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

[Birgitte SB]

--- On Thu, 2/5/09, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] FW: [Wikinews-l] Increased incivility at wikinews [en] <warning: contains rant>
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Thursday, February 5, 2009, 3:56 PM
> 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.

Personally I think that is the wrong approach.  It would be most effective to move the center.  There are always going to be people who feel the need to be shocking.  If we can get the people who are only occasionally rude or who are just crossing the line of civility to follow consistently higher standards, then I think that extreme cases will improve also.  That sort of approach should be more successful than making blocks stick for the extreme cases.

Birgitte SB