Wikipedia:Civil POV pushing

This is an essay on the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view and Wikipedia:Civility policies. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

Shortcuts WP:CPPWP:CPP WP:CPUSHWP:CPUSH WP:PUSHWP:PUSH

This page in a nutshell: Civil POV-pushers argue politely and in compliance with Wikipedia civility principles, but also with bad faith, which discourages or upsets the other contributors. In a discussion, blame is often assigned to the person who loses their temper, which is even more frustrating for good-faith contributors trapped in such discussions.

Wikipedia, and specifically the dispute resolution process, has a difficult time dealing with civil POV pushers. The Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) has a mixed record in dealing with such problem users. The Arbitration Committee has chosen to avoid focusing on content, because admittedly they are not subject experts, and often these issues are complicated enough that knowledge of the topic is necessary to identify pseudoscience, crankery, conspiracy theories, marginal nationalist or historic viewpoints, and the like. (One important reason for this is that oftentimes there is a great deal of misinformation surrounding these topics.) Rather than focusing on content the Arbitration Committee has focused on behavior. The problem is compounded because it often takes the form of long-term behavior that cannot accurately be summarized in a few diffs. As such, the committee has difficulty dealing with "civil" POV pushers—editors who repeatedly disregard or manipulate Wikipedia's content policies but are superficially civil, or not-quite-uncivil-enough to merit sanctions.

As a result of the Arbitration Committee's failure to deal with these issues, the committee has effectively abdicated the responsibility for ensuring neutrality, verifiability, and other content standards to a few users (mostly, but not entirely admins) who patrol these articles and attempt to keep them free of disruption. These users are generally very knowledgeable about the subject and committed to Wikipedia's policies on proper sourcing and appropriate weight. Unfortunately, they tend to burn out. Usually they burn out in one of two ways:

• The impatient ones tend to become angry as a result of the seemingly never-ending problems these articles cause, become uncivil, and get sanctioned by ArbCom for incivility.
• The patient ones tend to go more quietly. They become disillusioned by the never-ending problems and the lack of support from the Wikipedia community, and stop editing on these topics or quit the site entirely.

This is an untenable situation.

On occasion the Arbitration Committee acknowledges the existence of this problem. In response to suggestions that ArbCom use a related arbitration case to set down some "far-reaching, well-written, solid, effective principles for dealing with POV pushers who are civil" it was suggested to formulate a list of principles and remedies. The original impetus for this page was to provide such a list, though in the end ArbCom declined to address the issue.

Behaviors

Civil POV-pushing involves being superficially polite while exhibiting some or all of the following behaviors:

• Editing primarily or entirely on one topic or theme.
• Edit warring and excessive reverting.
• Using sockpuppets, or recruiting meat puppets.

Discussions

• Using the talk page for soapboxing, and/or to re-raise the same issues that have already been discussed numerous times.
• Attempting to wear down more serious editors and become an expert in an odd kind of way on their niche POV. Such editors often outlast their competitors because they're more invested in their point of view.
• Misrepresenting other editors or discussions in an attempt to incriminate or belittle others' opinions.
• Attempting to label others or otherwise discredit their opinion based on that person's associations rather than the core of their argument. See ad hominem.

Double standards

Shortcut

• WP:DOUBLESTANDARDSWP:DOUBLESTANDARDS

• Applying double standards, using inconsistent logic across discussions, applying an argument or standard in one situation but using a contradictory one in the next discussion if it suits their POV.

For example, an editor may participate in articles for deletion discussions, keeping articles that support their POV and deleting articles that do not, even if the articles otherwise have similar notability.

Sealioning

See also: Wikipedia:Efficiency

Shortcuts

• WP:SEALIONWP:SEALION
• WP:SEALIONINGWP:SEALIONING

• Sealioning is a particular form of civil POV-pushing in discussions, with some distinctive characteristics. It can sometimes occur in the form of simple trolling, as well as with a deliberate POV intent. Other times, such POV-pushers are quite fluent in Wikipedia policies, and latch on to those policies that, on their face, are the embodiment of reasonable expectations, such as the BLP policy, as well as NPOV itself, and demand absolutist adherence to those policies.
  These POV-pushers characteristically make a series of frivolous and time-wasting requests for comment or arbitration in an attempt to wear down or provoke other editors. They politely feign a desire to simply understand the issue, while asking question after question, ignoring the substance of previous replies in order to raise yet another question, and prevent the discussion from reaching a reasonable conclusion. Sometimes, they employ large language models to add large amounts of machine-generated text to discussions. They bait good-faith editors into losing their cool, and then weaponize those lapses in order to gain the upper hand.
  In a variation of sealioning, the questioner does not so much feign a desire to understand the issue better, but instead to pin down another editor's opinion and how that editor arrived at that opinion. The questioner asks leading questions in the manner of an attorney conducting cross-examination, but with exaggerated courtesy framed around just wanting to understand what the other editor thinks. The real intention is to make the other editor squirm, and possibly goad them into saying something that will reflect badly on them. When another editor makes a flawed argument, it is much simpler to just point out the flaw, but the sealioner wants instead to draw out the process and try to embarrass the other editor by making that editor point it out themselves.
  Sometimes, an appropriate response to someone practicing sealioning is: "Instead of asking these questions, you should just say whatever you want to say."

Examples

Topics affected by this problem include:

Principles

• Civility is not limited to superficial politeness but includes the overall behavior of the user. Superficially polite behaviors still may be uncivil. Some examples are politely phrased baiting, frivolous or vexatious use of process, ill-considered but politely phrased accusations, unrelenting pestering, and abuse of talk pages as a platform to expound upon personal opinions unrelated to specific content issues.
• Just as WP:NPOV, WP:V, and WP:NOR cannot be applied in isolation, WP:CIVIL should not be interpreted or enforced without reference to other guidelines and policies. Civility is important, but it does not trump other core behavioral and content policies.
• Using Wikipedia as a vehicle for advocacy, or to advance a specific agenda, damages the encyclopedia and disrupts the process of collaborative editing. Wikipedia is not here to right great wrongs. Even when such behavior is superficially civil it is just as harmful to the project, if not more so, than incivility.
• The requirement to assume good faith is not an excuse for uncooperative behavior. There is a limit to how long good faith can be extended to editors who are continually shown to be acting in a manner that is detrimental to the growth and improvement of the encyclopedia. Nor is AGF defined as doublespeak for urging all editors to agree with a particular viewpoint and accept any changes that are advocated.
• Civility does not mean that editors cannot disagree. Academe is well known for spirited debates and disagreements and these often point the way to progress. The key principle is "stay on topic"; that is, arguments should be on the merits and not personalities. Editors should bear in mind that a disagreement with their point is not an attack on their honor.

Suggested remedies

• This is a type of behavior that is very easy to do; all it takes is a willingness to spend the time creating the necessary walls of text until the other editor(s) become frustrated, give up in disgust and go away. It is incredibly tedious to prove and almost as tedious to assess because by its very nature it requires many multiple diffs. You simply cannot prove it with 3 or 4; editors assessing the situation would have to then take the complaining editor’s word for it that this was being repeated over the course of a long wall of text. Because of this, complaints of sealioning/civil POV pushing about an editor who has been found to be exhibiting this behavior before should be taken seriously, and such complaints should not be closed until someone has been willing to investigate.
• Accounts which use Wikipedia for the sole or primary purpose of advocating a specific agenda at the expense of core policies and consensus-based editing should be warned, restricted, or ultimately blocked by any uninvolved administrator. Care should be taken to distinguish new accounts from those with an established pattern of disruptive single-purpose advocacy. Likewise, this remedy is not meant to apply to editors who work within a narrow range of topics but adhere to Wikipedia's core policies.
• Where consensus cannot be attained through normal wiki processes, the Arbitration Committee could designate "lead" editors who have considerable expertise on that article or topic. Lead editors would be empowered to direct discussion, determine consensus and designate discussions as closed. However, the Arbitration Committee has done this only very rarely, and there is considerable opposition to it doing it at all: the committee is expected to deal with behavior, not content.
• If an editor insists on continuing to bring up an issue which has been discussed and decided, especially if they have no new information that can add to the issue, they should be pointed to the previous discussion, warned, restricted and ultimately blocked by any uninvolved administrator. An "involved administrator" (for the purposes of allowing uninvolved administrators to impose sanctions on problem users) is one who has a current, direct, personal conflict with a problem user on the specific issue at hand. Previous interactions on other articles or topics does not make one involved; previously editing the same article (but a different matter) does not make one involved. Broad definitions of "involved" that exclude administrators who have any prior experience with the article or editors in question are counterproductive. They result in overemphasis on superficial civility at the expense of more complex and long-term behavior. See WP:UNINVOLVED.

See also

External links

• Sea lioning, from the original Wondermark comic