[WikiEN-l] drama and incivility

[George Herbert]

On 8/28/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Marc Riddell wrote:
> > [...] The fact that anyone would even try to rationalize and/or
> > justify saying to another person, "Go away, you trolling fuckwit" is
> > symptomatic of the cancer that exists in the culture. [...]
> This is just SO not true. Marc, as I believe you've said yourself in the
> past, you're not especially experienced with large collaborative online
> projects. Trolls and other disrupters will keep poking and poking and
> poking and poking and poking and poking and poking until even the most
> patient of saints lose their cool - by definition, that is the goal. It
> doesn't mean there is a cancer in the project, or that it's doomed, or
> whatever, it just means that everybody has a breaking point. Of the
> various online projects I've worked in the past 25 years, WP is by far
> the most tolerant of troublemakers; on serious projects like GNU or
> Linux, people won't even talk to you until you've proven yourself useful
> somehow, and if you even slightly irritate one of the project owners,
> you might as well as give up and move on to something else.

Wikipedia is also very unlike those other projects; the social scope
is too large for anyone to really "see" it all, and it's far from a
monolithic unified project.

In some ways our community is more like some of the online social
communities (larger newsgroups, large chat systems, discussion forum
programs, etc) of yore than large software projects.

See Shirky's "A group is its own worst enemy" for some deeper
discussions along these lines (
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html ).

There have been a very few people who were remarkably hard to provoke
over time (Spaf and Tale on Usenet, etc) and formed cohesive cores for
decade-plus long online sociotechnical constructs.  I think anyone
looking at how Wikipedia deals with its internal strife can see that a
lot of how "we" respond hurts rather than helps, including the
occational blowing up at someone who meets the "are they trying to get
a rise out of us" definition of trolling.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com