On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:48 AM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/2/9 <WJhonson(a)aol.com>om>:
>
>
>> Most of our editors enjoy marking up their user page with details about
>> themselves, and I see no harm to the project in that and it's my
believe
that
> those who do it, constitute the majority of the editors and thus the
"consensus"
> that it should be viewed as just fine.
I view it as similar to decorating your
cubicle at work.
At the very least , let's try to keep "focusing only on Encyclopedia
activities" separate from "focusing on abusive and rude behavior". They
are
not related in any way. I don't know of any
significant objection in
principle to people treating each other politely, but I do know of plenty
of
opposition (and count myself among it) on
sterilizing the environment of
any
personalization.
The target of the day is rude abusive behavior - stay on target.
With respect, there are other ways of "lowering the tone", besides
"rude
abusive". A somewhat large and scarlet herring having been drawn across
that point, I seem to have to point it out once more.
There is no disagreement (among admins / experienced users) that people
using Wikipedia as a social networking site are violating the point of the
project and site, and when identified they're asked to stop and eventually
blocked. That's not controversial.
Your comment ( "(a) Wikipedia pages relate to the mission, not anyone's felt
need for self-expression" ) goes, or seems to imply (and is being read that
way by several of us...) much further. I don't think there's support or a
consensus for much further. Wikipedia isn't a blog, social networking site,
or user homepage - but it is a community, and a working environment
(volunteer as it is), and as David points out, people like to decorate their
cubes (in whatever form cubes take). This is normal human behavior and not
something to be arbitrarily squashed.
Your other comment ( "(b) although this tenet needs to be relaxed somewhat
around elections, the pages are also not for battling and campaigning for
personal attitudes and beefs" ) is reasonable but somewhat harder to pull
off than asking for civility in the main project spaces. We already enforce
NPA and CIVIL to some degree in the userspace, but making that an overriding
priority would likely raise more objections and resistance than is useful.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com