[WikiEN-l] You Really Don't Get It

[Ray Saintonge]

John Lee wrote:

>On 4/23/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>  
>
>> 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.)
>
While I very much support the principle behind Marc's ideas, I have 
doubts about whether it would work.  I don't think that userboxes have 
anything to do with this; you can't put meaningful discussion into a 
tiny box.  Esperanza seems like it could do this, but I only found out 
about it when people were campaigning to have it deleted; from the 
little that I have read about it saying that it would hurt the community 
seems a bit over the top.

Respect on a professional level is a meaningless concept when most of 
the people involved are not professionals.  While mutual respect remains 
important, professional respect has implications that go beyond that; 
those implications include a tendency for group think which the less 
competent professionals can use as a life raft.  Based on what you say 
it seems as though Esperanza was poisoned by a bad faith which can be 
very difficult for the more gentle and fragile participants to stop.  
It's not easy for the more introverted to tell those with agressively 
bad faith that they can't behave like that.

I think that time and stress have more to do with the failure of such 
projects.  We can all easily agree that if we could be on Wikipedia 24/7 
we would not run out of things to do.  Not least among these tasks would 
be fixing what we believe was screwed up by the other guy.  For those 
that believe they are right the corrections are obvious, and concrete 
actions seem so much more constructive than listening to vague 
complaints that never appear soluble.  We are socially wired to believe 
that such encounters are unproductive time wasters. 

>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).
>
Absolutely.  And we certainly have more reasonable people doing this 
than unreasonable people who hang out at these problem sites.  
Reasonable people like to avoid local convenience stores that have 
become hang outs for teenage gangs.  The effort required to replace 
these gangs can be overwhelming.

>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.
>
Exactly.

>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.
>
Getting together on a personal level can be reinvigorating.  Going to 
meetups and sharing views does a lot for building respect.  It can be 
easier to find a common understanding when the only thing standing 
between you is a couple of beers on the table.  The redundancy may very 
well be there, but it's not a valid excuse to avoid meeting.  The 
meetings themselves may not have direct accomplishments, but building 
foundations is not essential for putting a building up; it's only 
important for ensuring that it doesn't fall down next week.

I've personally found benefit to attending Wikimania, and during the 
time that I was there I didn't make a single entry to the database.

Ec