George Herbert wrote:
The problem is that those forums constitute the only
mechanisms by
which nearly all decision-making happens in Wikipedia. You can't go
"I'm going to go over to that room there, with these other people, and
stop listening to the guy shouting into the megaphone". There's only
one "room" per topic (or, a small set, of meta-topic rooms plus the
right one). If someone's abusing others, their only options short of
some form of community imposed censorship are to stop participating.
This is precisely the situation and lack of consensus that makes most of
those rules meaningless.
Every forum I have seen people try to build online,
without exception,
has failed and fallen apart if there wasn't a mechanism by which
abusive contributors could be exiled. There have also been a fair
number of places where tin-pot dictators stifle discussion - there's
no doubt that there's a continuum from undercontrol to overcontrol.
Wikipedia is operating comfortably in the middle ground, which is in
my experience and opinion the only place that an online community can
survive.
Yes, and it's difficult to explain what happened to keep it growing long
and strong.. NPOV was only one factor. So too was the need to face
certain issues of conflicr (like British vs. American English) from the
very beginning. Unlike the various Yugoslave wikipedias we dealt with
the problem head on with a problem-solving attitude.
Ec