Conversation

Fun little thing about #Mastodon. I've spent time as a #Wikipedia admin, and I know other Wikipedians are nodding their heads and chuckling because it's such a part of Wikipedia culture that they already know what I'm about to talk about.

Collaborative editing on Wikipedia is supposed to follow standards of civility. The uncivil behavior that I used to see on Wikipedia sometimes is pretty much the norm on #Twitter. What's ironic and funny about it is that there is a long-standing (unofficial) community mantra on Wikipedia known as "No Angry Mastodons." We (people) are hard-wired with fight-or-flight responses and, when confronted, either dig in and become super defensive, or we just check ourselves out of the situation and skedaddle. It's an evolutionary response to stress, because it helped us defeat and/or escape from predators in prehistoric times.

The idea behind No Angry Mastodons is that our fight-or-flight response is misplaced on the internet. On Wikipedia, there are "no angry mastodons" that are going to come after us. We don't have to worry about getting squished by prehistoric pachyderms. The TL;DR of No Angry Mastodons is that there is nothing that happens online that is worth subjecting yourself the stress of facing down an Angry Mastodon - there aren't any, so just chill.

Edit: It occurs to me that this is leaving my home instance, which means that a lot of folks seeing this post aren't going to see the embedded link since their instances probably don't support markdown. Here's the link to the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_angry_mastodons

#NoAngryMastodons