quit promising never to come back.

And new editors come with new perspectives. They don't know all the discussions that we had in the past years, they don't automatically ambrace all the complexities of our system an push against it. They bring new feedback. We often think of that feedback as threatening to the established ways we do things this way. Some of those would try to push against our boundaries. To some extent this might be good, we might need to extend our boundaries once in a while, change our rules to adapt. (Example of change of rules in the Hebrew WP as a result of such feeback) Like we did with footnotes/citations. Initially we needed none -(Asaf mentions Hebrew wikipedia, but most "old" wikis made that step some time in the past)

Sometimes that pressure needs to be resisted. "Let's just ignore copyright". We can't.

A healthy system balances openness, flexibility to pressure, with resistance.

Ideas vs. Emotions

3 distinctions between two things

Emoitons and ideas

(Slide with a picture of an elephant and a Mahout/driver)

Asaf invites to see that picture as a metaphore:

The mahoot is your conscient mind. The ideas in your head. The elephant are your emotions. The limbic system. It influences everything we do. The elephant is both larger and stronger than the mahoot. But it is he who determines where do they go. *Most of the time*.

When would the Mahoud lose the control about the elephant?

When it's in pain/hurt or scared/upset- the mahoot could loose control. The elephant takes over, training goes out the window and it reacts on pure instinct. What could the mahoot do? There is very little the mahout could do against it. All the secret signals would probably not work. Nobody of us is always in control of our elephants and we continously meet many other elephants and mahouts that could get into our way, scare or annoy our elephants

Respect other elephants which might have other rules and behaviours than our elephant.

The resistance line

• Jokes, sarcasm, excuses, gossip, rage quit, strike, disruption can be reactions of people who are not in control of a situation.
• We all engaged in these kinds of resistance before - what can we do against it? To not have our emotions take over control over us? => Learn what upsets your elephant. What are you triggers? Perhaps let other people deal with issues that trigger your elephant.
• Create an atmosphere where it is safe to disagree. Make disagreement safe, try to also treat disruptive feedback as feedback, agree with what you can, give agency, mirror opinions - literally repeat the words of the other (best way to make people feel heard, relax the elephant)
• Build consensus around majority - but there is always a minority, those elephants can get upset. Appreciate their point of view even if you won the argument, where they are coming from, that the discussion was frustrating for them. Seems trivial but it is not. Is there a little something that we can do /change about the current situation that makes it a little more acceptable for you. Just asking them already can make them feel better and helps them save their face.
• Use humor to heal, not to harm.
• Shut our complete bad faith or total trolling - it's the opposite of civil argument. There need to be boundaries and people who are absolutely not willing to accept them, you need to speak up and shut them out. Especially if it is NOT your discussion. Don't stay silent. Show up, don't just be a silent witness. Especially if it is not your conflict.
• Passive toleration of trolling by decent people is a huge problem throughout internet communities, because that means, that the community de facto tolerate non-civil behaviour.