koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com wrote:
It seems to me that people should know what we're here for and respect that, and people who don't should be asked, kindly, if their priorities are straight in coming to the website. As far as I'm concerned, the encyclopedia is what matters; there are plenty of other places online to chitchat, argue, or pontificate. Try yahoo!groups, or livejournal, or usenet, or even slashdot. Our community is unified in purpose, and quite frankly, anyone who is not here for that purpose belongs to a different community. Banning comes about IMHO because people aren't seeing enough community pressure to quit being an asshole and/or get to work.
I would agree with this completely. I fully support that we should ask people, kindly (of course!), if their priorities are straight in coming to the website. And that we should exert careful social pressure on people who are being problematic.
This doesn't mean yelling at them or shaming them, since those are the techniques of Usenet, appropriate (perhaps) to that medium, but less than helpful in a medium of collaboration.
So how we determine someone has nothing to contribute? Isn't that a bold decision? How long do we allow someone to try to contribute before deciding it's not worth it?
I wish I knew an easy answer to these questions. But I think there is none. We can only be thoughtful and tolerant for awhile, and apply pressure for awhile, and then eventually and *with the feeling that we've failed*, we should ban as a last resort. And even then, the door to redemption should almost always remain open.
I believe that: 1) It should not be necessary to tell people to leave. The community expectation should be so great that we are here to build an encyclopedia that trolls and vandals are immediately and thoroughly discouraged. 2)I'd rather not feel compelled to tell people to leave because they're interfering. Most people realize it, and so most people don't dabble where they don't belong. 3) If someone proves a stubborn & insistent impediment, we should tell him or her to leave. 4) When we do tell someone to leave, we should be able to enforce it if necessary.
I think that's all basically correct. It's hard to strike the right balance, but one thing that I do think we can do a better job of is in educating/indoctrinating newcomers that we play nicely here, that we aren't here to fight and argue, but to produce. That's a hard lesson to learn, but if the social pressure is solidly in that direction, it will usually work.
some people are simply not helpful. We don't all agree who those people are, but I think we do agree that such people exist. For those people who won't listen to reason and won't listen to community pressure, we should have an accurate means of blocking access. We are accepting to people by default, but wasps should make their nests outside, not inside.
I agree.
I daresay our standards are fairly open: come here to help build an encyclopedia. Do not come here to chitchat, to troll, to play. Work may be fun, work may not always be fun (I know this for certain), but work is why we are here. We are open to people who want to help; we are not open to people who want to hinder. We also, it seems (and here I'm thinking of Helga), are not open to people who want to help and consistently can not. Jerry Lewis can play in the [[wikipedia:sandbox]]; he should keep his hands off the [[muriatic acid]].
Yes.
On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I would agree with this completely. I fully support that we should ask people, kindly (of course!), if their priorities are straight in coming to the website. And that we should exert careful social pressure on people who are being problematic.
This doesn't mean yelling at them or shaming them, since those are the techniques of Usenet, appropriate (perhaps) to that medium, but less than helpful in a medium of collaboration.
Yelling, certainly, doesn't help. Shaming, in an atmosphere where there is strong general support for certain principles that are *egregiously* violated, *can* help and *has* helped upon occasion.
It is *precisely* in a medium of collaboration where shaming can help!
I'm not going to stop doing it, myself, and I continue to advocate its tasteful, usually tongue-in-cheek, winking, use. Treating others with respect is important as well; but I wouldn't attempt to shame someone that I didn't have at least enough respect to think that they'd react appropriately.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, of course. I expect that, if I do something egregiously wrong, I'll be shamed; and lord knows that on this list, people do their level best to do just that (albeit with uneven success).
Now, don't get me wrong. I really do wish we all were a *lot* nicer to each other than we have been. I *don't* actually relish taking people to task for their violations of protocol. If I can do it in a gentle way, I'll can. But where gentleness is met with no result, shaming can help.
Sometimes, violations are *so* egregious, *so* outrageous, and *consciously so* (rubbing our nose in it as it were), that shaming the violators is the polite way of saying, "You've really gone over the line this time, buddy."
