It has a lot to do with the community governance structure.
Wikipedia is something akin to a democracy. Every editor has the potential to become an Administrator or a Bureaucrat. This means that a lot of editors engage in metrics-gaming behavior and become involved in the Wikipedia community, which by its very nature means weighing on on various controversies, like whether or not to delete an article. There's nominally a focus on creating a consensus, but in practice, the opinion of the Right People wins the day. There's a process for everything, and everyone has a refuge in some guideline or another which leads to lots of rules-lawyering. It's difficult to get rid of problematic people who are good at rules-lawyering and garnering support.
On HN, dang and sctb are kings. If you cause problems, you are warned. If you continue to cause problems, you are banned. There are no higher appeals. Your interpretation of the guidelines is irrelevant; that of dang and sctb is irrefragable.
I think it is possible to construct well-run, friendly 'democratic'-type communities on the Internet, but very difficult. In practice, it's always seemed to me that dictatorial moderation creates the best communities - of course, there are communities with bad administrators, but they generally die out. I've seen some really excellent forums where moderators ban posters simply for not having sufficiently high-quality content, and the result was amazing.
Granted, for any reasonably active community, it means that someone is going to spend a lot of time doing the moderating. I think HN strikes a good balance with allowing users to downvote and flag, even though I feel that most people generally downvote for reasons I disagree with (disagreement.)
One other key factor I've found in community civility actually seems a little strange at first. In my experience, it is very important for no communication backchannels to exist - for example, no IRC channels. Those effectively breed the creation of cabals and all sorts of strategic interventions in discussions, or in the case of Wikipedia, talk pages and votes. That's been a major problem on Wikipedia. It is nominally community-run, but "community" really refers to the insiders who frequent the right IRC channels and are friends with the right people - connections you have no way of seeing simply by looking at Wikipedia talk pages. On top of that, people who are friends with the right people outside of Wikipedia always, simply by human nature, get much more leeway when engaging in abusive behavior than do people who aren't.
The much bigger difference is that Wikipedia conversations/disputes are long-running and relate to the state of permanent artifacts.
The technology of Hacker News makes it literally impossible to carry on a long-running conversation or collaborate on serious permanent artifacts. There’s no point in going back to last week’s discussion and vandalizing it with troll comments, because nobody is ever going to read it. There’s no need to invent complicated rules for productive collaboration, because there’s no work to collaborate on in the first place.
But the thing is, at the end of the day Wikipedia is still the best website on the web. It's amazing. It's continually accurate, inaccuracies get fixed very quickly because just about every article is someone's pet project, etc.
Yeah there are a few things - like some political articles - that you should be careful with, but everything has citations. You can see the historical edits, you can see the talk page, it's all very transparent.
Whether it's fun and nice to contribute to is irrelevant to me. To me it's a fantastic source of information. And so whatever they're doing, they must be doing right.
Many open-source projects and standards bodies operate the same way. Many's the time I've attempted to make a contribution and discovered that first one has to get on the inside of a particular clique, else be ignored.
It's rare for me to persist in such circumstances; life is too short to play other people's games. I usually abandon the contribution, or maintain a fork if it was of utility to me.
Wikipedia is something akin to a democracy. Every editor has the potential to become an Administrator or a Bureaucrat. This means that a lot of editors engage in metrics-gaming behavior and become involved in the Wikipedia community, which by its very nature means weighing on on various controversies, like whether or not to delete an article. There's nominally a focus on creating a consensus, but in practice, the opinion of the Right People wins the day. There's a process for everything, and everyone has a refuge in some guideline or another which leads to lots of rules-lawyering. It's difficult to get rid of problematic people who are good at rules-lawyering and garnering support.
On HN, dang and sctb are kings. If you cause problems, you are warned. If you continue to cause problems, you are banned. There are no higher appeals. Your interpretation of the guidelines is irrelevant; that of dang and sctb is irrefragable.
I think it is possible to construct well-run, friendly 'democratic'-type communities on the Internet, but very difficult. In practice, it's always seemed to me that dictatorial moderation creates the best communities - of course, there are communities with bad administrators, but they generally die out. I've seen some really excellent forums where moderators ban posters simply for not having sufficiently high-quality content, and the result was amazing.
Granted, for any reasonably active community, it means that someone is going to spend a lot of time doing the moderating. I think HN strikes a good balance with allowing users to downvote and flag, even though I feel that most people generally downvote for reasons I disagree with (disagreement.)
One other key factor I've found in community civility actually seems a little strange at first. In my experience, it is very important for no communication backchannels to exist - for example, no IRC channels. Those effectively breed the creation of cabals and all sorts of strategic interventions in discussions, or in the case of Wikipedia, talk pages and votes. That's been a major problem on Wikipedia. It is nominally community-run, but "community" really refers to the insiders who frequent the right IRC channels and are friends with the right people - connections you have no way of seeing simply by looking at Wikipedia talk pages. On top of that, people who are friends with the right people outside of Wikipedia always, simply by human nature, get much more leeway when engaging in abusive behavior than do people who aren't.