I'm not entirely certain that this has a lot to do
with civility....although it does certainly have a lot to do with respect for women. (It
also >reassures me that my decision to not create a facebook account was wise in more
ways than one.)
+1
Nonetheless, one difference that was immediately
apparent is the fact that Violentacrez was pretty much at the top of the volunteer heap
>there: he essentially had control of a large portion of their content, had permissions
and accesses even higher than any Wikipedia >administrator has, and clearly had direct
communication and influence with the staff of Reddit. I can't think of someone who
was equally >trollish having the same degree of access or influence on any Wikimedia
project. Yes, we have lots of loud people and rude people and >trolls. But most of
them are never granted adminship (and I can think of only one or two who advanced beyond
that point in *any* WMF >project), and none of them have anywhere near the same degree
of control of content.
Risker/Anne
It also strikes me that there was another key difference: Reddit is owned by a large
for-profit media conglomerate, giving the staff an even greater incentive to let him be as
long as (as the Gawker article reported) he made their jobs much easier. Paradoxically it
would seem, being run by a non-profit and having volunteers do almost all the work at
Wikipedia that paid staff do at Reddit actually seems to have prevented a problem of this
magnitude developing.
If this does remind me of any particular Wikipedia scandal, it’s Essjay ... and that issue
wasn’t so much about protecting undesirable content as it was an editor who had earned a
great deal of community respect turning out to have earned that respect on the basis of
greatly overstating his expert credentials (granted, probably something that will never
happen at Reddit).
Daniel Case