[WikiEN-l] The admin problem

[Fastfission]

On 3/1/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
> > Of course, building an encyclopedia has first priority, but a good
> > working community of editors is essential to accomplishing that goal.
>
> I won't be popular for saying so, but I don't know that it is. My high
> school biology teacher used to delight in seating people together who hated
> each other. She reckoned you got more interesting and lively discussions
> that way and everyone benefited. My objective was to sit up the back
> somewhere and go to sleep, but that didn't happen in her class and I have
> fond memories of high school biol as being a great education experience.

"Good working community" doesn't have to necessarily mean people like
each other. Fiery people who disagree with each other often do
generate lots of discussion, and anybody who has dealt with long-term
POV pushers know that the short term result, at least, is a profound
increase in citation, detail, and nuance in the articles themselves
(and, when things die down, someone usually comes along later and
says, "Why is all of this attention being devoted to such a minor
issue?" and trims it up).

But I think these are exceptional situations -- the exceptions which
prove the norm that most people don't like to work in antagonistic
environments. There can be a case for too much antagonism. And
disagreements need not be antagonistic, if they are civil (I disagree
with people all the time, but rarely does it become a "dispute," much
less anything truly unpleasant).

I think this entire discussion was originally about transparency. I
think one could say that a lack of transparency does not kill
discussion -- in fact, it might magnify it, though much of the
discussion which results will be antagonistic, distrusting, and so
forth.

There is also a question as to which battles need waging at all. I
don't think we should mistake the burst of activity associated with
dispute as necessarily being contributive to the goals of the
encyclopedia. Has the userbox debate yet generated anything positive?
Not in my viewing of it, at least not commensurate to the amount of
frustration and negativity it has created on all sides of it, and the
amount of resources it has taken up.

FF