

Why so much impatience on the STEM communities? - chomskyfan

this is more of a rant than &#x27;news&#x27;, but anyway...<p>Why are online communities-particularly those centered around STEM matters such as stack exchange, reddit, and wikipedia etc have a tendency to be so impertinent to newbies, or those not up to speed? These intelligent people want to create communities but seem to have little patience those who don&#x27;t meet their lofty standards or fit in with the clique. For example, the stack exchange series of sub-forums have a habit of  closing questions that are deemed &#x27;off topic&#x27; and rule like a dictatorship where appeal isn&#x27;t an option. In my own experience I&#x27;ve posted technical questions to only have them closed without even an a link to a resource. This was after an exhaustive google search on the subject matter. On reddit I see people post non-trolling, helpful replies to science&#x2F;econ&#x2F;math boards and get 5+ more down-votes because the intelligentsia overclass didn&#x27;t like the answer. Maybe they could take 2 minutes  to elaborate what was wrong with instead of down-voting? I can understand angst ridden teens downvonting a troll on an lolcats board, but not smart, educated people acting like jerks to well intentioned people.
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hga
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is sufficient to explain this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy)

Along this line of thinking, your confusion comes from thinking the Powers
That Be in those long existing forums actually share the goals the forums
ostensibly exist for. Of your cited examples I can only speak about Wikipedia,
and I assure you that's not in the least true anymore. For that matter, in
response I changed my approach to it, from improving it to simply firmly
defending two articles I find of particular importance, and occasionally
related ones. Plus general good stuff so I continue to look like I good-willed
Wikipedian (which I am, but besides the problems of Wikilawyers and biased
areas (wouldn't dream of touching a page on Islam),
[http://xkcd.com/386/](http://xkcd.com/386/) is always relevant, and with the
original goal of Wikipedia stone cold dead...).

