Thomas Larsen wrote:
Hi all,
On 2/4/09, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:
Basically
you've just said "we're going to be just like wikipdia except
we
won't let incivlity, personal attacks and other bad stuff like that
happen".
How will you stop it? Blocking? Then you're just like wikipedia.
Actually, no. Wikipedia no longer enforces civility. At least not against
aggressive well-established players like Giano. Actually, it never did
much. So, whoever is aggressive and persistent can determine the content
of the information on the 8th largest website.
Fred Bauder has it exactly right. Wikipedians now accept incivility
and rudeness as part of their daily operations. Worse, some of them
seem to believe that it's actually a _good_ thing.
I must be editing in the wrong places, because I make thousands of edits
yet rarely encounter incivility. On the mailing lists, sure, but rarely
on the wiki. Where I do, it's extremely limited cases that are almost
entirely predictable.
One is deletion. I generally these days write in areas where it doesn't
come up. But when I tried covering pop culture it was pretty annoying to
deal with (despite meticulous sourcing), and made it pretty easy to get
into conflicts.
The other is controversial topics with clear partisans ---
Israel/Palestine, Hindu nationalism, Balkan nationalism, topical
political issues, religion-related articles, etc. But it'd tricky to
figure out how to avoid *that*. I personally would argue for expansive
conflict-of-interest rules: when writing about a Croatian-Serbian
conflict, for example, anyone who is connected with Croatia or Serbia or
their cultures should recuse themselves when discussion gets heated. But
generally Wikipedia's declined to consider this a conflict of interest
on par with editing your own business's article. If that isn't going to
be done, I think the only effect of civility rules will be to create
simmering passive-aggresive conflicts, which to some extent already
happens (the 3RR just means partisans revert 3x per day every day for
months on end).
But the vast majority of the encyclopedia isn't either of those, so I'm
not sure why people are seeing incivility everywhere?
-Mark