Wikipedia:Hate is disruptive

A question arises from time to time on the English Wikipedia: Can we punish an editor simply for expressing hateful views? A common refrain is that there is no policy against expressing such views.

This is incorrect. Expressing hateful views is a form of disruptive editing. So is acting in a hateful manner, including by aligning oneself with a hate movement.

The essays WP:NONAZIS and WP:NORACISTS discuss this, but both make their conclusions sound more radical than they are. There is nothing radical about blocking, topic-banning, site-banning, or removing user rights from disruptive editors. We do it all the time. An editor does not even need to be participating in bad faith to be sanctioned for disruption.

Why is hate disruptive?

Many reasons, but one chief one:

Consider the statement [EDITOR] is a [SLUR]. Obviously, this statement is a pretty severe personal attack against [EDITOR].

Now consider a second statement, black people are [SLUR]s. This is pretty obviously hateful, but also, notice that it's still a personal attack against [EDITOR]! (And every other black person on the project.)

Any hateful statement against a group is also a hateful statement against individuals, because groups are made of individuals. We don't allow hateful statements against individuals, so we also don't allow hateful statements against groups.

Hate speech

Editors are routinely blocked for engaging in hate speech. Usage of slurs directed at individuals or groups of people is treated as severe vandalism. For more complex cases, while there is no Wikipedia policy explicitly defining "hate speech", in practice a Wikipedian can expect consequences for, in the context of a group of people who are distinguished by an inherent attribute:

• Promoting the group's supremacy over or inferiority to other like groups.
• Assigning collective guilt to members of the group for any offense, real or imagined.
• Denying well-documented crimes committed against members of the group.
• Insulting, harassing, or discriminating against other editors based on their membership in the group.

This essay does not attempt to create any clear definition of hate speech; rather just to document a practice as it already exists. Whether speech is hateful can be assessed by common-sense application of prevailing community norms.

Hateful conduct

It is entirely possible to perpetuate hate without ever once saying a slur or claiming that a genocide was a hoax. Cases of more complex hateful conduct on Wikipedia might include:

• Tendentiously editing to promote a hateful point of view. (See, generally, arbitration enforcement.)
• Referring to oneself on-wiki as being a member of a hate movement, or outing oneself as supporting such a cause off-wiki.
• Using the iconography, slogans, or rhetoric of hate movements.

These actions are inherently disruptive. In the rare case that someone does not know the meaning or full context of, say, putting the Nazi flag on their userpage, they presumptively lack the competence to edit Wikipedia.

How does this essay differ from NONAZIS/NORACISTS?

In practice? Barely at all. Almost all editors who are blocked under those essays can just as well be blocked for disruptive editing. The only exception would be a user who never in any way indicates that they are a bigot, but is somehow found out to be one without that being their intention, but has still not engaged in any disruption on-wiki. That is a narrow, possibly entirely hypothetical edge case, and on its own would not justify writing a separate essay. Rather, the purpose of this essay is to highlight a difference in philosophy: Under this essay, bigoted editors are not blocked for their ideologies; they are blocked for their behavior. It just so happens that their ideologies correlate nearly 1:1 with a tendency toward disruptive behavior, especially given that the very act of self-identifying as a member of a hate movement is disruptive behavior.

This distinction is important. Non-bigoted editors outside the political mainstream, both on the right and the left, may read NONAZIS and reasonably worry that their ideology is next. Others may infer a political or geographical bias in the focus on right-wing extremists in Europe and the core Anglosphere. Focusing on ideology, in justifying blocks, raises many difficult-to-answer questions, needlessly complicates things, and leads to drama every time a block is made citing these essays. The real answer is simple: Hate is disruptive. We block people for disruption. We block people who say and do and align with hateful things.

This only sounds controversial if you go out of your way to make it sound controversial.