" Without a healthy and diverse community of participants, the quality of our content will suffer."

I do not share your view, Dakinijones, and I feel strongly that it is deeply misguided. The idea that Wikipedia has a "combative" culture has taken a life of its own and, unfortunately, does not represent reality well. My experiences have been anything but combative and I encounter more people who are helpful, nice, and intelligent than those who are rude or ignorant. In that respect, Wikipedia is not much different than real life. Disagreements and even arguments naturally arise when collaborating on something. Nothing will change this and it has nothing to do with gender. It has a lot to do with people being passionate about making a good encyclopedia and sometimes that passion spills over. I believe strongly that Wikipedia is not much more "combative" than any other free and open collaborative project.

Suppose there existed a wiki-style encyclopedia edited only by women. Would this be some wonderful utopia where people do nothing but smile and sing while writing articles and then send each other baked brownies when they are done? We both aren't naive enough to believe that. My suggestion is that such an encyclopedia would be roughly just as "combative" as the current Wikipedia.

There's one last aspect of this that I want to mention. It's that part of the perceived "combativeness" arises from the success of Wikipedia producing a high-quality product. As the bar has been raised in terms of quality, it stands to reason that less people can make beneficial contributions. When these people have their edits reverted, they feel a sense of hostility from the other editors who have "blocked their additions". By definition, these editors are unaware that their additions lowered the quality of the article; and thusly the label of "hostile" or "combative" is unfairly achieved.

The notion that Wikipedia is excessively combative is a cancer. I passionately hate it because it is unfairly slanderous and largely without merit beyond what is to be expected.

Jason Quinn15:36, 9 May 2010

I appreciate your point, Jason.

Dan Kahneman gave a wonderful talk at TED this past year. He noted that there's an important distinction between our experience and our recollection of that experience.

He shared an example of patients undergoing colonoscopies, a generally unpleasant experience (or so I hear). He noted that people who had longer procedures that ended comfortably recalled a more pleasant experience than those who had shorter procedures that ended uncomfortably. This, of course, does not map to the reality of the experience.

We have to be careful not to let our recollection of our experiences on Wikimedia projects unfairly color our actual experiences. I suspect that most people have a largely positive experience here, but the bad experiences are the ones that stick. To the extent that we can reverse this, we should, but self-awareness is the first step toward improvement.

Eekim21:42, 11 May 2010