On 30/01/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
I bring this up because, when I first came to WP, the one policy I found most disturbing was the one concerning ³incivility². Most especially the practice of banning (punishing) members of the WP community for using words and phrases considered by whoever made up the policy to be ³offensive². This, to me, made WP free in every thing but speech.
The (conceptual) reasoning for a civility rule translates to:
"This is a collaborative project. Civility is needed in order to work collaboratively with others. Not being civil rules out effective collaboration; ruling out effective collaboration means you're not working for the good of the project"
Basically, if someone doesn't play nice, they're not helping the project - indeed, there's a good chance they're harming it, as a combative and offensive attitude drives off contributors faster than anything. And if they're not helping the project, well, please tell them to bugger off. (in as many words...)
"Free speech" is a misnomer. Sure, free speech is limited on Wikipedia by its groundrules - but we're virtually required to do so in order to keep the project on track. We don't let you post lengthy theoretical discussions of how you think you've proved the Riemann Hypothesis, for example. You can think whatever you want, you can publish whatever you want, you can say whatever you want. But we reserve the right to say "no, not here", same as the New York Times reserves the right to say "no, not in our pages".
If we're banning people over bad-word shibboleths - say, banned because they talked about a "fucking annoying" problem* - we have an issue, but the issue isn't "the policy is wrongheaded", the issue is "people are applying it wrongheadedly". That's a misapplication of the policy, which should deal with context and manifestations not with specific terminology - and there is a world of difference between "that might be construed as offensive" and "this person is being offensive".
Common sense is a precious, precious thing. If people need to use it more, please tell them...