[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[Andrew Gray]

On 15/10/2007, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:

> > It may be useful
> > to pretend otherwise at times
>
> I don't know what you mean by this statement.
>
> >
> David, I spend time reading many of the Talk, Discussion and whatever other
> Pages I have access to as a non-admin

(In general terms, there are no pages non-admins do not have access
to. Well, there's a handful of technical ones. And the deleted pages.
But no actual contentful discussion pages; there is nowhere on-wiki
that The Secret Club Is Talking About You, or at least nowhere they
could do it *easily*)

> and my informed read is that there
> are a great many very unhappy people in there. The mood is angry, the
> climate is cold, and the culture in trouble.

Yes, the community has problems. I'd go so far as to say it's in some
ways dysfunctional. But I really don't see how reasserting the basic
values of this project is going to cause the community to get any
*worse*.

The community has problems because it's lost track of what it's trying
to do and it's squabbling internally; it has problems because users
are being dicks with power, or power they think they have. But that
problem is - as much as anything else - because of users in positions
of authority assuming the authority of "the community" in playing
their games and political posturing, using the moral weight of a
community who doesn't give a damn to browbeat their opponents.

Of course David and I want a healthy community. But we know that the
community wants to get on with writing an encyclopedia. The way to
help the community be healthy is, well, to invoke mens sana in corpore
sano; put our attention back to actually doing some work, take a
harder line with the unrecoverable idiots, and the community will wake
up again.

> And statements like "the
> Project is more important than the Community" not only reinforces the
> Members' feeling of second-class status

No, it's a healthy assertion that we share fundamental common
priorities and that the community are, on the whole, aware we're not
here as a social activity.

"Second-class"? Second-class to who? This isn't an admin clique trying
to put itself above "the community". "The community" includes the
admins - and wikien-l - as much as any other regular user - the
project is still more important than them/us.

> but serves, also, to give
> permission to those who would behave abusively to others.

Those behaving in some of the most insidiously abusive ways cry
"protecting the community" as loudly as anyone, and mostly get away
with waving the banner in the name of people who haven't heard of
their petty squabbles and wouldn't care about them if they had.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk