No subject

icon of compliance with our SOCKS rules as they currently exist, and
his block had much more to do with WP:BADSITES  than  WP:SOCKS.




>Social pressure is a primary driving factor in creating cooperation
>and civility.

That's true, but in PM's defense,  the BADSITES issue isn't just any
old issue.  The level of on-wiki incivility that BADSITES opponents
are subjected to is really unprecedented.   If you come out against
BADSITES, there's a vocal group of people who are going to hate your
guts for the rest of your Wikipedia career.  They'll accuse you of
"aiding trolls", "being a troll", "badgering", and everything in
between.

With BADSITES, there's a real climate of partisan hatred that I've
never really seen before on Wikipedia.  There's a groups of people who
are definitely "collecting names", and overtly hostile to anyone who
has strongly opposed Badsites, and if you're sensitive to attacks,
they can completely poison your wiki experience.

If you strongly oppose BADSITES but are the kind of person who really
needs a happy, civil working environment to make it pleasant to edit
wikipedia, you really either have to make a pseudonym or you have to
just have to keep your mouth shut.

PM chose the pseudonym route, and absent any evidence of wrongdoing,
we should respect his choice and thank him for lending a hand to
trying to mediate our #1 community disagreement.

Alec


The ability to selective short circuit the social
factors by occasionally dropping your pseudonym and commenting
anonymously is an enemy to cooperation and civility.

Plus, it makes the rest of us tenured folks who have the courage to
stick our names next to difficult positions, accepting the social
consequences, look more unusually controversial than we are.

A little bit of this behavior here and there won't hurt us and we
couldn't prevent it in any case, but I think privatemusings has gone
too far and that outright endorsing this behavior in this case or for
others would be terribly unwise.