Misplaced Pages:Activist - Misplaced Pages

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This is an essay.
It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Misplaced Pages contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Misplaced Pages's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

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WP:ACTIVIST

Perhaps because of its high Internet traffic ranking, Misplaced Pages appears to attract a number of ideological, religious, philosophical, political, and other activists. These activists can present a difficult problem for Misplaced Pages, most obviously because they repeatedly violate Misplaced Pages's neutral point-of-view policy, which seems to be one of the most difficult policies to enforce because of its inherently subjective nature. A lone activist, however, while irritating to editors who are trying to follow the rules, usually cannot exercise controlloing ownership over a topic. On the other hand, when activists band together with other like-minded editors, they can skew an entire range of articles related to their topic of interest. Once a group of activists have all the topic's articles "on message", the activists will guard the articles with noteworthy dedication to make sure they stay on message.

How does one tell if a WP topic has become controlled by activists? The indications listed below provide an easy-to-follow guide. Then, once it is evident that activists have taken control of a topic, how does Misplaced Pages fix it? Unfortunately, it is usually up to an editor who is a glutton for punishment to come along and get the ball rolling. Below are instructions on how to address the problem for those editors willing to try.

Three ways to spot activists

Removal of information

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WP:BADPOV

The easiest way to tell if a group of editors has an activist agenda is how often they seek to remove reliably sourced information from non-biographical articles, instead of cooperating and compromising with other editors to find a way to include it at appropriate length. A variety of reasons will be used to justify the removal. The most common are WP:UNDUE and FRINGE, which are routinely cited to justify the removal of material—even when well-sourced—that is judged to be on the wrong side. Citing UNDUE allows material to be dismissed as a tiny-minority view, a non-specialist view, a view from a good source who has been taken in, a non-peer-reviewed view, a view peer-reviewed by the wrong people, in the wrong way, or in some way controversially so that it doesn't count. The frequency with which UNDUE is cited is one of the most prominent markers of activist editing.

The difference between neutral, good faith editors and those who are not is fairly obvious. Editors operating in good faith will usually try to find some way to cooperate, collaborate, and compromise with almost all other editors. Instead of seeking just to remove the information, good faith editors will work with other editors to find a way to resolve the dispute and try to retain some substance of the text at issue. Activists, on the other hand, usually won't. During a protracted content dispute with activists, tag-team edit warring and long, convoluted wiki-lawyering on the article talk page become the norm. If the activists do agree to include the information, such as if a content request for comment (RfC) goes against them, they will seek to minimize the information as much as possible and word it in a way which favors their point-of-view. Then, they will probably wait a few months and again try to remove the information of which they don't approve. Obviously, the activists want no ambiguity in their articles, as it does not serve their purpose, which is to promote the authority of one particular point of view.

Biographies of Living People

Another sign that ideological activists might control a topic is their treatment of biographies of living people (BLP). Activists treat the BLPs of their ideological adversaries as dumping grounds for almost any kind of pejorative or impeaching information they can find. It doesn't really matter how tenuous the sources are. They could be posts from an advocacy blog hosted by a political lobbying organization, a professor's self-published slide show, or the subject's signature on some controversial petition, it's all good to go as far as they are concerned. Any attempt to remove or qualify some of the negative information or balance out the BLP in question, even a little, is met with cries of "whitewash!" by the activists on each others talk pages and a quick call to action.

If someone tries to do the same thing to the BLP of someone who agrees with their ideology, however, Misplaced Pages's BLP-related policies suddenly become holy writ, strictly interpreted and strenuously enforced with pharisaical fervor. Normally reliable sources, such as major newspapers, suddenly become unreliable, partisan, self-published, rantings from fringe fanatics and cranks.

Hostility

Activists don't want any other editors taking their articles off message. So, activists will try to drive editors they don't approve of away. The method used to accomplish this is usually to make the other editors feel very unwelcome in the activists' articles. The activists will display consistent and continuous incivility, including personal attacks, hectoring comments, biting edit summaries, baiting, condescension, and just plain rudeness. Often the activists will revert unwelcome edits with curt or misleading edit summaries, then ignore attempts to discuss their reverts on the article talk page. The activists will especially engage in passive or aggressive incivility and hostility if they don't think they are being watched closely by Misplaced Pages's administrators, which may be because several of the activists are administrators themselves.

Many times the unwelcome editors will protest that their personal point of view on the topic is the same as the activists. It doesn't matter. If the editor interferes with keeping the article on message, they will be treated with the same amount of hostility as any other unwelcome editor.

