Wikipedia:Culture of disrespect

Following is a community consensus, such as it can be determined from the relatively few vocal editors:

Our policies would be printed in books like these, according to this viewpoint.

It would be too restrictive, repressive, unnecessary, and/or impossible (depending on who you ask) to require people to treat others with common respect if they want to edit Wikipedia. To be fair, this would require us to define very precisely what constitutes a violation, covering every conceivable situation in detail, resulting in a policy that would resemble the U.S. Internal Revenue Code and would be about as usable. It would be wrong to ever require someone to leave unless we could point to policy fragments that clearly and specifically prohibited precisely what they said in precisely those situations. How could they know they were crossing the line if the line was unclear? We may be routinely disrespectful, but we must never be unjust.

Besides, the definition of common respect is not universal. There are cultural differences; even within a culture, disrespect to one might not be disrespect to another. How would we resolve these differences in a way that does not discriminate? Thus, we have no choice but to apply the most liberal, least restrictive standard anywhere in the Anglophone world.

Finally, Wikipedia does not censor speech, except when we do. An editor should be forgiven for telling another to "go fuck yourself", if the other deserved it. It's just harmless words anyway. It is impossible to know whether the community feels that anyone ever deserves to be told to go fuck themselves, so we must accept the viewpoint of a majority of a minuscule slice of the editing population, those few who care to stand up in a very contentious situation and voice an opinion.

All those problems aside, imposing such a standard would cost the project a large number of experienced editors who have no control over their behavior—hey, we are what we are, no use fighting it—and the project would suffer terribly without them. The project might actually fail before it had time to replace that lost experience. Add to that the large number of new editors who would be forced to leave before they even got started. Large numbers of potentially good editors being kept away or driven off by the rancorous atmosphere? Prove it.

The culture of disrespect must be accepted because that's just how most people are. If any of us find it offensive, we just need to grow thicker skins; it's not such a big deal. Or, if we can't do that, no one is forcing us to edit Wikipedia. Do you buy it?