On 3/1/06, Peter Mackay peter.mackay@bigpond.com wrote:
Of course, building an encyclopedia has first priority, but a good working community of editors is essential to accomplishing that goal.
I won't be popular for saying so, but I don't know that it is. My high school biology teacher used to delight in seating people together who hated each other. She reckoned you got more interesting and lively discussions that way and everyone benefited. My objective was to sit up the back somewhere and go to sleep, but that didn't happen in her class and I have fond memories of high school biol as being a great education experience.
"Good working community" doesn't have to necessarily mean people like each other. Fiery people who disagree with each other often do generate lots of discussion, and anybody who has dealt with long-term POV pushers know that the short term result, at least, is a profound increase in citation, detail, and nuance in the articles themselves (and, when things die down, someone usually comes along later and says, "Why is all of this attention being devoted to such a minor issue?" and trims it up).
But I think these are exceptional situations -- the exceptions which prove the norm that most people don't like to work in antagonistic environments. There can be a case for too much antagonism. And disagreements need not be antagonistic, if they are civil (I disagree with people all the time, but rarely does it become a "dispute," much less anything truly unpleasant).
I think this entire discussion was originally about transparency. I think one could say that a lack of transparency does not kill discussion -- in fact, it might magnify it, though much of the discussion which results will be antagonistic, distrusting, and so forth.
There is also a question as to which battles need waging at all. I don't think we should mistake the burst of activity associated with dispute as necessarily being contributive to the goals of the encyclopedia. Has the userbox debate yet generated anything positive? Not in my viewing of it, at least not commensurate to the amount of frustration and negativity it has created on all sides of it, and the amount of resources it has taken up.
FF