On 15/10/2007, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
It may be useful to pretend otherwise at times
I don't know what you mean by this statement.
David, I spend time reading many of the Talk, Discussion and whatever other Pages I have access to as a non-admin
(In general terms, there are no pages non-admins do not have access to. Well, there's a handful of technical ones. And the deleted pages. But no actual contentful discussion pages; there is nowhere on-wiki that The Secret Club Is Talking About You, or at least nowhere they could do it *easily*)
and my informed read is that there are a great many very unhappy people in there. The mood is angry, the climate is cold, and the culture in trouble.
Yes, the community has problems. I'd go so far as to say it's in some ways dysfunctional. But I really don't see how reasserting the basic values of this project is going to cause the community to get any *worse*.
The community has problems because it's lost track of what it's trying to do and it's squabbling internally; it has problems because users are being dicks with power, or power they think they have. But that problem is - as much as anything else - because of users in positions of authority assuming the authority of "the community" in playing their games and political posturing, using the moral weight of a community who doesn't give a damn to browbeat their opponents.
Of course David and I want a healthy community. But we know that the community wants to get on with writing an encyclopedia. The way to help the community be healthy is, well, to invoke mens sana in corpore sano; put our attention back to actually doing some work, take a harder line with the unrecoverable idiots, and the community will wake up again.
And statements like "the Project is more important than the Community" not only reinforces the Members' feeling of second-class status
No, it's a healthy assertion that we share fundamental common priorities and that the community are, on the whole, aware we're not here as a social activity.
"Second-class"? Second-class to who? This isn't an admin clique trying to put itself above "the community". "The community" includes the admins - and wikien-l - as much as any other regular user - the project is still more important than them/us.
but serves, also, to give permission to those who would behave abusively to others.
Those behaving in some of the most insidiously abusive ways cry "protecting the community" as loudly as anyone, and mostly get away with waving the banner in the name of people who haven't heard of their petty squabbles and wouldn't care about them if they had.