Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:
[…]
On a separate note to those of you who contribute to technical spaces and are not happy about how some aspects have gone:
Matthew and a few other people have been trying /really hard/ to make Wikimedia's technical spaces better. You know that embarking on such a path is very difficult: it requires spending many many hours of your time (read life) on it, elaborating, deliberating, documenting, discussing things with people from different paths of life, etc. They have been doing it for months now. It's my understanding that they are doing this not to exercise power over others but to make our technical spaces better, to make them more enjoyable to contribute in.
For all of us who contribute in technical spaces, we should remember: We may not agree with every step they take, but we all owe it to them to help them on this path. What they are doing is a good thing and that's something that sometimes gets lost in these lengthy conversations.
This is a circular and illogical argument. Just because someone has good intentions or invested time and effort does not mean that the path they chose is the right one to take. And if someone is steering towards a cliff, encouraging peo- ple to keep pushing the cart to honour the navigator's dedi- cation is self-destructive.
Personally I'm much more grateful for the people who did not spend their energy on this code of conduct to "accidentally" exercise power over others, but made our technical spaces better and more enjoyable by reporting bugs, debugging, an- swering questions, writing patches, reviewing contributions or creating or translating documentation.
Tim