User:SHB2000/Leave me alone

It starts with a simple mistake. Someone notices this and then offers you feedback. You, however, don't take any of that feedback on board. You continue making mistakes and fail to heed the advice given to you. Opposition is seen as revenge or a grudge. All you see in your eyes is that "someone" is perceived to be stalking (or hounding) your contributions. The community's focus then shifts from "fixing a mistake" to "monitoring a disruption." Because you have demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to self-correct, other editors feel a heightened responsibility to audit your work.

From your perspective, all you see is the same username (or usernames) pop up in your notification screen or display. The feeling of being "watched" or "hunted" might seem like targeted harassment, or hounding, so you ask them to "leave you alone" and to "stop harassing you". They don't, however. Why? Because in many cases, "leave me alone" and "hounding" are often misused as excuses to hide behind bad user conduct or behaviour.

The siege mentality is when you view every piece of feedback through a personal lens; helpful criticism gets misconstrued as malice. Your internal monologue becomes something along the lines of "they have a personal vendetta against me", but that sort of mindset traps you in a bubble. Every time you label a critic as a harasser, you shut down the very communication needed to resolve those issues in the first place. The dangerous feedback loop repeats.

The most direct counterpoint to the leave me alone plea is that project priorities should always come first. Whatever that might involve, or what that might mean, may be up for debate, but the core underlying point at least remains the same. While (perceived) harassment and hounding are serious issues that the community takes seriously, it is not a "get out of jail free" card to bypass community standards or evade scrutiny.

The success of Wikimedia projects has much to do with transparency. If your actions require others to constantly track your edits, you have no standing to demand they leave you alone; in a majority of cases, the problem almost always lies with you. If you truly want to be left alone, change needs to happen in your edits and actions in a way that doesn't require a rescue party.

An interaction ban, or IBAN, is a community- or ArbCom-imposed ban that stops two users from interacting with each other on that wiki in any manner. A one-way interaction ban (e.g. where User:Foo is prohibited from interacting with User:Bar, but User:Bar remains free to comment on or follow User:Foo) creates the very power imbalance problem it seeks to solve. Such an arrangement can be easily weaponised, where the "free" user can continue to critique, revert, or discuss the restricted user's work. If only one party's conduct is deserving of an interaction ban (such as genuine harassment), they should be indeffed; otherwise, the interaction ban should apply to both parties.

This essay is based on various on-wiki incidents; the usernames and wikis have been anonymised.

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