I think that somewhere along the way we lost sight of many of the qualities that make the wiki model work.

There are certain patterns, which a wiki community needs to follow to be successful - beyond assume good faith, there are principles such as forgive and forget that are just as crucial to community building. instead we punish reputation endlessly -, once you make a mistake it follows you forever or at least until you make a clean start. most people don't want to have to start over every time they manage to offend someone, so I think we are becoming victims of an increasingly cynical unforgiving and hopeless culture. The editors that are left are either the ones with really thick skin, the ones that haven't become jaded yet by community interaction,, or the ones that create such a hostile enviroment.

We lack an effective structure for dealing with the more persistently hostile editors- arbitration can only work so well when the abuse is subtle and sustained rather than sharp outbursts.

We need both technological and social fixes to this problem. Edit histories are both necessary and harmful. Community interaction in some cases needs to be filtered - limiting who interacts with new editors sounds extreme but it may be exactly the sort of change that helps us to ease new editors into our community. All these sort of things require interface changes to accomplish the needed social changes. This is the sort of area where the foundation should take a very active role, because the mission itself is jeopardized by communities that are too hostile for new members to be comfortable in. Sent from my mobile device. On Mar 27, 2011 8:27 PM, "Sarah" slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote: