[WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

[George Herbert]

On 1/30/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> WP and its various interaction pages is my first exposure to this type of
> dialogue between and among persons. The whole of my past experience has
> been, in person, face-to-face communication.

Ah.  Ok.  This explains the question somewhat.

To amplify something from my earlier comment, no forum which is a
complete anarchy on the Internet survives.  This is true of other
forms of machine-mediated discussion such as IM, IRC, Usenet, BBSes,
email, etc.

There has to be a social contract, preferably explicit, but implicit
if not otherwise.

People tend to both be more aggressive in online discussions and to
take offense more easily; the lack of visual and audio clues in both
directions of a conversation is something which humans adapt in odd
ways to.  The moderating influence of nonverbal communications falls
right away.

This is in no way local to Wikipedia; it's generic to online
text-based communications.  Combining immediacy with text-only format
causes the problems.


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