>The use of the term "collegial" to describe the editing milieu. Anyone who has
>spent much time in the academe will recognize a lot of the "problem"
>behaviours we see on our own project, particularly personalization of
>disputes, which is one of the major elements leading to the perception of
>incivility. Indeed, some of our most significant problem areas involve
>editors with academic credentials behaving pretty much within the norms for
>their profession, i.e., pretty unpleasantly toward those who don't agree with
>their educated opinions.
In other words, as a community we create a climate where poor behaviour is the
most effective means to motivate needed changes, where our policies and
practices can be used as weapons both to support negative behaviour and also to
"punish" positive behaviour, where the boundaries of unacceptable behaviour
vary widely dependent on a large number of factors and enforcement is
extraordinarily inconsistent, and where we openly claim to follow a behavioural
model that *sounds* progressive but is in reality possibly even more nasty than
our own.
Exactly. We should keep in mind that many of the complaints about how
Wikipedia’s conduct policies do and don’t work are, IME, hardly unique to us
but quite common in many college and university faculties. Perhaps one of the
accomplishments of Wikipedia is that it has allowed laypeople to get a taste of
that.
And not just. It occurs to me how my own way of staying around echoes my
father’s advice to any young lawyer joining a large enough firm: find a niche
for yourself that will make you an asset to whichever faction is running, or
perceived as running, or trying to run, the firm (and there will be factions).
Do that and do it well, and don’t get too involved in firm politics, or more
than you absolutely have to. He’s told me he was pleasantly surprised to read
Richard Pipes, the historian, draw similar conclusions from his experience of
the Harvard history department. He’s actually shared a draft of a PDF expanding
on this, and it struck me how much his descriptions of a typical law firm echo
some people’s descriptions of Wikipedia.
Daniel Case_______________________________________________
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