If someone is actually shamed *for shaming* someone in such a situation, that's an indication that the community doesn't take its "lines" seriously enough. In such situations, again, shaming can be useful, and should at the very least be tolerated.
I wish I knew an easy answer to these questions. But I think there is none. We can only be thoughtful and tolerant for awhile, and apply pressure for awhile, and then eventually and *with the feeling that we've failed*, we should ban as a last resort. And even then, the door to redemption should almost always remain open.
I agree with this personally, but I'd like us to discuss it in a little more depth and with a little more precision if we can. Maybe not *right now*, but eventually.
I believe that: 1) It should not be necessary to tell people to leave. The community expectation should be so great that we are here to build an encyclopedia that trolls and vandals are immediately and thoroughly discouraged. 2)I'd rather not feel compelled to tell people to leave because they're interfering. Most people realize it, and so most people don't dabble where they don't belong. 3) If someone proves a stubborn & insistent impediment, we should tell him or her to leave. 4) When we do tell someone to leave, we should be able to enforce it if necessary.
I think that's all basically correct.
So do I, well said.
Larry
Larry Sanger wrote:
Now, don't get me wrong. I really do wish we all were a *lot* nicer to each other than we have been.
Me too, although at the same time I'm impressed with how nice everyone usually is. As compared to the typical mailing list or Usenet debate, wikipedia /talk pages are very co-operative (on the whole).
Virtually all discussions start with the base assumption that the other person wants to get it right as much as we do, and that differences are cause for careful analysis and tweaking, not for flame wars.
It doesn't always go that way, of course, and unfortunately, but usually it does. Some are masters at it.
--Jimbo
Yelling, certainly, doesn't help. Shaming, in an atmosphere where there is strong general support for certain principles that are *egregiously* violated, *can* help and *has* helped upon occasion.
It is *precisely* in a medium of collaboration where shaming can help!
I'm not going to stop doing it, myself, and I continue to advocate its tasteful, usually tongue-in-cheek, winking, use. Treating others with respect is important as well; but I wouldn't attempt to shame someone that I didn't have at least enough respect to think that they'd react appropriately.
When you shame someone, you demonstrate a lack of respect. Jokingly shaming someone is still shaming someone. I don't like it.
===== Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com http://www.christophermahan.com/
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Jimmy Wales wrote:
I think that's all basically correct. It's hard to strike the right balance, but one thing that I do think we can do a better job of is in educating/indoctrinating newcomers that we play nicely here, that we aren't here to fight and argue, but to produce.
This gives me a thought: maybe we should all of us spend a week or so cleaning up ALL talk pages that have arguments, particularly the long-resolved stuff. Maybe these play a significant part in *not* conveying the impression that we play nicely here.
Maybe we should be more Wiki-like in refactoring discussions as we work.
On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, tarquin wrote:
This gives me a thought: maybe we should all of us spend a week or so cleaning up ALL talk pages that have arguments, particularly the long-resolved stuff. Maybe these play a significant part in *not* conveying the impression that we play nicely here.
We could begin here:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:The_Cunctator/How_to_destroy_Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_commentary/Responses_to_How_to_Destr...
I don't believe those pages have been refactored and I'm sure some people would object if they were. In fact, if we're *really* interested in cleaning up divisive pages that convey the impression that we don't play nicely, what would we do with this page?
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:The_Cunctator/Bias_Talk
A number of listmembers will find quotations from themselves on that page. Perhaps Cunc wants it known that people don't play nicely with him; but he never has explained why he has such a page, when no one else does. He also fails to supply the context that explains why he has elicited the reactions that he has, which isn't exactly nice itself.
(What if *I* were to put up such a page of quotations critical of me? How would you react? What if we *all*, each one of us, maintained a page listing all quotations that were critical of us? That doesn't sound like it would be a civilizing influence.)
If we were *really* serious about making Wikipedia more civil, we would demonstrate that we have the maturity and courage to talk about such problems openly and seriously--and then finally committing ourselves to burying the hatchet.
