This chapter is primarily for situations where you’re the target of incivility or personal attacks. But, sadly, you may be the one committing—or thinking about committing—mayhem against another editor. You know you shouldn’t, but sometimes telling yourself that you shouldn’t do something isn’t enough. If it’s not, this section can help.
If you’re just thinking about posting something snippy, subtly insulting, or otherwise critical of another editor, take yourself promptly to one or more of the following pages:
Say you’ve indulged in a little biting criticism of another edit. And, quite possibly, the editor deserved to be criticized. Nevertheless, you’ve committed a violation of Wikipedia policy, and (as good as it may have felt when you were doing it) done nothing to further the goal of building the world’s best online encyclopedia.
First, rest assured that you won’t get booted off Wikipedia for a single mistake, or even for a couple. You will get into trouble by ignoring justified warnings and continuing your behavior. As discussed earlier in the chapter, Wikipedia administrators don’t block editors to punish them, they block editors to prevent future problems.
Second, do what you can to mitigate the damage. At minimum, do the following:
For anything relatively recent (say, in the past week), go back and strikethrough inappropriate wording. To change text from normal to strikethrough, use a pair of tags: Put a <s> at the beginning and a </s> at the end. If you replace inappropriate words with neutral words, underline the added text using <u> at the beginning and </u> at the end. Make sure your edit summary includes something like my prior comments, so other editors understand that you’re not editing someone else’s words, which isn’t allowed.
Post an apology on the user talk page of the editor who you attacked. If you can’t bring yourself to actually say I apologize, then say something like I have realized that my postings were a violation of [[WP:CIVIL]], and I’ll do my best not to do that again.
Third, try really, really hard not to do it again. In the future, when you’re irritated (or worse), get up and walk away from the computer, or at least switch to doing something else. And if you decide you can’t tolerate whatever’s pushing your emotional buttons on a particular page or area, go to a different page. Wikipedia is a huge project (as this book should make clear), with an amazing variety of things to do, and whatever you do, you should enjoy doing it.