From: "Parker Peters" onmywayoutster@gmail.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org, jwales@wikia.com Subject: [WikiEN-l] Quitting Wikipedia and wanted you to know why. Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 21:38:18 -0500
There's a lot of truth in that email. I'm disappointed with David's response, which is to question the examples given, and basically evade the point. The point is not wrong, and it's that we've allowed ourselves to develop a culture of disrespect, contempt, and dickishness. We haven't made it a priority to insure that Wikipedians, especially admins, treat one another with respect and dignity at all times. We're actually developing a reputation as a place of arrogance and nastiness, a place of heavy-handed thugishness, a place where people treat each other quite badly. That's bad for the project.
Rather than defensively trying to say why Parker Peters is wrong, we should be introspectively asking what we can do to make Wikipedia a better work environment. I see no reason why Wikipedians shouldn't set a standard for excellent treatment of contributors. In Jimbo's Statement of Principles, I read #7: "Anyone with a complaint should be treated with the utmost respect and dignity." We seem to be very quick to revert to the final sentence of the paragraph, which says, "I must not let the "squeaky wheel" be greased just for being a jerk." The trouble is in being too quick to decide that someone is "just a jerk". When you decide someone's just a jerk - they often become one, and I don't blame them!
I've seen admins treat regular users like dog shit way too many times. Why doesn't ArbCom come down on admins who fail to respect contributors? Why isn't that a high priority? We're not in an early development stage at this point, where the whole cowboy, run-and-gun mentality is all that valuable. We've reached a plateau where other things start to matter a lot - things like maintaining an atmosphere in which good writers will want to contribute their valuable time. Wikipedia's grown up a bit, and we should really start acting like grownups.
The email from Parker Peters makes me sad, because it hits so close to home. If we don't start demanding civility, not in some hollow sense where we manage to avoid personal attacks, but in a real sense that involves treating people with actual dignity, we're going to start seeing a lot more fallout.
I'm not citing any examples, or getting specific, not because I can't (I could go on and on), but because I don't want people to focus on attacking whatever particular case I bring up. The point is that more and more people are thinking of Wikipedia as a place to go and get showered with abuse, with little or no provocation. Is that what we want?
I suggest we take a cue from those great philosophers from San Dimas, and make it a site policy to "Be excellent to each other".
Tony Jacobs/GTBacchus