Board Thread:Moderation Desk/@comment-5722194-20160209164539/@comment-7263041-20160210000350

Those disagreements on whether or not someone should be left alone were few and far between Berenal. In most of the cases I saw, concerns were raised about a particular part of a page, and then a debate would begin discussing the objection and if it was valid or not.

Good example being the debate last night on one of Darthrange's pages. We were discussing the validity of a war between Gilneas and Lordaeron. That was, for the most part, civil until Arathorstories decided to jump in and start another wiki fight with flawed arguments, something he has a habit of doing lately. Did it result in Darthrange getting a bunch of emails telling him about comments on his page? Yes. Were they on topic? Yes.

Now there could have been multiple solutions to this problem outside of such a heavy-handed approach used here.

1. Darthrange could have asked the debaters to move the discussion away from his page so that he wasn't getting any additional emails. Had he asked that, I would have respected his wish and continued the debate elsewhere. I had to do a similar thing when Digman and Ranets were debating on one of my pages long after the matter that started the entire ordeal was resolved. I asked politely, they moved on, problem solved.

2. If complaints were raised to an admin, they could have stepped in and asked for the matter to stop. That would have been respected by all parties involved.

3. If the comments were volatile and not offering any form of criticism, those individual comments could have been removed by an admin. Again I refer to one of Darthrange's pages, specifically his one for Tiberius. We had a random 'wiki contributor' not offering criticism but just generally slamming Darth into the dirt. That comment was not only off topic, but was not offering any form of helpful comment or criticism.

Now on a related note, try looking at this situation from someone who is not an admin, who comments regularily and isn't afraid to offer criticism (some helpful, some harsh but all constructive in one form or another) when it is appropriate. How would this situation look to anyone who wasn't aware of the discussion between the admins? A few people get into an on topic debate that gets heated and suddenly no more comments because a few people complained? With a justification that makes no sense given how article comments to not detract from the overall presentation of the article they're attached to?

I think assuming that you're attempting to silence criticism so you don't have to deal with it anymore is a fair judgement to make at first glance.