Conflict

Conflict is going to occur on the wikis that you care about. There are positive and negative ways to deal with conflict, here are some lessons learned about the negative ways and suggestions about how to learn the positive ways.

The upside of conflict is that if resolved to the satisfaction of all participants it can spurn growth.

• Interested party discovering the wiki by discovering negative comments on their page
  

• Contention over facts in dispute
  

• Pre existing conflict spilling onto the wiki

• Restore unfairly deleted materials yourself; make sure all competing viewpoints are presented.
  

• Be aggressively fair; stifle for a moment your own personal opinion, you'll be on the wiki after this conflict is over and can make a point then. Right now your chosen role is to assist the greater community.
  

• Keep the focus on the topic by creating a Talk page. Tangents can grow and off-topic heated debates can burn themselves out in Talk pages. Make sure you sift through those debates for on-topic nuggets. Talk pages are an important tool, and the balanced and careful use of them can keep entries clean and editors communicating.
  

• Reach out to the participants and remind them that everybody involved is a real person. Without the ability to see and hear each other, there is no reminder of emotional impact, and things can grow to a completely unproductive flame war, hurt somebody or result in an editor burning out.

Sometimes these conflicts will result in a flame war.

Robert Trivers theories regarding reciprocal altruism and much of game theory, including Rapoport's Tit for Tat can be useful in dealing with groups of people who are mostly working together with a small set of individuals working against the group. Most theories are attempts to explain existing behavior and allow an individual to commit acts that are maximally beneficial to the group, which is generally a core goal of most gnomes.