[Foundation-l] Call for participation in Epistemia, a new wiki encyclopedia

[Delirium]

Thomas Larsen wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> On 2/4/09, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
>   
>>> Basically you've just said "we're going to be just like wikipdia except
>>> we
>>> won't let incivlity, personal attacks and other bad stuff like that
>>> happen".
>>> How will you stop it? Blocking? Then you're just like wikipedia.
>>>       
>> Actually, no. Wikipedia no longer enforces civility. At least not against
>> aggressive well-established players like Giano. Actually, it never did
>> much. So, whoever is aggressive and persistent can determine the content
>> of the information on the 8th largest website.
>>     
>
> Fred Bauder has it exactly right. Wikipedians now accept incivility
> and rudeness as part of their daily operations. Worse, some of them
> seem to believe that it's actually a _good_ thing.
>   
I must be editing in the wrong places, because I make thousands of edits 
yet rarely encounter incivility. On the mailing lists, sure, but rarely 
on the wiki. Where I do, it's extremely limited cases that are almost 
entirely predictable.

One is deletion. I generally these days write in areas where it doesn't 
come up. But when I tried covering pop culture it was pretty annoying to 
deal with (despite meticulous sourcing), and made it pretty easy to get 
into conflicts.

The other is controversial topics with clear partisans --- 
Israel/Palestine, Hindu nationalism, Balkan nationalism, topical 
political issues, religion-related articles, etc. But it'd tricky to 
figure out how to avoid *that*. I personally would argue for expansive 
conflict-of-interest rules: when writing about a Croatian-Serbian 
conflict, for example, anyone who is connected with Croatia or Serbia or 
their cultures should recuse themselves when discussion gets heated. But 
generally Wikipedia's declined to consider this a conflict of interest 
on par with editing your own business's article. If that isn't going to 
be done, I think the only effect of civility rules will be to create 
simmering passive-aggresive conflicts, which to some extent already 
happens (the 3RR just means partisans revert 3x per day every day for 
months on end).

But the vast majority of the encyclopedia isn't either of those, so I'm 
not sure why people are seeing incivility everywhere?

-Mark