diversity

Thank you 99.237.208.131 and Dakinijones for telling about your personal experiences on wiki. Getting these type of first hand accounts is helpful. Taking the discussions from a theoretical to real life examples reminds us that this is not merely a process driven exercise but is in fact meant to make the community stronger and our end products (articles) better.

Some of our editors are elderly and are not accustom to having young people speak with disrespect to them and I see this cause problems sometimes. And people with professional degrees can be surprised when the discussion are not of a professional nature but rather more of a ruckus at times. So I agree with Randomran that showing all editors more respect is important.

Let me echo FloNight's thanks. I also think your point about the elderly is important. We need to hear more experiences like these.

One way to make this more clear is social features, specifically more detailed profile information with pictures/avatars that are more prominently displayed in the appropriate places. It would be an interesting experiment to see whether this affected people's behavior toward each other. I would definitely think twice about my choice of words if the person I was responding to looked like my grandmother.

See Proposal:Social Interaction Features for an expansion of these ideas.

Those are all good points (the grandmothers/elderly thing). I've seen this play out on Chowhound. Most chowhounds seem to be baby-boomers, but I've seen a couple of people self-identify as in their sixties or seventies, alongside pleas for less-rough language. Most people accommodate them: most people don't actually want to offend others, and will try to stop once they're aware that's what is happening.

I've also just read Flo-Night's comment about Wikimedia feeling like the seventies and eighties (from a gender perspective), and ITA, that's exactly what it feels like. Not at every moment in every way, but there are definitely echoes.