Board Thread:Administrator's Noticeboard/@comment-7697305-20140527012127/@comment-7697305-20140527224751

I'll echo most of what I said in chat (+ some extra explanation), for transparency:


 * For starters, as a social medium which is mostly separate from the main goal of the wiki, chat has always had significantly less stringent standards than the rest of the site. I think this has worked quite well for it, as it gives users a place where they can hang around with people they may know from the wiki in a place which is more conducive to casual conversation. It is not free from rules, but the ability to speak freely has always been allowed so long as it doesn't get to the point of disruption.
 * Profanity on the wiki proper is full-on censored rather than allowed but reverted for a couple of reasons:
 * The problematic revisions would still show up in page histories, logs, and special pages like Special:RecentChanges. This kind of stuff is difficult to fully remove – doing so would require usage of revdelete (a staff-only tool) or deleting and selectively restoring a page.
 * Profane language has very little reason to appear on content pages on an encyclopedia, so attempting to insert it into such pages is most often vandalism (though there are false positives).
 * Chat doesn't have to worry about any of this stuff. Things said in chat will only be visible as long as someone remains in the chatroom, and nothing is automatically logged in there. Additionally, chat isn't trying to be an encyclopedia – it's just a place for the writers of said encyclopedia to hang out.
 * As has been mentioned: if someone's purpose is to disrupt chat, they will find a way to disrupt chat, filter or not. This filter may deter them temporarily, but it certainly won't actually prevent trolling outright. In light of this (which I feel is self-evident if you look at pretty much any other part of the internet), it seems that most of the impact of this filter would fall on well-intentioned users in chat.
 * I imagine that this filter would also come with its own unique problems. For instance, I expect that microcosms of this very argument will take place whenever someone who doesn't take kindly to censorship of any kind joins the chat and finds out about the filter. Heck, [ there is precedent] for this happening even with just a &quot;soft&quot; ban on profanity. With this combined with the previous point in mind, I believe that this filter could potentially cause more problems than it would solve.
 * Finally, part of my opposition to this proposal is that I believe the chat is already pretty well-moderated. Lately, any given time has seen two or more people in there with the " " right, which I feel is definitely enough to handle any problems that arise as a result of ill-intentioned users. At times when there aren't any chatmods on, I think that the solution is to appoint new ones from trusted users who tend to be active at the times in question rather than creating an automated filter like this.