[Foundation-l] Message to community about community decline

[Stephanie Daugherty]

I think that somewhere along the way we lost sight of many of the qualities
that make the wiki model work.

There are certain patterns, which a wiki community needs to follow to be
successful - beyond assume good faith, there are principles such as forgive
and forget that are just as crucial to community building. instead we punish
reputation endlessly -, once you make a mistake it follows you forever or at
least until you make a clean start. most people don't want to have to start
over every time they manage to offend someone, so I think we are becoming
victims of an increasingly cynical unforgiving and hopeless culture. The
editors that are left are either the ones with really thick skin, the ones
that haven't become jaded yet by community interaction,, or the ones that
create such a hostile enviroment.

We lack an effective structure for dealing with the more persistently
hostile editors- arbitration can only work so well when the abuse is subtle
and sustained rather than sharp outbursts.

We need both technological and social fixes to this problem. Edit histories
are both necessary and harmful. Community interaction in some cases needs to
be filtered - limiting who interacts with new editors sounds extreme but it
may be exactly the sort of change that helps us to ease new editors into our
community.
All these sort of things require interface changes to accomplish the needed
social changes.
This is the sort of area where the foundation should take a very active
role, because the mission itself is jeopardized by communities that are too
hostile for new members to be comfortable in.
Sent from my mobile device.
On Mar 27, 2011 8:27 PM, "Sarah" <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote: