On 4/23/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 4/22/07 10:00 PM, K P at kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
There already are millions of such places, they're called restaurants, parks, beaches, jungles, churches, birthday parties, protest marches,
buses,
airplanes, living rooms, cruise ships, sidewalks.... Today I spoke with people over the telephone, at the graveyard, in the grocery store, at
the
cafe....
But, speaking specifically about the people you interact with all the time on this List, that you wouldn't have a chance to meet in the above places, wouldn't you like to know what they think, and how they feel, about other things beside what relates to Wikipedia?
I'm not sure if we should judge any attempts to start this sort of thing, but there was a *very* active movement to create this sort of thing in 2006. I'm specifically thinking of userboxen and [[Wikipedia:Esperanza]]. Ironically, it was decided (by consensus, moreover, and among many of these projects' proponents) that both of these things actually hurt the community; the proliferation of boxen has slowed, and Esperanza was shut down.
I'm not sure why these attempts failed, but it may be that getting to know your fellow editors as humans isn't very conducive to creating a culture of mutual respect if you can't even respect them on a professional level. (The most active and vocal Esperanzeans also had some of the most active and vocal assumers of bad faith in their number.)
In the end, I think it's more about the kind of people who are attracted to the project - specifically, the messy deep dark bowels of the project such as RfA, AfD, and all things that attract trolls (e.g. articles on polemical issues like [[George W. Bush]]). Most reasonable people hang out around these areas for a while, decide they're not worth it, and either leave or find their own niche on WP (mine seems to have become Malaysian articles; it's an obscure, quiet and peaceful area of WP where I do my best to keep politicians' biographies free from libel - not very hard when there aren't many people editing them).
The nicest and most respectful people in the project tend to be those who avoid the polemical areas of WP. Trouble is, if nobody mans the polemical areas, who will? We can't surrender these things to the extremists - but the levelheaded centrists don't have the right temperament for handling them without burning out.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you can respect your fellow editors on a professional basis, it's redundant to get to know them on a personal level, although that would be nice. And if you can't respect them as colleagues (common for people involved in polemical things, where the other guy is *always* wrong), it's difficult to imagine you respecting them as people. That may be why Esperanza failed; because its base was generally people who couldn't respect their fellow editors as colleagues.
Johnleemk