Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 16:17, 22 November 2007

This page documents an English Misplaced Pages behavioral guideline. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page.

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Canvassing is sending messages to multiple Wikipedians with the intent to inform them about a community discussion. Under certain conditions it is acceptable to notify other editors of ongoing discussions, but messages that are written to influence the outcome rather than to improve the quality of a discussion compromise the consensus building process and are generally considered disruptive. This guideline explains how to notify editors without engaging in disruptive canvassing.

Types of canvassing

The following table explains under which circumstances notifications are considered acceptable ("friendly notices") or unacceptable ("disruptive canvassing"). In a nutshell, to avoid disrupting the consensus building process on Misplaced Pages, editors should keep the number of notifications small (or seek out WikiProjects), keep the message text neutral, and not preselect recipients according to their established opinions.

Friendly notices

Neutrally worded notifications sent to a small number of editors are considered "friendly notices" if they are intended to improve rather than to influence a discussion (for example if a Wikipedian is known for being an expert in a certain field and has shown interest in participating in related discussions). This is more acceptable if they have made an unsolicited request to be kept informed, but unacceptable if they have asked you to stop. Examples of friendly notices include:

• Notifying a related WikiProject
• Notifying all editors who substantively edited or discussed the article or project
• Notifying all editors who participated in a preceding discussion of the article or project, as long as it goes out to all editors

Always keep the message neutral, and leave a note on the discussion itself that you sent out friendly notices. Editors who like to be informed about Misplaced Pages discussions can add the "Friendly notice" userbox to their user page.

Excessive cross-posting

Important discussions sometimes happen at remote locations in Misplaced Pages, so editors might be tempted to publicize this discussion by mass-mailing other Wikipedians. Even if the goal is not to influence the outcome of the debate, indiscriminately sending announcements to uninvolved editors is considered "talk-page spamming" (or e-mail spamming) and therefore disruptive. Editors trying to attract a larger audience for a discussion should contact related WikiProjects first and use only limited friendly notices to individual editors.

Campaigning

A hard and fast rule does not exist with regard to selectively notifying on their talk pages certain editors who have or are thought to have a predetermined point of view, in order to influence a vote. However, the greater the number of editors contacted, the more often this behavior is engaged in, and the greater the resulting disruption, the more likely it is that this behavior will result in warnings and/or sanctions. Some Wikipedians have suggested that informing editors on all "sides" of a debate (e.g., everyone who participated in a previous deletion debate on a given subject) may be acceptable.

Votestacking

Votestacking is sending mass talk messages only to editors who are on the record with a specific opinion (such as via a userbox or other user categorization) and informing them of a current or upcoming vote. In the case of a re-consideration of a previous debate (such as a "no consensus" result on an AFD or CFD), it is similarly frowned-upon by many editors to send mass talk messages to those who expressed only a particular viewpoint on the previous debate, such as only "Keep" voters or only "Delete" voters.

Stealth canvassing

Because it is less transparent than on-wiki notifications, the use of email or other off-wiki communication to notify editors is discouraged unless there is a significant reason for not using talk page notifications. Depending on the specific circumstances, sending a notification to a group of editors by email may be looked at more negatively than sending the same message to the same group of people on their talk pages.

Forum shopping

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The term "forum shopping", or "asking the other parent", refers to repeatedly asking for outside opinions until you get an opinion you like. For instance, if you're blocked you can ask for an outside review of said block; if this review concludes that the block was proper, it is generally inappropriate to ask for yet another outside review. Forum shopping can be considered "internal spam" and can be grounds for blocking.

This also includes bringing up the same issue on a number of forums in succession (e.g. the village pump, admin board, deletion discussions, etc.) because the debate on the first forum did not yield the result you wanted.

If you have canvassed

The following guidelines for cross-posting have wide acceptance among Wikipedians:

• Be open. Do not make cross-posts that initially appear to be individual messages.
• Be polite. Wikiquette issues are extra-important when a message is likely to be read by many people.
• Avoid redundancy. Rather than copying the same five page essay to twenty talk pages, write it once, in the place where it is most relevant, and then link to it.
• Do not use a bot. If you're not willing to spend the time personally sending the messages, don't force us to spend the time reading it (or throwing it away). Also note that running bots without authorization is almost guaranteed to get both your account and the bot account blocked.
• Do not attempt to sway consensus by encouraging participation in a discussion by people that you already know have a certain point of view.

There are often better alternatives to canvassing. For example, suppose you've written a cool new article, and you want lots of people to read it. Simply add links to it from other encyclopedia articles, where it is relevant, and also add it to appropriate categories. This increases the exposure of your article, while simultaneously benefiting the encyclopedia, without annoying your fellow contributors.

Responding to disruptive canvassing

The use of rollback to remove notices from user talk pages is not recommended, as the recipients will read the notices anyway, and will post a large number of complaints on your talk page. Canvassing notices can be expunged from user talk pages by deleting the affected talk pages, then restoring all revisions except those containing the notices, and those that were already deleted. It is recommended that caution be exercised before deploying this technique, since talk pages containing an extremely large number of revisions may be difficult to restore, and since the deletion of pages with large numbers of inbound links can cause server slowdowns. Future modifications to the MediaWiki software may permit the deletion of specific revisions of a page directly; such a feature, if implemented, would be a highly effective tool for cleaning up user talk page canvassing.

Notes and references

1. Any kind of solicitation may meet this definition, including, for example, a custom signature to automatically append some promotional message to every signed post.
2. On at least one occasion, a provocative attempt to stack an ongoing poll by cross-posting has contributed towards an Arbitration Committee ruling of disruptive behavior that resulted in probation and eventual banning by the community. An arbitrator clarified the position: "Briefly, I think a reasonable amount of communication about issues is fine. Aggressive propaganda campaigns are not. The difference lies in the disruption involved. If what is happening is getting everyone upset then it is a problem. Often the dividing line is crossed when you are contacting a number of people who do not ordinarily edit the disputed article." See Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/Guanaco, MarkSweep, et al#StrangerInParadise is disruptive.
3. The Arbitration Committee has ruled that "he occasional light use of cross-posting to talk pages is part of Misplaced Pages's common practice. However, excessive cross-posting goes against current Misplaced Pages community norms. In a broader context, it is unwiki." See Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/IZAK#Principles.

See also

• Misplaced Pages:Spam
• Misplaced Pages:Multiposting
• Misplaced Pages:Sockpuppets section on meatpuppets
• Misplaced Pages:Survey notification (inactive)

• Misplaced Pages behavioral guidelines