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This editor has a long-standing tendency for incivility and lack of respect for other editors, especially through the use of rude, offensive and insulting edit summaries, and has yet to respond to multiple requests for civility over several months from several editors.
It is desired is that this editor be civil, provide neutral and descriptive edit summaries, and be responsive to concerns which are brought to his attention.
This editor has been questioned about civility issues on his talk page by at least six editors since July 2009. He has never responded. This was brought up at Wikipedia:Wikiquette_alerts/archive79#Prestonmcconkie in January 2010, but still he did not respond. After an apparent hiatus of about a month, he began editing again in February, and in March he once again returned to his pattern of incivility. Two queries were made after this latest set of edits, and since then he has still not responded, but has performed some more article edits. He has been given several ample opportunities to alter his behavior and has shown no inclination to do so.
From March 2010:
From late 2009 and early 2010:
These are just some of the most egregious examples; more can be found in his list of contributions. It should be noted that he often provides no edit summary at all; when he does, it is often objectionable.
There has been no response from the editor to the various requests for civility. In the "Evidence of disputed behavior" section, evidence of incivility is seen both before and after the requests and the WQA discussion, perhaps indicating a lack of interest in changing his behavior. The only visible effect of the requests has been a temporary halt in editing articles, but with no permanent change in behavior.
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I can definitely see a problem with those edit summaries. I see edit summaries that are similar to what editors are probably thinking when they are making any correction to an article such as a copyedit or typo correction. Apparently, this is what Prestonmcconkie thinks when they make a correction to an article, but they not only think it, but allow themselves to put those thoughts in an edit summary.
The point of an edit summary is to provide an explanation as to why we are making changes to Wikipedia, but we should explain civilly, neutrally, undramatic, and non-judgmental. With Prestonmcconkie, this is not the case. Instead of explaining with civility, they explain with incivility, personal attacks and judgmental attitude. Besides this one which should have been "doesn't make sense", the edit summaries aren't even understandable as to what it's explaining, because of the attitude, but whatever the reason, the edit summaries could have been either civil, or no edit summary at all.
The attitude comments in those edit summaries are comments that we should keep to ourselves, and only think it, and say them to ourselves.
Basically, Prestonmcconkie uses edit summaries with hateful, incivil, judgmental and personal attitude. Very inexcusable for any user to make any such edit summaries, I feel that if an editor is unable or unwilling to make an edit summary without attitude, they should be banned from editing.
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I might be streching it, but I'm going to WP:AGF here and say that I think he has the best intentions at heart. I do, however, think he needs to be way less abrasive, from a view of those edit summaries. There's not that much of an issue with being rude sometimes-hell, even I'm rude to vandals in edit summaries sometimes- but frequent rudeness causes some unrest. I think it's bad to abuse users who have good intentions. Also, and this I cannot stress enough, he should certainly respond when someone has a query against him. If you don't, he'll never get a chance to defend himself, and the response is likely more severe. Also, it appears as if he's ignoring other users concerns. That is not good. If it were up to me, I'd put him on civility parole rather than ban him. I would give him a chance.
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No civility violations here. Colourful language, perhaps. Usually Preston's "dipshit" is not meant to hurt a specific editor. Rather, as in [17], he reproaches everybody involved with the article: look here, you collective blind eye, you've been here for years and you still don't see nonsense in the lead sentence? Well, dear "community", you need a lesson: Nature doesn't give a crap when the tourist season is. Charming! Owing to the plaintiffs of this RFC I now know the perfect copyeditor who can trim the fat off my next article. One thing worries me: Preston's bold practice of removing "meaningless paragraphs" [18] that may not be as meaningless as he thinks. But it can easily be reverted (BRD) and should be handled case-by-case, not here.
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I agree with NVO. We have someone who does not suffer fools gladly and who is fighting a war against verbiage and Newspeak. His language is a bit colourful at times but not uncivil in my opinion. The only action I would support against this editor would be some quick-witted but inoffensive retorts when he goes a bit too far.
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I have reviewed all the diffs provided. in addition i have looked through the latest 300 entries in Prestonmcconkie contributions log.I divided them up into cases where there was no edit summary at all, where the automated default of a section header was provided but nothing more, where an actual edit summery was provided but was not offensive, and where an offensive summery was provided. Obviously the classification of the latter two was subjective. In general when profanity was used or an editor was addressed in significantly negative terms (as with "What kind of dipshit wrote this? "Represented" an event? It WAS a freaking event, you moron!" or "What a useless thing to point out. You might as well point out that the more people there are on bicycles, the more bicycle-related deaths there are. Duh!") I classed the edit summary as offensive. When it used forcible but non-profane language about the edit (such as "Too many words.", "It didn't SEE success. It HAD success.", "That is implicit already.", or "This is a section about Morris and Socialism, not Engels and Socialism or Socialism in England in general. The Engels quotes are minutiae") I classed it as non-offensive.
My results, in the groups of 50 that the contributions page defaults to
| Dates | None | Default | Non- offensive |
Offensive | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Mar - 14 Jan | 6 | 21 | 17 | 6 | 50 |
| 14-5 Jan | 4 | 31 | 2 | 13 | 50 |
| 5 Jan - 28 Dec | 8 | 17 | 11 | 14 | 50 |
| 28 Dec - 15 Dec | 4 | 13 | 19 | 14 | 50 |
| 15 - 3 Dec | 2 | 8 | 20 | 20 | 50 |
| 3 Dec - 29 Nov | 4 | 22 | 12 | 12 | 50 |
| Totals | 28 | 112 | 81 | 79 | 300 |
This is, IMO far to high a proportion of offensive edit summaries.
While I did not examine every actual edit, I did spot-check edits and I examined every one of the edits linked to in the diffs above. None that I checked was an obviously bad edit, although I disagreed with a few. Most improved the writing of the articles, removing excess words or redundancies, changing unclear phrases to clearer ones, changing long word or phrases to shorter ones with identical or improved meaning, etc. We need editors with this approach to prose. But we need this editor to adopt a better use of edit summaries, using them more often but addressing the content, not the contributor, and even then in somewhat more moderate terms. If most of his edit summaries were like the 81 "non-offensive" ones, there would be no problem here.
I note that since the edit of 07:06, 10 March 2010 there have been no offensive edit summaries (although there has only been one non-default summary). I hope he has noted, although not responded to, the various warnings and the opening of this RfC.
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Frankly, I want to assume good faith, but this has been going on for a long time. I am surprised this user hasn't been blocked for incivilty yet. I didn't even need to examine the edits, I just went through the contribs and looked at the edit summaries, by which time I'd seen enough. It bothers me that this is allowed to continue so long.
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