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