>I'm not entirely certain that this has a lot to do with civility....although
>it does certainly have a lot to do with respect for women. (It also
>>reassures me that my decision to not create a facebook account was wise in
>more ways than one.)
+1
>Nonetheless, one difference that was immediately apparent is the fact that
>Violentacrez was pretty much at the top of the volunteer heap >there: he
>essentially had control of a large portion of their content, had permissions
>and accesses even higher than any Wikipedia >administrator has, and clearly
>had direct communication and influence with the staff of Reddit. I can't
>think of someone who was equally >trollish having the same degree of access or
>influence on any Wikimedia project. Yes, we have lots of loud people and rude
>people and >trolls. But most of them are never granted adminship (and I can
>think of only one or two who advanced beyond that point in *any* WMF
>>project), and none of them have anywhere near the same degree of control of
>content.
>Risker/Anne
It also strikes me that there was another key difference: Reddit is owned by a
large for-profit media conglomerate, giving the staff an even greater incentive
to let him be as long as (as the Gawker article reported) he made their jobs
much easier. Paradoxically it would seem, being run by a non-profit and having
volunteers do almost all the work at Wikipedia that paid staff do at Reddit
actually seems to have prevented a problem of this magnitude developing.
If this does remind me of any particular Wikipedia scandal, it’s Essjay ... and
that issue wasn’t so much about protecting undesirable content as it was an
editor who had earned a great deal of community respect turning out to have
earned that respect on the basis of greatly overstating his expert credentials
(granted, probably something that will never happen at Reddit).
Daniel Case
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