Thread:Feedback/Social effects of quoting/Tgr (2)

This is not so much about critical reading than about critical writing. Line-by-line criticism is a fun activity for the forum warrior, and a constant source of adrenaline, but rarely useful for the reader (and since Wikipedia is mostly governed by consensus, the main goal of debates is to help other contributors reading them decide). If you check venues for high-quality debates, such as newspapers or scientific journals, you will see that the original is almost never quoted (even though the distance between it and the response is much greater -- they might even be printed to different pieces of dead trees) but paraphrased. This has several advantages: the text reads like a continuous train of thought and not a mosaic; it is easier to notice if the critic misunderstood the original argument; and since it takes more effort, there is a disincentive to reply to unimportant aspects.

The last is the important one in an environment like Wikipedia, I think. You can still quote if you really like ( : and '' work just like before) but if there is a button dumping the whole text of the parent comment, people will feel inclined to reply to every sentence of it, arguing about totally irrelevant side remarks, quoting sentences to add "I agree" and so on. This results in huge bloated posts with low signal-to-noise ratio, which are fractured into tiny argument shards, instead of the bigger picture oriented debate that would be more useful in a consensus-driven environment.