Ninety-nine percent of the wiki are not looking for a fight.
You're editing an article, perhaps on, say,
the pop-culture assessment of America. On seeing a description of the negative stereotypes that pop up, you decide to add the current president as an example of where those stereotypes come from.
Five minutes later that piece is gone. It vanished as fast as spam.
Why did it happen?
The Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment:
Ninety-nine percent of the wiki are not looking for a fight. You stepped on the toes of the vast majority of the wiki, the people who
really want to avoid flamewars.
This doesn't mean that 99% of the wikians agree or disagree with the opinion on the president. It means that 99% do not care for side-issue battles.
Wikis are open to editing from all sides, which makes them self-correcting. And for the most part (
trolls aside), people want to maintain a peaceful environment. This means that anything that seems to rib a little
too harshly will be wiped away.
When something is posted that stands firmly on one side of a hot-button debate (conservative vs. liberal being the
huge one), the editing machine will work to grind it back down. (Frag that. We chop it off with a
Zanbatou. Or possibly a
claymore, if we're not feeling
otaku today.)
Nobody is saying that poking fun is forbidden -- far from it; if our tongues weren't in our cheeks this wiki would never survive -- but there are lines to acknowledge. When something comes to mind that makes sense to you but will stand out as a potential flame, judge it against the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment -- ninety-nine percent of the wiki-ans are not looking for a fight.
