On 1/30/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@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.