--- On Thu, 2/5/09, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From: George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] FW: [Wikinews-l] Increased incivility at wikinews [en]
<warning: contains rant>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Thursday, February 5, 2009, 3:56 PM
On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Andrew Gray
<andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk>wrote;wrote:
You can see the results we've had: viz, not a
lot.
It's not like we
can put our foot down and say "play nice,
now,
guys" and things get
better. If we could solve this problem easily,
we'd have done it years
ago.
To be fair - we're playing really nice with offenders,
rather than playing
nasty hardball.
We could politely play nasty hardball, and squash a few
people under our
polite polished jackboots of propriety.
It wouldn't necessarily be a self-contradiction to use
excessive force to
try and impose politeness. That said, the ultimate problem
is community
interaction issues that incivility and abuse cause, and
abusive admin
responses make *that* worse even if we help the incivility
problem, so it's
probably not a wise approach.
That said, making more of the civility blocks stick would
be helpful. The
sense of the community that some of the problematic
contributors are more
worth having than asking to leave is probably a mistake.
Personally I think that is the wrong approach. It would be most effective to move the
center. There are always going to be people who feel the need to be shocking. If we can
get the people who are only occasionally rude or who are just crossing the line of
civility to follow consistently higher standards, then I think that extreme cases will
improve also. That sort of approach should be more successful than making blocks stick
for the extreme cases.
Birgitte SB