On 1/30/07, Marc Riddell
<michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote:
on 1/30/07 7:00 PM, Stan Shebs at
stanshebs(a)earthlink.net wrote:
People who are good editors, but take other
people's statement to heart, can get so upset that they no longer want
to work in WP, and that's certainly a loss to the project. So the
civility rule is partly about backing down to a level that reduces hurt
and misunderstandings across a broad range of individuals.
Isn't this a rather paternalistic attitude? "We are censoring this for
your
protection" is the first reason given by powers that would be.
There's censorship, and then there's a social contract.
Civility should be about the social contract... we agree not to abuse
each other in the course of discussing things about which we may
disagree greatly.
If someone shows up who refuses to buy in to the social contract, then
we can ask them to behave or in extremis to leave. No forum which is
a complete anarchy survives.
The implicit message in that is that the social contract is written in
stone. Abiding with the social contract does not mean having to buy
in. Mature institutions resist change, even good change.
Establishments and vested interests become hardened into place. That
can make newcomers with fresh ideas unwelcome. By the same token a
newcomer should not expect that his improvements will be implemented
immediately. The newcomer needs hope.
It seems a natural tendency in people who have fought hard for some
aspect of the system to do what they can to keep it in place, sometimes
long after its usefulness has been exhausted. If voting is used to
bring about the feature the winners can easily be content in the feeling
that the issue must never again be revisited; defence becomes a virtue
in its own right. In time the original supporters drift away for
unrelated reasons, and we are left with a rule that has been stripped of
its raison-d'ĂȘtre. Attempts to change such rules can be a daunting
task, if only because such proposals can too easily be ignored and
wander off into some limbo of consciousness. It would be nice if we
could adopt some policy that says that virtually all decision making
processe remain open perpetually.
Ec