QUOTE(everyking @ Sat 2nd January 2010, 1:38pm)
First of all, we can easily police name-calling and profanity--we really can't police slick manipulation. Secondly, even a slick manipulator contributes to a calm and peaceful atmosphere by refraining from angry outbursts when under stress. At the end of the day, you can maintain a community even when a lot of polite manipulation occurs, but you can't maintain a community when people are screaming at each other all the time. Real life is no different.
This is all wrong, EK.
First, we've all seen on Wikipedia, and with other dysfunctional communities (including families), that if you impose artificial civility requirements, people will simply redefine the terms involved - so that comments which would be seen as harmless by anyone else become "personal attacks" within the dysfunctional community.
Second, this is clearly "all or nothing" thinking. Adjusting the civility requirements to be more in line with real-world term definitions won't result in "people are screaming at each other all the time," it will result in people using easily-recognized conflict words
some of the time, hopefully when the situation actually calls for it. What you have now is a situation where people who have been fully inculcated into the
cult community have one standard, and people who haven't been inculcated have another, and the former group uses their higher standard as a cudgel against the latter group. This is how cults
should work, and do work - but not encyclopedias.
Third, what does the phrase "maintain the community" really mean? Presumably it means the three basic tasks of keeping people around, bringing new people in, and getting rid of undesirables. Artificial civility rules don't do a very good job of any of those things - they represent short-term, limited thinking, the idea that if WP'ers are forced to be nice to people on the surface, they'll stick around long enough to allow themselves to be indoctrinated, and/or addicted. That isn't going to work forever, assuming it ever did. Besides, WP's focus has always been on bringing more people in, often at the expense of the other two things.
There's no fourth thing, but that's only because I have to go and do something non-internet-related now.