[WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

[Stan Shebs]

Marc Riddell wrote:
> on 1/30/07 7:00 PM, Stan Shebs at stanshebs at earthlink.net wrote:
>
>   
>> People who are good editors, but take other
>> people's statement to heart, can get so upset that they no longer want
>> to work in WP, and that's certainly a loss to the project. So the
>> civility rule is partly about backing down to a level that reduces hurt
>> and misunderstandings across a broad range of individuals.
>>     
>
> Isn't this a rather paternalistic attitude? "We are censoring this for your
> protection" is the first reason given by powers that would be.
>   
True, it's never been put to a vote of all the editors. I am confident 
however that support for this rule would be 80-90% or even higher. There 
are online communities that are more rough-and-tumble, but the crowd 
here is generally not like that. No doubt there is an element of 
self-selection involved, but I note that it's always been possible to 
fork WP, and yet there's no forked Nastypedia where anybody can say 
anything to each other - so either the uncivil aren't sufficiently 
organized to create a fork (perhaps they're still flaming each other 
over which wiki software to use :-) ), or the people most interested in 
encyclopedia-building tend to dislike incivility. I could theorize 
further, but then I'd be treading on your territory. :-)

Stan