On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:48 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/9 WJhonson@aol.com:
Most of our editors enjoy marking up their user page with details about themselves, and I see no harm to the project in that and it's my
believe
that
those who do it, constitute the majority of the editors and thus the
"consensus"
that it should be viewed as just fine.
I view it as similar to decorating your cubicle at work.
At the very least , let's try to keep "focusing only on Encyclopedia activities" separate from "focusing on abusive and rude behavior". They
are
not related in any way. I don't know of any significant objection in principle to people treating each other politely, but I do know of plenty
of
opposition (and count myself among it) on sterilizing the environment of
any
personalization.
The target of the day is rude abusive behavior - stay on target.
With respect, there are other ways of "lowering the tone", besides "rude abusive". A somewhat large and scarlet herring having been drawn across that point, I seem to have to point it out once more.
There is no disagreement (among admins / experienced users) that people using Wikipedia as a social networking site are violating the point of the project and site, and when identified they're asked to stop and eventually blocked. That's not controversial.
Your comment ( "(a) Wikipedia pages relate to the mission, not anyone's felt need for self-expression" ) goes, or seems to imply (and is being read that way by several of us...) much further. I don't think there's support or a consensus for much further. Wikipedia isn't a blog, social networking site, or user homepage - but it is a community, and a working environment (volunteer as it is), and as David points out, people like to decorate their cubes (in whatever form cubes take). This is normal human behavior and not something to be arbitrarily squashed.
Your other comment ( "(b) although this tenet needs to be relaxed somewhat around elections, the pages are also not for battling and campaigning for personal attitudes and beefs" ) is reasonable but somewhat harder to pull off than asking for civility in the main project spaces. We already enforce NPA and CIVIL to some degree in the userspace, but making that an overriding priority would likely raise more objections and resistance than is useful.