on 1/30/07 9:11 PM, George Herbert at george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
You always have the right to stop reading a Wikipedia talk page, email, or such.
The problem is that those forums constitute the only mechanisms by which nearly all decision-making happens in Wikipedia. You can't go "I'm going to go over to that room there, with these other people, and stop listening to the guy shouting into the megaphone". There's only one "room" per topic (or, a small set, of meta-topic rooms plus the right one). If someone's abusing others, their only options short of some form of community imposed censorship are to stop participating.
Every forum I have seen people try to build online, without exception, has failed and fallen apart if there wasn't a mechanism by which abusive contributors could be exiled. There have also been a fair number of places where tin-pot dictators stifle discussion - there's no doubt that there's a continuum from undercontrol to overcontrol. Wikipedia is operating comfortably in the middle ground, which is in my experience and opinion the only place that an online community can survive.
There have been various academic studies on the topic of interpersonal communications and community standards online; I don't have convenient citations, but it's out there. They have observed the same thing.
George,
I bow (ever so slightly ;-) ) to your experience with the online forum. I have, and still am, learning a lot about it from all of the responses I've gotten here - that's why I brought it up in the first place.
I'm going to check out some of the studies you referred to. But, as in the session room, I usually learn more of what I need to know from the person(s) who are experiencing it everyday.
Marc