[WikiEN-l] Personal attacks and low EQs

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/2/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
> > [[Wikipedia:No personal attacks]]
> I've taken a look at the page and I quite agree with Nathan that it
> fails to define what a personal attack is.
> 99% of people have an intuitive feel for what constitutes a personal
> attack; they have the empathy to understand that certain remarks can
> hurt another person, even when the objective contents of the statement
> are true (e.g. "you're a hypocrite"). [[Wikipedia:No personal attacks]]
> assumes this of the reader.

Unfortunately trying to solve hurt feelings purely on the sender's
side is an intractable problem. There will always be people who *want*
to hurt you, and eventually someone will write some software that can
participate in an online community and insult people... Judging by
some of the weirdos who have successfully hurt the feelings of people
in our community, the bar for intelligence for such software would be
pretty low.

I think the only solution for this, long term, is learn to apply the
internet protocol mantra to our social interactions: "Be liberal in
what you accept, and conservative in what you send".

That is, while it is my responsibility as a good intentioned writer to
select words which have a reduced risk of hurting people, it is  your
responsibility as a reader to try not to be offended or hurt.  If you
are hurt, we've both failed.. the blame would, if measured, be split
based on how everyone else would have felt in that situation.

There are some people on Wikipedia with very thin skins, who are quite
eager to feel 'attacked' by every word they could possibly interpret
as critical. I believe these users are as much of a problem as users
who casually throw around hurtful comments.

This is not a problem unique to Wikipedia, but I haven't seen it  well
solved anywhere..  It seems that Internet communities tend to cluster
into two major camps based on the two obvious solutions to the
problem:  Nanny-moderated, and nearly unmoderated.   In
nanny-moderated forms people are kicked off for a simple polite
disagreement, if they are unlucky enough to disagree with one of the
hypersensitive who is also well liked. This becomes fairly likely
because such forums tend to fill with the hypersensitive.  The other
type of community is the effectively unmoderated, in this everyone is
expected to have a very thick skin and and working kill-file.
Sensitive users find it nearly impossible to participate since the
forum becomes filled with the low-EQ people that can't participate
elsewhere.

Because of Wikipedia's nature and roots, we do have a lot of low EQ
participants who are very valuable. As a result, we have probably the
lowest nanny-moderation amount of any general audience community of
our size. I think this is a really good thing.

I think going forward we need to adopt policies with respect to
uncivil language which realize that communication is two way street, 
and which work to:
1) Identify people whom enjoy hurting others and encourage them to leave.
2) Assist well meaning but ill spoken or hot tempered wikipedians in
speaking in a way which is less hurtful and more constructive.
3) Assist overly sensitive users in adapting to an online environment
which lacks the softening effect indirect communication provides with
voice or face to interactions.
4) And when overly sensitive and emotionally insensitive editors meet
and have a dispute, we should just step in and separate them... and
not unreasonably punish one side over the other.

Can someone suggest a rephrasing of "Be liberal in what you accept,
and conservative in what you send" which will not get misunderstood as
speaking of anything political?