I don't know what the prompt to write this was, but it was relevant recently on commons.
It's a damn, damn hard thing to help people see their own cultural assumptions, and to be constantly aware of your own.
Brianna user:pfctdayelise
On 30/09/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Can anyone think how to rephrase this better? Would it actually get through to anyone who needs to hear it?
(I eagerly await all the people saying I should read what I wrote.)
==== Cultural expectations
These are the things we do that aren't actually codified. The feel of the project. The social structure. This stuff is process too, but if you contradict it you'll really upset people. Breaking a rule is just breaking a rule; but breaking a cultural expectation is breaking people's basic assumptions about the fabric of this small world of ours. And upset volunteers fade away.
If you think you're keeping to the fundamental rules and the sensible processes but repeatedly upset people in the same way, your approach is ineffective. If you are in fact right, and cultural expectations are getting in the way of writing the encyclopedia, you've got a hard job ahead of you changing them. But that's the trouble with vision. ====
- d.
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