On 4/23/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote:
on 4/22/07 10:00 PM, K P at kpbotany(a)gmail.com wrote:
There already are millions of such places,
they're called restaurants,
parks, beaches, jungles, churches, birthday parties, protest marches,
buses,
airplanes, living rooms, cruise ships,
sidewalks.... Today I spoke with
people over the telephone, at the graveyard, in the grocery store, at
the
cafe....
But, speaking specifically about the people you interact with all the time
on this List, that you wouldn't have a chance to meet in the above places,
wouldn't you like to know what they think, and how they feel, about other
things beside what relates to Wikipedia?
I'm not sure if we should judge any attempts to start this sort of thing,
but there was a *very* active movement to create this sort of thing in 2006.
I'm specifically thinking of userboxen and [[Wikipedia:Esperanza]].
Ironically, it was decided (by consensus, moreover, and among many of these
projects' proponents) that both of these things actually hurt the community;
the proliferation of boxen has slowed, and Esperanza was shut down.
I'm not sure why these attempts failed, but it may be that getting to know
your fellow editors as humans isn't very conducive to creating a culture of
mutual respect if you can't even respect them on a professional level. (The
most active and vocal Esperanzeans also had some of the most active and
vocal assumers of bad faith in their number.)
In the end, I think it's more about the kind of people who are attracted to
the project - specifically, the messy deep dark bowels of the project such
as RfA, AfD, and all things that attract trolls (e.g. articles on polemical
issues like [[George W. Bush]]). Most reasonable people hang out around
these areas for a while, decide they're not worth it, and either leave or
find their own niche on WP (mine seems to have become Malaysian articles;
it's an obscure, quiet and peaceful area of WP where I do my best to keep
politicians' biographies free from libel - not very hard when there aren't
many people editing them).
The nicest and most respectful people in the project tend to be those who
avoid the polemical areas of WP. Trouble is, if nobody mans the polemical
areas, who will? We can't surrender these things to the extremists - but the
levelheaded centrists don't have the right temperament for handling them
without burning out.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you can respect your fellow editors on
a professional basis, it's redundant to get to know them on a personal
level, although that would be nice. And if you can't respect them as
colleagues (common for people involved in polemical things, where the other
guy is *always* wrong), it's difficult to imagine you respecting them as
people. That may be why Esperanza failed; because its base was generally
people who couldn't respect their fellow editors as colleagues.
Johnleemk