User:Eddyspeeder/Wikipedia culture

Background

This article provides my personal views on Wikipedia's culture the way I have experienced it, along with telling examples. It has also affected the way I contribute to Wikipedia today.

In November 2011, I threw in the towel. I had contributed to Wikipedia since June 22nd, 2006 (on the Dutch Wikipedia since August 12th, 2006), but by that time I felt that in those five years, I had taken enough crap from whiny editors while contributing without ever receiving a word of praise. What it all boils down to is the closed minded subculture that has evolved among the die-hard Wikipedians since the site started. In my experience, it requires perseverance of anyone outside "Team Tunnel Vision" to not leave, filled with a sense of resentment, disappointment, regret, and agitation.

Respect

I feel that overall, Wikipedia suffers from a negative climate, and that there is too much emphasis on unbalanced criticism. Correcting one another is fine, but if it lacks in respect/empathy and it is not balanced with compliments or other rewards for the good things you do, at some point it just becomes unpleasant. I am very much in favor of discussions and I think it is good that people disagree with one another, as I think that the process of bringing opposing views together helps to allow for pages to become more neutral and more carefully phrased. There are several examples I could give you where several users remain respectful to one another and discuss issues constructively to reach the best solution. Unfortunately, there are many more examples where arrogance, megalomania and obstinacy have the upper hand.

The final drop for me to leave in 2011, was that the OTRS team was systematically ignoring me and thwarting my every action when I tried obtaining OTRS approval for photos for which I had written permission from the copyright holders. Once this "final drop" had reached the bucket, I made the conscious decision to leave and cease my editing. Why? Because is a ridiculous way of dealing with volunteers.

Adding to the problem, is that motivational actions that I have experienced as very positive, have been beaten down. For example, a few years back, one user was trying to improve the climate and hand out "The Original Barnstar" from the perspective of "Love and kindness to everyone". I've had that Barnstar up on my user page for years. Sadly, I later learnt this person was corrected for this action, because it was "somewhat inappropriate". Way to go, killing an initiative to make people happy! For me it did exactly what the person correcting this user was referring to as the intention of the Barnstar: "to let people know that their hard work is seen and appreciated". For once I felt it was. It saddened me to learn later on that this action was slapped down. A clear indication to me how bad the climate actually was.

Kindness

If the prevailing atmosphere of negativity does not turn into an enabling and collaborative environment where people interact assuming other users are well-intentioned, I believe that the majority of occasional contributors will keep hanging on until they've had enough of getting irritated, whether it be sooner or later, and whether they are vocal about it or leave via the backdoor. All I can say is: hang in there! You know when your time to go has come. Before I got sick and tired, I had already seen many people giving up, and for good reason. But I myself felt for several more years that contributing was worthwhile. Even after having taken the decision to leave, I continued to stand behind my philosophy on Wikipedia, which is that its power lies in the possibility for everyone to contribute individual knowledge and bundling it with others to create a great framework of human knowledge. But we are also humans and volunteers, that interact with one another; we have to do it together. And like the proverb says: "kindness costs nothing".

I try to do my part in that as well; if I see someone make good, constructive edits on the pages I have on my watchlist, I go to their talk page and thank them. A funny situation: one IP vandalized Wikipedia multiple times and I ended up giving him a final warning and ultimately having him blocked temporarily. Then the IP contributed constructively, so I was glad to compliment him. Sadly, he later continued vandalizing, but I was happy I could compliment the person for once. Fortunately, overall it does seem that the way people treat one another appears to be on the mend, at least in terms of being complimentary to one another. This is a good development, but to nuance it: after somebody welcomed me back and kindly helped me with a question I had regarding uploading a file that reportedly is not copyrighted, this same person went on to call other users names for their ignorance. (He immediately received at least three separate angry notes from moderators, it reminded me a bit of Office Space. He later was also blocked for his behavior, so I do not want to be involved with this user anymore.) So much for the friendliness...

So nowadays I just tend to keep a low profile; my current contributions to Wikipedia are specific and I regard them as "projects", meaning I set goals and abandon the projects once these goals have been achieved. See my projects at my user page.