Joseph Reagle wrote:
On Tuesday 04 January 2005 15:18, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Actually, NPOV comes from me.
Ok, that was just a guess -- I'm looking forward to digging into the origins of the core policies, including who or what group is responsible for the good manners? ;)
Jimbo has certainly set the example, but I think a good bit of it is a sort of "social Darwinism" :-) - editors are self-selected and tend to be content-focussed (there's so much to do!), while the bouts of arguing and namecalling suck up time and energy. So although there are high-profile exceptions, nastiness is basically an unsuccessful strategy; even if the nasty manages to chase one person away from an article, at some point other people show up, some thicker-skinned than the previous, and eventually the nasty gets tired and gives up. I've been able to get my way in some cases by doing nothing more than waiting for three months.
The Darwinistic process does depend on a large-ish population of editors; from what I hear, the smaller WPs are much more likely to be held hostage by a bad editor.
Stan