Wikipedia Editor Says Site's Toxic Community Has Him Contemplating Suicide (vice.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A longtime Wikipedia editor wrote an email to a large public mailing list Tuesday, saying he was contemplating suicide due to online abuse by his fellow Wikipedians. "Nobody on Wikipedia seems to be kind," he wrote. "You are all so busy power tripping that you forget there is a real, live person on the other side." He lamented that obstructionism by other editors stopped him from contributing to the site's "great mission -- one I feel so keenly." The email was sent to the Wikimedia-L mailing list, which is one of the largest community-run Wikimedia mailing lists and has hundreds of subscribers. The editor was upset after an ongoing disagreement with other editors on the "talk" pages of an article about a local politician. The debate devolved into name-calling, the editor wrote, and eventually he was completely banned from editing the site he had devoted so much time to.

Comments

Re:People online need to be more sensitive

[Curunir_wolf]

I can relate to his experience - not in wikipedia, but other forums, including slashdot and LinkedIn. I have found that most people are nice, but there are certain people who become nasty very quickly. Those individuals can easily destroy a discussion. IMO we need to expect civility in online forums - otherwise, why have a forum? People should not make personal attacks - comments should be issue focused. I see a-lot of posts on slashdot that get personal, like "you are an idiot", etc. That is not appropriate - it is childish. IMO, a comment that embeds a personal attack should result in the commenter being banned for awhile at least.

You're an idiot.

Re:Yup, yup...

[PopeRatzo]

Back in the day, I hade almost several 1000 quality edits

And all of them to this one article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...