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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Never thought I'd see WP talk pages held up as an example of civility. They certainly weren't when I was there. AN/I, ArbCom, flame wars a plenty.

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And the civility is definitely oftentimes a facade thereof.

Quoting rules, policies, passive aggressive civility was the norm, rather than sincere attempts at compromise.

Yeah. The "assume good faith" policy in particular has always been a favourite weapon of skilled edit warriors and flamers, for obvious reasons.

Seriously. I gave up editing Wikipedia a long time ago after one too many of my good-faith edits were reverted by some random busybody citing WP:OMGWTFBBQ. It was done in an ostensibly polite way but the passive-aggressive "fuck you, go away" was very clear. I eventually just gave up because it wasn't very important to me, but I don't think that model can successfully transfer to society writ large.

I had the very same exact experience. It is astounding to me that there are no legitimate competitors to Wikipedia at all after 15 years. It's funny how social networking is such a competitive space from facebook --> instagram --> snapchat etc but it's still just Wikipedia --> Wikipedia --> Wikipedia

What money is there to be made from an online encyclopedia? Selling ads? :)

There's a few people doing this with Wikipedia content anyway, of course, not to mention the content farms geared towards search queries, which just makes the competitive space for a raise VC-capital to invest a lot of time and effort into making an ad-supported traditional encyclopedia that's actually good seem even less attractive

Those quoting rules often used shortcut wikilinks to pol View and guidelines they have never read, much less understood.

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