[WikiEN-l] Civility poll results

[Andrew Gray]

2009/8/11 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
> 2009/8/11 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net>:
>> Thank you, Thomas, you just made my point. This is exactly the type of focus
>> and denial I was speaking of.
>
> I'm not denying we have a problem with civility. I got desysopped for
> a civility block the community and ArbCom objected to. What I'm
> denying is that this problem is going to lead it disaster. There is
> absolutely no evidence of that.

Well, here's an odd thought. If Wikipedia dies, something to do with
our community will probably be the reason.

Everything else, we seem to have escaped. We're mostly out of the
funding trap; we're not going to have to go offline for lack of money
unless the Foundation *really* drop the ball. We've avoided being
sucked into any horribly fatal lawsuits, and it looks like we've
positioned ourselves to keep doing so. There aren't any obvious
looming technical problems, or catastrophic holes in the IP model we
rely on. Barring a freak accident losing the datacenter and a few
months undumped work, Wikipedia has reached the stage where it isn't
going to vanish one night due to something unfortunate.

But this, this could do it. A breakdown in civility is a breakdown of
community; a sufficiently comprehensive breakdown of the community
will destroy the project, simply because it's now too big to be
maintainable without that large and active community. That's not to
say this will happen, of course; I don't think it will. But it's not
implausible, to imagine us wasting away under a gradual growth of
people who just don't want to play nice and don't see any benefit in
it.

Like I say, I wish we had an effective way of solving it. We can't
direct one centrally, that's for sure.

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