Cunc's pages aren't particularly important, of course. They're just an example of a festering issue that is easily glossed over in calls for civility and kindness. There are usually legitimate if not fully exculpating reasons for nastiness of all sorts on the website, and mere calls to cooperate will not solve them. Actually talking about them openly, however, might. Hopefully, such conversation could itself be done with civility.
I really would look forward to an atmosphere in which participants *actually did* show respect for each other. That might actually might persuade *me* to participate more again!
Larry
Larry Sanger wrote:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:The_Cunctator/How_to_destroy_Wikipedia
This is a User page. We've never come to definitive policies on what should be "allowed" on User pages, but we've taken a mostly laissez-faire attitude so far.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_commentary/Responses_to_How_to_Destr...
This should probably be moved to meta, right? It's not an encyclopedia article, per se, so it shouldn't be in the main article namespace in the first place.
If we were *really* serious about making Wikipedia more civil, we would demonstrate that we have the maturity and courage to talk about such problems openly and seriously--and then finally committing ourselves to burying the hatchet.
I'm all for this. Perhaps Cunc will exercise some of the "ten noble virtues" from his "WikipediAhimsa" page and remove whatever pages in his user space are causing anyone discomfort. Such a gesture might be greatly appreciated and help forge a better path forward.
--Jimbo
On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Larry Sanger wrote:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:The_Cunctator/How_to_destroy_Wikipedia
This is a User page. We've never come to definitive policies on what should be "allowed" on User pages, but we've taken a mostly laissez-faire attitude so far.
Please understand, I'm not saying that that policy should be changed (while neither do I think that all users have an inalienable right to put *whatever* they want into their user space--but I don't think anyone is denying that right now).
The request for refactoring or moving such pages is not an attempt to infringe anyone's rights (for example, Cunc can continue to ignore the request without comment if he chooses). It's instead a matter of simple politeness and civility, of trying to make Wikipedia a place where people are *more* apt to treat each other respectfully than they are now.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_commentary/Responses_to_How_to_Destr...
This should probably be moved to meta, right? It's not an encyclopedia article, per se, so it shouldn't be in the main article namespace in the first place.
That would be a slight improvement but it wouldn't achieve what tarquin was trying to achieve, viz., demonstrating to new visitors that constant verbal warfare and nursing festering resentments isn't what we are about. (Of course, it's a matter of debate whether we should use this means of achieving it!)
This is why moving the "anti-American Wikipedians" page to m.w.o (linked directly from the main Wikipedia user space) misses the point as well.
We shouldn't be trying to balkanize ourselves for the simple reason that what we're doing requires cooperation, and a lot of it!
If we were *really* serious about making Wikipedia more civil, we would demonstrate that we have the maturity and courage to talk about such problems openly and seriously--and then finally committing ourselves to burying the hatchet.
I'm all for this. Perhaps Cunc will exercise some of the "ten noble virtues" from his "WikipediAhimsa" page and remove whatever pages in his user space are causing anyone discomfort. Such a gesture might be greatly appreciated and help forge a better path forward.
Yes, I agree totally, while acknowledging that he can continue to voluntarily host all that stuff in his user space.
Larry
tarquin wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I think that's all basically correct. It's hard to strike the right balance, but one thing that I do think we can do a better job of is in educating/indoctrinating newcomers that we play nicely here, that we aren't here to fight and argue, but to produce.
This gives me a thought: maybe we should all of us spend a week or so cleaning up ALL talk pages that have arguments, particularly the long-resolved stuff. Maybe these play a significant part in *not* conveying the impression that we play nicely here.
Maybe we should be more Wiki-like in refactoring discussions as we work.
The principle is good, but it runs contrary to the lazy element in human nature. I've tried a little refactoring, and it's tough work. The practice seems to be that when arguments get too long so that the page loads too slowly we prefer to stuff the old files into an archive and start the whole same argument all over again.
For those of us who also believe that respect is a positive quality, there's a natural apprehension about deleting other contributors' comments.
But your right, and I should consider doing my share.
Eclecticology