i'm kind of sick at the moment and thinking about how arguments on Wikipedia seem to be somehow nicer and less combative than arguments in other places on the internet. like, sure, there's been discussion about whether the article called "Maize" should instead be called "Corn" for years, but it's remained fairly civil and on topic, largely being about corn and maize instead of becoming about those participating or anything more important. maybe it's just site culture or because there's mountains of policy requiring you to be civil in discussion, but I think it might mostly be that there's always a very specific point to arguments on Wikipedia. should it be "Maize" or "Corn", should this information be included in this article, can we consider this a reliable source for this topic, should we delete this page, whatever. And often those in discussion have the power to actually make the change, just go in and edit the article themselves, they're just talking about it because they don't want to edit war and need to come to some sort of consensus or compromise to move forward.
Arguments in e.g reddit comments tend to be more nebulous, you probably want to get people to agree with you but the outcomes of doing so are less clear, and disagreeing with others can so often feel like a personal attack. I used to get into arguments with people on reddit, these long comment threads, and it was horrible. After three or so comments in the thread any hope of anybody participating changing their mind was completely lost, and in any case it was always more about playing to the audience, the people upvoting and downvoting, because victory was really decided by who had the positive comment scores. It felt important, somehow, when somebody commented something wrong and it got a few points, to jump in and try to turn the tide, lest some unquantifiable number of random spectators was misled.
Maybe it was important. Maybe there's some fantastic number of people who hold better, more reasoned opinions on any number of important topics because I got involved. It's impossible to say, and I have mixed feelings towards the ridiculous amount of "karma" I have on there. I really did kind of hate getting involved. Maybe it's just because I have less experience with Wikipedia, but I'm kind of proud of how, for example, one article has a citation to a zine article that is written in toki pona in it because of a discussion I had once. That's something I can point to and claim to be responsible for, and the discussion that led to it was actually very brief and everyone involved was completely reasonable and civil.
(This isn't about cohost beyond the extent to which it explains why I personally don't tend to get involved in arguments on here. One thing I will say: people on here seem to be a lot more reasonable, unlike reddit where so often people were so wrong, so my participation feels less important.)
