John Lee wrote:
Indeed - I noticed it was disappearing in 2005, and by
2006 it
seemed to
have almost completely vanished. I recognise that part of my
feelings about
this are just irrational wishing for the "good old days" (I have
noticed
it's always the same with any online community people have been
members of
for a long time - we tend to get nostalgic and hype up how good
things once
were). But still, there was a culture of mutual respect for each
other. Even
if you thought someone was dead wrong, you didn't get into a wheel
war or
edit war with them.
I don't know how accurate your perceptions are on this point. I've
been involved with Wikipedia since late 2002 and haven't noticed a
huge change in the amount of respect that Wikipedians show for one
another. The main thing I've noticed is that there seems to be a
bigger corpus of formalized rules, and a correspondingly higher
likelihood that disputes will turn into officious rule-wielding
rather than debates directly about articles and their merits. I don't
know whether this change is a good thing or a bad thing -- some of
both, probably.
As for the "culture of mutual respect," though, I remember some knock-
down-dragout fights, ideological wars, and some incredibly nasty
experiences with trolls, vandals and cranks. Moreover, this seems to
have been going on at Wikipedia since its earliest days. Larry Sanger
(who left Wikipedia before I got here) recalls its early history as
follows:
Jimmy and I agreed early on that, at least in the
beginning, we
should not eject anyone from the project except perhaps in the most
extreme cases. Our first forcible expulsion (which Jimmy performed)
did not occur for many months, despite the presence of difficult
characters from nearly the beginning of the project. Again, we were
learning: we wished to tolerate all sorts of contributors in order
to be well-situated to adopt the wisest policies. But--and in
hindsight this should have seemed perfectly predictable--this
provisional "hands off" management policy had the effect of
creating a difficult-to-change tradition, the tradition of making
the project extremely tolerant of disruptive (uncooperative,
"trolling") behavior. And as it turned out, particularly with the
large waves of new contributors from the summer and fall of 2001,
the project became very resistant to any changes in this policy. I
suspect that the cultures of online communities generally are
established pretty quickly and then very resistant to change,
because they are self-selecting; that was certainly the case with
Wikipedia, anyway.
http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95
Elsewhere, Sanger goes so far as to say that the "poisonous social or
political atmosphere" is one of the reasons why he left the project:
There is a certain mindset associated with unmoderated
Usenet
groups and mailing lists that infects the collectively-managed
Wikipedia project: if you react strongly to trolling, that reflects
poorly on you, not (necessarily) on the troll. If you attempt to
take trolls to task or demand that something be done about constant
disruption by trollish behavior, the other listmembers will cry
"censorship," attack you, and even come to the defense of the
troll. This drama has played out thousands of times over the years
on unmoderated Internet groups, and since about the fall of 2001 on
the unmoderated Wikipedia.
[SNIP]
A few of the project's participants can be, not to
put a nice word
on it, pretty nasty. And this is tolerated. So, for any person who
can and wants to work politely with well-meaning, rational,
reasonably well-informed people--which is to say, to be sure, most
people working on Wikipedia--the constant fighting can be so off-
putting as to drive them away from the project. This explains why I
am gone; it also explains why many others, including some extremely
knowledgeable and helpful people, have left the project.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25
I don't know whether the Wikipedia commmunity today is overall more
or less successful than it was in the past at fostering a "culture of
mutual respect," but if John Lee thinks it used to be better, I
suspect that this may simply reflect his early good luck rather than
an actual change. My own experience suggests that the overall culture
hasn't changed much. If anything, it probably has gotten marginally
better over the years.
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (
www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
| Weapons of Mass Deception
| Banana Republicans
| The Best War Ever
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