[Foundation-l] FW: [Wikinews-l] Increased incivility at wikinews [en] <warning: contains rant>

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> When will you people finally acknowledge that there is something terribly
> wrong with the deteriorating level of discourse occurring in the Projects?
> And this trend is certainly not confined to Wikinews. Take a good, objective
> look at some of the dialogue occurring on the English Wikipedia. The
> atmosphere is becoming angrier and more hostile by the day.

Not all projects. I'd like to take this opportunity to shamelessly
plug Wikibooks, which is as close to utopia as we get here in wiki
world. We don't fight, there's very little hostility, and a relatively
small number of hardworking users are producing a pretty impressive
group of free textbooks. </shameless plug>.

Projects are self-administering. If you feel the projects are not
functioning properly it is the fault of the project, not the fault of
the foundation. Get your admins to block your trouble users, and if
the admins themselves are causing trouble then petition to have them
removed. Everybody wants the WMF "hand of god" to swing down from the
sky and deliver relief to various community problems. It won't happen
and it can't possibly work anyway. Change and solutions have to come
from within, or they won't come at all.

> And, Erik, when I broached this subject in a private email conversation with
> you, you never even acknowledged receipt of that email. What would you have
> done if we were speaking to each other in person - stare at me in silence?
> That, alone, speaks volumes.

And what response do you want from him? This isn't his problem to solve.

--Andrew Whitworth