[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

Tue Feb 27 19:07:25 UTC 2007

John Lee wrote:

> Indeed - I noticed it was disappearing in 2005, and by 2006 it  
> seemed to
> have almost completely vanished. I recognise that part of my  
> feelings about
> this are just irrational wishing for the "good old days" (I have  
> noticed
> it's always the same with any online community people have been  
> members of
> for a long time - we tend to get nostalgic and hype up how good  
> things once
> were). But still, there was a culture of mutual respect for each  
> other. Even
> if you thought someone was dead wrong, you didn't get into a wheel  
> war or
> edit war with them.

I don't know how accurate your perceptions are on this point. I've  
been involved with Wikipedia since late 2002 and haven't noticed a  
huge change in the amount of respect that Wikipedians show for one  
another. The main thing I've noticed is that there seems to be a  
bigger corpus of formalized rules, and a correspondingly higher  
likelihood that disputes will turn into officious rule-wielding  
rather than debates directly about articles and their merits. I don't  
know whether this change is a good thing or a bad thing -- some of  
both, probably.

As for the "culture of mutual respect," though, I remember some knock- 
down-dragout fights, ideological wars, and some incredibly nasty  
experiences with trolls, vandals and cranks. Moreover, this seems to  
have been going on at Wikipedia since its earliest days. Larry Sanger  
(who left Wikipedia before I got here) recalls its early history as  
follows:

> Jimmy and I agreed early on that, at least in the beginning, we  
> should not eject anyone from the project except perhaps in the most  
> extreme cases. Our first forcible expulsion (which Jimmy performed)  
> did not occur for many months, despite the presence of difficult  
> characters from nearly the beginning of the project. Again, we were  
> learning: we wished to tolerate all sorts of contributors in order  
> to be well-situated to adopt the wisest policies. But--and in  
> hindsight this should have seemed perfectly predictable--this  
> provisional "hands off" management policy had the effect of  
> creating a difficult-to-change tradition, the tradition of making  
> the project extremely tolerant of disruptive (uncooperative,  
> "trolling") behavior. And as it turned out, particularly with the  
> large waves of new contributors from the summer and fall of 2001,  
> the project became very resistant to any changes in this policy. I  
> suspect that the cultures of online communities generally are  
> established pretty quickly and then very resistant to change,  
> because they are self-selecting; that was certainly the case with  
> Wikipedia, anyway.

http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95

Elsewhere, Sanger goes so far as to say that the "poisonous social or  
political atmosphere" is one of the reasons why he left the project:

> There is a certain mindset associated with unmoderated Usenet  
> groups and mailing lists that infects the collectively-managed  
> Wikipedia project: if you react strongly to trolling, that reflects  
> poorly on you, not (necessarily) on the troll. If you attempt to  
> take trolls to task or demand that something be done about constant  
> disruption by trollish behavior, the other listmembers will cry  
> "censorship," attack you, and even come to the defense of the  
> troll. This drama has played out thousands of times over the years  
> on unmoderated Internet groups, and since about the fall of 2001 on  
> the unmoderated Wikipedia.
[SNIP]
> A few of the project's participants can be, not to put a nice word  
> on it, pretty nasty. And this is tolerated. So, for any person who  
> can and wants to work politely with well-meaning, rational,  
> reasonably well-informed people--which is to say, to be sure, most  
> people working on Wikipedia--the constant fighting can be so off- 
> putting as to drive them away from the project. This explains why I  
> am gone; it also explains why many others, including some extremely  
> knowledgeable and helpful people, have left the project.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25

I don't know whether the Wikipedia commmunity today is overall more  
or less successful than it was in the past at fostering a "culture of  
mutual respect," but if John Lee thinks it used to be better, I  
suspect that this may simply reflect his early good luck rather than  
an actual change. My own experience suggests that the overall culture  
hasn't changed much. If anything, it probably has gotten marginally  
better over the years.

--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
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