Marc Riddell wrote:
Respect is something which cannot be legislated or regulated; it is part civility and part empathy - the ability to respect another being should be built in to us all.
on 3/29/07 6:09 PM, Stan Shebs at stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
"Should be", yeah. Interesting to ponder how it is that we have thousands of editors who seem to lack a great many human qualities. My cynical theory is that an encyclopedia that *anyone* can edit is going to attract a disproportionate number who would never be accepted into, or have been ejected from other kinds of collaborative projects; and because one of our fundamental principles is to assume good faith, we are slow to get rid of those that are simply not ever going to be a net positive.
Stan
We are, once again, in the area of the Wikipedia culture.
And, once again, we are asking the question: What is Wikipedia? Is it a free-for-all romp, or a serious attempt to collect and report facts that truly advance our knowledge and understanding of, and appreciation and respect for, the subject? For the sake of this argument, let's assume the latter.
Assuming good faith is a noble quality (and I mean that sincerely, not sarcastically). And, when WP was young and had a much smaller group of editors, with very similar beliefs and set of ethics, this worked. However, today this is, apparently, not the case. This then requires a greater control of the behaviors of these editors a control that may have been unthinkable in the beginning. Today WP is full of guidelines regulating the behavior of its editors. And these guidelines evolved out of necessity as both the Community and the Project grew.
We cannot regulate a person¹s values or beliefs - nor should we try. But we can and should regulate that person¹s behaviors when it affects the Community as a whole.
Adding gratuitous, disrespectful text to a person¹s Article is a behavior and is especially cheap and destructive when that person is no longer alive to refute it. And it needs to be made an intrinsic part of the WP culture that adding such crap to an Article is unacceptable. This junk should be deleted every time it is encountered. And, perhaps over time, those who insist on adding it will give up and move on to a culture where this behavior is acceptable.
How do we know which behaviors are disrespectful? As Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography: ³I know it when I see it.²
Marc Riddell