>The
use of the term "collegial" to describe the editing milieu. Anyone who has spent
much time in the academe will recognize a lot of the "problem" behaviours we see
on our own project, particularly personalization of disputes, which is one of
the major elements leading to the perception of incivility. Indeed, some
of our most significant problem areas involve editors with academic credentials
behaving pretty much within the norms for their profession, i.e., pretty
unpleasantly toward those who don't agree with their educated opinions.
In other words, as a community we create a climate where poor behaviour is
the most effective means to motivate needed changes, where our policies and
practices can be used as weapons both to support negative behaviour and also to
"punish" positive behaviour, where the boundaries of unacceptable behaviour vary
widely dependent on a large number of factors and enforcement is extraordinarily
inconsistent, and where we openly claim to follow a behavioural model that
*sounds* progressive but is in reality possibly even more nasty than our
own.
Exactly. We should keep in mind that many
of the complaints about how Wikipedia’s conduct policies do and don’t work are,
IME, hardly unique to us but quite common in many college and university
faculties. Perhaps one of the accomplishments of Wikipedia is that it has
allowed laypeople to get a taste of that.
And not just. It occurs to me how my own way of staying
around echoes my father’s advice to any young lawyer joining a large enough
firm: find a niche for yourself that will make you an asset to whichever faction
is running, or perceived as running, or trying to run, the firm (and there
will be factions). Do that and do it well, and don’t get too involved
in firm politics, or more than you absolutely have to. He’s told me he was
pleasantly surprised to read Richard Pipes, the historian, draw similar
conclusions from his experience of the Harvard history department. He’s actually
shared a draft of a PDF expanding on this, and it struck me how much his
descriptions of a typical law firm echo some people’s descriptions of
Wikipedia.
Daniel Case