Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-4714463-20140727035153

I've been here, albeit only active intermittently, for about two and a half years, mostly under my previous name, BigBug64. While there have been some special moments - and correct me if I'm mistaken - the community here seems to be largely dull at best, and outright hostile at worst, with an average mood of thinly veiled contempt.

It seems to me that this is because the community's culture has been heavily molded by a wide and relatively restrictive collection of regulations, which seem to be in place largely to encourage this precise kind of quiet, almost contemptuous behavior, on the basis that anything even the slightest bit more frivolous or relaxed might be obnoxious or immature.

I have always looked upon this anti-communal attitude as self-defeating. What is the purpose of a community if it is disallowed everything that would make it a community? Recently, however, I have begun to reconsider. Perhaps this community holds no purpose. Perhaps it is merely a byproduct, like excrement, of the fundamental fact that wherever there exists a monument or shrine to an interest shared by many people, those people will inevitably form a community around it, whether a community is wanted there or not.

Could this perhaps be the case? Is this website, at heart, a library? Should the community cease to exist, and give way to a silent world of lonely readers and writers, without speakers or listeners among them to unite them?

Or maybe we shouldn't destroy the community. Maybe we should simply divorce it entirely from the site, and allow it to exist somewhere else, somewhere more communal, so that the wiki can retain the professional, quiet air of an anthology, while those who wish to hold conversations may still do so without cluttering it.

This may not immediately seem like an attractive proposal, but I implore you to consider not whether it would be best for you, or for us, or for our personal feelings and friendships, but instead whether it would be best for the website, as a distinct entity, and for those who come to read its stories. 