Jimmy Wales

“ But, so I'm not arguing against the minimum standard, don't get me wrong, I think that civility piece, that minimum standard, is incredibly important, what I want us to do is to raise the level in the entire community, to raise the spirit of what we're doing, and I think that thinking about love, is the right way to do that. ”

“ We can't do that much about anything yet, we're not in enough languages, we're not quite there yet, but we're building an infrastructure, so that people can quickly turn and say: 'Oh right, something horrible's going on in my village, ebola, I'm going to learn about it.' So there's love for that, in conflict areas, I think there's really value to be had in neutral summaries of what's happened, calm, that Wikipedia style. It doesn't solve problems necessarily, but it prevents problems from being exacerbated by misinformation and hype, propaganda and things like that. ”

“ In fact, we're inadvertently causing a bit of a race to the bottom. Because we're saying that because this is the floor of behavior we're willing to accept, we implicitly end up thinking that's the behavior that we expect. ”

“ Causes of uncivil behavior
Okay, so that's just one problem. Another thing to think about is general causes of uncivil behavior. And this is one that I wanted to mention in order simply to dismiss it. Sometimes people are uncivil because they care so much about the content -- and that can be in a positive sense -- that they just love Wikipedia so much that they get upset when people are doing the wrong thing. It can be people who are passionate and have a point of view on the issue, and that's more problematic. ”

“ But then it's up to us as a community -- we have to realize we have to build an environment that's conducive to producing the greatest encyclopedia in history.
And one of the things we always talk about is civility. But this has long been a contentious issue in the community and I have, I hope, a new approach to thinking about this that I'm hoping to popularize today, because I think that in many ways our conversations about civility in the community have gone down a bad path that is causing us to miss an enormous opportunity. ”

“ Additionally we have a lot of policies -- policies, guidelines, essays: 'Stay cool when editing gets hot', 'please do not bite the newcomers' -- this is really important: we want to grow the community, and biting the newcomers is the best way to damage Wikipedia in the long run -- 'no personal attacks', the classic 'civility', 'assume good faith', we don't allow 'attack pages', 'don't insult the vandals' even. ”

“ Obviously something that we believe is very, very valuable in our community -- obviously truthfulness is very important if you're writing an encyclopedia, because you're not supposed to just make stuff up. ”

“ So, we're talking about the minimum floor of behavior, and so when we focus our discussion about the environment in the community on that concept of civility -- on what should we be banning people for -- I think that we're really distracting ourselves. ”

“ That's not accepted any more in our community, to say 'it's okay as long as it's not libel'.
We actually seek to be a force for positive good in the world, and we internalize doing the right thing, rather than adopting an adversarial model. ”

“ What I am talking about is any persistent environment of anger and hostility, not good people who lose their cool now and then, but the bigger issues around a hostile work environment, which we mostly don't have, but we all know there are pockets of Wikipedia where it's really bad. ”

“ One of the things that we know about a lot of the more difficult users is that they are probably coming from some kind of a bad place in their life. You wouldn't behave this way if you didn't have some kind of a problem, some kind of a stress on you, something that's causing you to behave this way. And so we can be compassionate. We can love these people, in a general way as human beings, while we're finding them incredibly annoying. ”

“ And this is the values that I think we should hold in order to be morally ambitious, and to build our community up into a more fabulous fun loving environment, so that we can really get our work done, we can really build this great encyclopedia, and we don't remain focused on that lowest standard of behavior. ”

“ What I'm concerned about is good people who get drawn into a behavioral cycle that makes them, and us, unhappy and stressed. I mean I'm imagining from the cheer I got from the room that a lot of people here have found themselves in a situation where they're unhappy and stressed because of whatever's going on, and there's gotten to be a really uncivil debate going on, and a lot of unfairness, and it's just no fun, and no one likes that. ”

“ We can educate people though, and in our longer term mission, when I read that one of the problems in spreading ebola is a lot of superstitious behavior, a lot of lack of understanding of germs, and things like this, I think wow, like that's really, really awful. ”

“ But if we're still talking about this kind of case where you're talking about good people who care so much that they get upset, we actually handle that pretty well. When good users kind of go crazy for a while, when somebody's really upset because the issue's really important to them, people they lose their cool, apologize, we all understand that. ”

“ If you're a really excellent historian but you're just not able to work with others, we should help them -- go and make your own website, release it under Creative Commons license and we'll try to use some of that material, because it's just not working out. ”

“ Annoying user, good content Jimmy Wales at Wikimania 2014
One of the classic problems we have is -- and we have this a lot in English Wikipedia -- is the annoying user, who at least allegedly produces good content. There are users in the community who have a reputation for creating good content, and for being incredibly toxic personalities. ”

“ It's what attracted us to the project, it's what keeps us doing it, even on rough nights, right? We also do it because it's fun, and interesting. But there's bad times, you know: things are boring, things are annoying. ”