One WP behavioral guideline directs us to give new editors some leeway. We understand that new editors may need some time to learn how we do things around here and what the policies and guidelines are and how they are applied. Activist editors, on the other hand, will usually be just as, if not more, rude and mean to the newbie participants as to any other unwelcome editors.

The incivility by activists usually follows the same pattern. First, the activists will revert the unwelcome edits with curt, dismissive edit summaries. Then, if the reverted editor starts a discussion about it on the talk page, the activists, if they respond, will belittle the editor's opinions in that discussion, such as by telling the editor that they appear to have little-to-no knowledge of the subject matter, that they obviously don't understand what the source is really stating, that they should read the discussion page archive before participating further, and/or that their edit added no value to the article's content. The activists may accuse the other editor, directly or indirectly, of being a sockpuppet or editing on behalf of a banned editor. In extreme cases, the activists will gang up and pile on the editor with incivil comments either on the article talk page or on the editor's user talk page. The end goal is the same, to influence the editor into moving on, the sooner the better.

What can you do about it?

Documentation

First, one needs to gather evidence as to whether activists have infested a topic area or not. The easiest way is to dive into the topic oneself and start making NPOV edits to the articles in question. Activists do not want their articles to be NPOV because it does not serve their purpose, which is advocacy. So, you will quickly encounter fairly consistent and determined resistance to your efforts.

One method to prove beyond a doubt that activists are at work in the topic area is this...find a subject in the topic area which doesn't have its own article yet and write one. Go to the library and find sources, especially sources which aren't freely available online, to support writing the article. Then, draft a complete, comprehensive, factual, well-sourced, and NPOV article on the subject on a page in your userspace or offline. Make sure you give appropriate weight to all sides of the issue. When the article is ready, post it in mainspace and link it, as appropriate, to the other articles in that subject area. If there are activists in the topic area, they will react in almost the same manner every time, videlicet, they will clearly engage in most, if not all, of the three types of behavior listed above.

The activists will start deleting large swaths of material and sources from the article you posted almost immediately, citing vague policy violations or for other reasons, such as UNDUE, SYN, BLP, or V. They may remove all the links to the article that you had added to other articles. If they do add any additional material, which will usually be in small amounts if at all, the information will be obviously intended to swing the article's message to their POV. If the article is a BLP, they will be especially aggressive in adding or deleting negative or positive information depending on the subject.

The activists may, after deleting significant content and removing many of the sources cited, nominate the article for deletion and then dogpile into the AfD to support its deletion, although they will probably do so over several days to try to disguise that they are acting together. At the same time, they will likely edit war to prevent the restoration of the sources and content they have removed.

Although, the article you posted may have been of sufficient quality for GA or FA, the activists will act as if they couldn't care less that they have just ruined the article's chances of passing the review. In fact, if you have already nominated the article for GA or FA, they will jump in and interfere with the process, attempting to derail the nomination. When you attempt to protest what they are doing on the article's talk page, they will collectively hit you with, not only the usual hypocritical wiki-lawyering, but also a shotgun blast of animosity, ridicule, derision, and/or condescension.

Why this works

What may be most startling about the activists' behavior is that they will act this way knowing full well that they are entrapping themselves. Perhaps they will have even already read this essay and know that you are not hiding what you are trying to do. They will act this way anyway, because they can't help themselves. The activists have spent too much time and effort getting the topic area on message to let anything challenge the status quo they have created. Their belief that their cause is just and right is so strong that they don't feel that they are doing anything wrong. Thus, most activists will find themselves unwilling and unable to act in any other way.

Make sure that you never allow yourself to baited by the activists into responding with incivility, edit warring, or any other violation of policy yourself. For sure it can be frustrating to spend 30 minutes adding a new paragraph with robust sourcing to an article, only to have it reverted 10 minutes later. Always act, however, with kindness, patience, forbearance, calmness, and with continual attempts to cooperate, collaborate, and compromise. The admins and uninvolved editors who respond to your first attempts at dispute resolution, such as an RfC in which you document the activists' actions, may at first appear not to support your assertions of partisan editing in the topic area, especially if the activists' POV seems to agree with popular opinion on the topic. Don't give up, repeat the same process above with another article and try again. Sooner or later more editors will notice what is going on and try to do something about it.

Multiple factions

Sometimes a topic is a focus of more than one faction of activists. In that case, one of the blocs is usually dominant, either because it has more editors, is better organized, its members have more time on their hands, or a combination of the three. The activists of all the factions can still be identified because they will all engage in the behaviors listed above. In this situation, the controlling faction of activists should be dealt with first, because it is the faction that is controlling the content of the articles. Once they have been dealt with, the other factions should get the message and cease the same behavior. If they don't, then they'll have to be dealt with in the same way.