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 | This page in a nutshell: Resolve a conflict by dealing with the underlying issue, not by ignoring it. |
Conflicts are inevitable in any community, and this includes Wikipedia. With several million users editing Wikipedia, some of these conflicts spiral out of control.
Of course, "spiral out of control" is subjective. What may seem like a flame war to one may seem like a healthy conflict to another. Healthy conflict does exist, and it should never be suppressed. A community without conflicts is just a community of clones under mind control.
It has been established that the more serious forms of conflict require some form of outside intervention, since the participants are too upset to do anything about it. Since, however, degrees of conflict, as stated above, are subjective, users can never agree on when to take action. This can in itself become a conflict and/or spiral out of control, but as in other types of conflict, the participants should try to reach a compromise about the type of action to be taken. A type of action that is inappropriate and unhelpful, however, is conflict smothering.
Conflict smothering has nothing to do with solving the problem or even dealing with the issue at hand. It just, well, smothers the conflict, like smothering a flame in a blanket. It often succeeds, but only in smothering the conflict. The raging fire of the ongoing argument is smothered in a blanket of often patronising soothing words at one extreme or "I'm trying to help you, but you won't cooperate" (and therefore I'll ignore you) indignation at misunderstood intent at the other. It works, but not in the long-term. Conflict smothering rarely gets rid of the whole conflict – sparks of resentment and/or unexpressed needs often remain, and what's worse, the firewood – whatever issue sparked the conflict in the first place – remains, with the potential for an even bigger fire the next time round since the fire has not been fully extinguished.
Conflict smothering is also irritating. Often, the conflict smotherer just barges into the conflict any old how and becomes an uninvited guest. This interruption when everyone is thrashing about madly trying to resolve the conflicts is irritating at best and profoundly insulting at worst: this user doesn't even trust me to manage my own social life! He/she thinks that whatever conflict we're having is so incredibly trivial that he/she can't be bothered to help us solve the problem, but since such things are unhelpful to Wikipedia, he/she has no choice but to get rid of the conflict without wasting too much of his/her precious Wiki time.
Also, most conflicts are over legitimate Wikipedia issues that since a problem has arisen need to be debated in order to get things straight and to improve the policy or guideline, or to create a new one. Smothering these conflicts prevents the issues being debated from developing and is actually to the detriment of the project.