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

[George Herbert]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk>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.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com