On Sun, 2007-15-07 at 10:56 +0200, Andrea Rossato wrote: 
> I've seen this pattern so often in communities.



I may be wrong, but I think you do not get the specificity of the
Haskell community, that is quite peculiar, I'd say.

I think you're wrong.  ;)  The specifics of motivation and style will vary from community to community, but the net result is alarmingly (and sometimes depressingly) the same: newcomers are driven away just at the point where they're transitioning from beginners who take from the community to intermediates who could (in theory) contribute.  The specifics in the Haskell community are more academic in their nature because, as you pointed out, most of the grognards are people who live and breathe academia.  The Python community has a different engine for the dynamic but very similar results (right down to the mockery when people think they're not being listened in on).  The Linux kernel team is infamous for its hostility to outsider input and has driven off a lot of talent that could have contributed greatly to fixing up its internal nightmares.  The FSF is a personality cult with all the negatives that entails, again with people leaving just at the point where they could become useful contributors.  The list goes on and on.

One of the frustrating things about seeing this happen over and over again is the insistence of people that "this community is somehow different".  It isn't.  People are people and politics is politics.  It's all the same manure on a different pile.

The only reaction I received was a couple of Haskell Top Gurus making
fun of me in the #haskell IRC channel (they did not know I was
reading, probably). As a reaction I just wanted to erase my wiki pages
and quit the community. I did only the later, but the tutorial remains
unfinished (I was thinking to finish it, but read on).

I was always wondering what happened to your tutorial.  Now I know.  The mockery on a public forum?  Was not cool.  Hell, mockery with other tops over private channels would be a childish and unhelpful reaction, but making it open like that is outright destructive.  I'm quite frankly disappointed to hear that it happened.

And even I'm doing my academic career in
Italy, known to have a very corrupted academic system [...]

I'll pit China against Italy for corruption any day.  ;)

I don't like speaking bad about a community I'm not part of.

On the one hand I want to say "please speak as badly as you can as often as you can" because the only way that problems that are driving off potentially productive members of the community can be fixed is if they're stared at in the face and hit with the rolled-up newspaper of decency.  "Bad dog!"

On the other hand, there's this: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html  It makes me wonder if there's any hope at all for online communities.

--
Michael T. Richter <ttmrichter@gmail.com> (GoogleTalk: ttmrichter@gmail.com)
The most exciting phrase to hear in science - the one that heralds new discoveries - is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny..." (Isaac Asimov)