[Gendergap] the state of civility on en.wiki

[Daniel and Elizabeth Case]

>The use of the term "collegial" to describe the editing milieu. Anyone who has spent much time in the academe will recognize a lot of the "problem" behaviours we see on our own project, particularly personalization of disputes, which is one of the major elements leading to the perception of incivility.  Indeed, some of our most significant problem areas involve editors with academic credentials behaving pretty much within the norms for their profession, i.e., pretty unpleasantly toward those who don't agree with their educated opinions. 
In other words, as a community we create a climate where poor behaviour is the most effective means to motivate needed changes, where our policies and practices can be used as weapons both to support negative behaviour and also to "punish" positive behaviour, where the boundaries of unacceptable behaviour vary widely dependent on a large number of factors and enforcement is extraordinarily inconsistent, and where we openly claim to follow a behavioural model that *sounds* progressive but is in reality possibly even more nasty than our own.  

    Exactly. We should keep in mind that many of the complaints about how Wikipedia’s conduct policies do and don’t work are, IME, hardly unique to us but quite common in many college and university faculties. Perhaps one of the accomplishments of Wikipedia is that it has allowed laypeople to get a taste of that.

    And not just. It occurs to me how my own way of staying around echoes my father’s advice to any young lawyer joining a large enough firm: find a niche for yourself that will make you an asset to whichever faction is running, or perceived as running, or trying to run, the firm (and there will be factions). Do that and do it well, and don’t get too involved in firm politics, or more than you absolutely have to. He’s told me he was pleasantly surprised to read Richard Pipes, the historian, draw similar conclusions from his experience of the Harvard history department. He’s actually shared a draft of a PDF expanding on this, and it struck me how much his descriptions of a typical law firm echo some people’s descriptions of Wikipedia.

    Daniel Case
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/attachments/20111029/45791a62/attachment.htm