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Yeah, that's an interesting example. Wikipedia spells out "civility" in great detail - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility#Avoiding_incivility http
by britta 13y ago
Yeah, that's an interesting example. Wikipedia spells out "civility" in great detail - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility#Avoiding_incivility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility#Avoiding_in... has friendly human-readable advice to prevent incivility, like "Not sufficiently explaining edits can be perceived as uncivil" and "Other people can misread your passion as aggression". And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility#Identifying_incivility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility#Identifying... provides a reasonably comprehensive list of types of incivility, to help identify what breaks the guideline. And then there's a stated process for dealing with serious problems.
- tptacek 13y agoWikipedia's impressive documentation goes hand-in-hand with a Wikipedia community problem --- lawyering. Spelling norms out in that level of detail risks making a sport of out spotting and "enforcing" the norms. Wikipedia's problem-solving mechanisms are impressive and effective for a project with a single coherent goal, but they aren't good at fostering community. In fact, they do the opposite thing: they artificially factionalize the community, which holds together despite and not because of those mechanisms.
- britta 13y agoSure, it gets messy to try to comprehensively document all types of incivility and only enforce what is described there. HN would benefit from a friendly middle ground between that legalistic style and simply saying "be civil".