Well, I would call the case where “one
person realizes the other person was right” an agreement not a dispute J but I agree with the
thrust of what you are saying. Certainly there are interactions among editors
that are helpful, productive and friendly. The question is whether we get
enough good experiences that the occasional bad experience doesn’t dint
our enthusiasm. The Clubhouse paper
http://files.grouplens.org/papers/wp-gender-wikisym2011.pdf
suggests that new editors will have bad
experiences in their first eits, and that bad experiences are positively
correlated with attrition.
Kerry
From:
Daniel and Elizabeth Case [mailto:dancase@frontiernet.net]
Sent: Thursday, 11 December 2014
2:16 PM
To: kerry.raymond@gmail.com;
Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase theparticipation of
women within Wikimedia projects.
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Arbcom
election
What’s missing
from this?:
>I don’t think most disputes get
“resolved”. I think one person simply gives up. Maybe they
don’t think the issue is that important, >maybe they feel that they
don’t have the time to argue it, maybe they feel that the other person
involved is too unpleasant to want to try to engage with, maybe they’ve
found that no matter what they do, they never make a difference.
Give up? It’s “maybe one
person realizes the other person was right, and does it their way from then on,
without any hard feelings.” It has happened to me quite a few times.
That’s the sort of outcome I was talking about.
Of course, I think of these in terms of
pure content disputes (should we or should we not mention something? how should
we format this table? and so forth ...) because that’s what most of those
I’ve been involved in have been. Disputes over someone’s conduct are
something else entirely, because it’s harder for people to admit they
were wrong in that department. And why I always say it cannot be repeated
enough that, when you realize the argument is no longer about what you were
originally arguing about but has instead become a meta-argument about the
argument itself, you should stop immediately as it will no longer accomplish
anything constructive to continue.
Daniel Case