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

[Phil Nash]

Jesse (Pathoschild) wrote:
>> George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Civility, or more properly abusive editors, is not a petty problem.
>>> If I had Jimbo's God-Emperor powers several existing WP users would
>>> be walked out the door and invited to not come back, on the grounds
>>> that they are persistently abusive and disruptive to other users.
>>> Even being a long time positive contributor cannot overcome the
>>> damage done to the community and other editors in particular when
>>> one problem abusive user persists.  The damage is both severe in
>>> the acute sense and insidious in the long term community values
>>> sense.
>>
>>
>> I disagree that divine intervention is a solution, but I agree with
>> the principle that a productive editor who cannot collaborate is not
>> a productive editor. Perhaps you and others can take a look at <
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Collaboration_first >, and put
>> together a convincing essay to that effect. Convincing the silent
>> majority to take a cohesive stance against such behaviour is one
>> possible solution.
>>
>> --
>> Yours cordially,
>> Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)

For every hundred or so editors whose only contributions are vandalism, 
there may be one or two editors with long-term positive contributions but 
who have issues with working with less-gifted editors, but who fail the 
behavioural standards, and it's always (in my experience) a difficult 
dichotomy between kicking these people out of the door and culturing their 
behaviour so as to benefit the encyclopedia. On balance, I feel that these 
editors are too much trouble to be worth expending effort on; their 
specialist expertise is not necessarily unique, and the content they bring 
could equally be brought by someone else. Although our ethos is intended to 
be collegiate, these editors don't get it and rely on [[WP:TRUTH]]. Sorry, 
but they should be invited to contribute somewhere else.