Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Personal attacks

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

This process has been discontinued per this discussion.

The personal attack intervention noticeboard (PAIN), created on 7 October 2005, was intended as a counterpart to the request for intervention against vandalism page. A person with complaints over personal attacks could, after giving warnings, report a personal attacker on this page.

Unfortunately, the noticeboard generated a considerable amount of controversy. While vandalism is usually a clear cut case, and administrator intervention (i.e. blocking) is usually uncontroversial, determining whether a comment is a personal attack, incivil, or just simply blunt and frank, can be quite subjective. That led to a lot of arguments, flame wars, tit-for-tat disputes and wikilawyering on this page. Even after several warnings as well as changes to the header designed to instruct users on how to use this page, this noticeboard continued to deteriorate. Due to this deterioration as well as some particularly poor exchanges in December 2006, the entire page was nominated for deletion, with the result that the noticeboard was closed on 10 January 2007.

The closure of this noticeboard does not mean that personal attacks are tolerated; they should never be. It simply means that complaints over personal attacks are moved to different, and more appropriate venues such as the administrators' noticeboard, dispute resolution or, as a last resort, arbitration.