Marc Riddell wrote:
on 1/30/07 7:00 PM, Stan Shebs at stanshebs@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