[WikiEN-l] Civility poll results

[Phil Nash]

George Herbert wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Thomas
>> Dalton<thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 2009/8/11 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net>:
>>>> Thank you, Thomas, you just made my point. This is exactly the
>>>> type of focus and denial I was speaking of.
>>>
>>> I'm not denying we have a problem with civility. I got desysopped
>>> for a civility block the community and ArbCom objected to. What I'm
>>> denying is that this problem is going to lead it disaster. There is
>>> absolutely no evidence of that.
>>
>>
>> I think there is a significant structural risk in the community
>> steadily getting less welcome to new blood.
>>
>> A. People burn out, we need new recruits on an average roughly 18
>> month cycle just to maintain a participation level.
>> B. The more insular and inwards looking we become the less likely we
>> are to see structural problems, both internal and external.
>> C. We are (still) missing diversity of coverage due to a focus of our
>> userbase in certain demographics.  I found a few days ago that one of
>> the most commonly found light mechanical / structural construction
>> materials used in modern first world construction had no article
>> (strut channel / unistrut).  I keep tripping over this sort of stuff
>> every time I turn around.  3 million articles minus epsilon is not
>> done by any means.
>> D. And a narrow standard worldview in some respects is not good for
>> community consensus building, if we want the encyclopedia to be
>> representative of the world around us that we're writing about.
>>
>> The "Well, it's getting worse, but it's always been getting worse"
>> misses the point - we're useful and relevant because we meet certain
>> criteria for our user base.  This sort of stuff strikes out at our
>> usefulness and relevance to our userbase, not just internal problems.
>> If people see us as an insular, crazy bunch of encyclopedia nuts
>> rather than as a genuine open movement that's important to them and
>> society writ large, we lose everything.

I agree with the last point, but I see it as new editors coming along with 
enthusiasm only to find that we already have the article they wanted to 
create- so their only option is to seek to improve it according to their 
perspective, which may not be consonant with the embedded culture. Whereas 
they will see omissions and room for improvement, sometimes I think there is 
an element of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Sure, they need to get used 
to issues such as [[WP:V]], [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:UNDUE]], and this is most 
obvious, in my experience, in "popular culture" articles, which are 
fast-moving and are seen by these editors as needing to report *everything*. 
The answer to that is, as [[Tony Blair]] said, "Education, education, and 
education"- but the cultural gap may be too great for existing editors to 
want to spend time explaining what may be relevant and what may not. That, 
perhaps, is why new editors who don't get it are discarded, however great 
the effort we may make to point them at [[WP:5P|principles]].