George Herbert wrote:
On 1/30/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 1/30/07 7:00 PM, Stan Shebs at stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
People who are good editors, but take other people's statement to heart, can get so upset that they no longer want to work in WP, and that's certainly a loss to the project. So the civility rule is partly about backing down to a level that reduces hurt and misunderstandings across a broad range of individuals.
Isn't this a rather paternalistic attitude? "We are censoring this for your protection" is the first reason given by powers that would be.
There's censorship, and then there's a social contract.
Civility should be about the social contract... we agree not to abuse each other in the course of discussing things about which we may disagree greatly.
If someone shows up who refuses to buy in to the social contract, then we can ask them to behave or in extremis to leave. No forum which is a complete anarchy survives.
The implicit message in that is that the social contract is written in stone. Abiding with the social contract does not mean having to buy in. Mature institutions resist change, even good change. Establishments and vested interests become hardened into place. That can make newcomers with fresh ideas unwelcome. By the same token a newcomer should not expect that his improvements will be implemented immediately. The newcomer needs hope.
It seems a natural tendency in people who have fought hard for some aspect of the system to do what they can to keep it in place, sometimes long after its usefulness has been exhausted. If voting is used to bring about the feature the winners can easily be content in the feeling that the issue must never again be revisited; defence becomes a virtue in its own right. In time the original supporters drift away for unrelated reasons, and we are left with a rule that has been stripped of its raison-d'être. Attempts to change such rules can be a daunting task, if only because such proposals can too easily be ignored and wander off into some limbo of consciousness. It would be nice if we could adopt some policy that says that virtually all decision making processe remain open perpetually.
Ec