On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 6:31 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
You are not the only one who is told that dissent is not appreciated. It is ironic that when openness and shared values are considered, these same values are swept under the rug when people are not in line with "common" thought.
Apparently thoughts are not so common and certainly not universally shared. When community degenerates in universal enforced thought, are we still a community?
Gerard, you're only one, to my knowledge, always fulfilling the soft quota of 30 emails per month, +1 or 2 message. In February you're already at 31 [1].
Openness and shared values, IMHO, should include also "empathy": which means care, attention, proactive listening to others. It means say something when you need to and carefully craft the message for others to understand. This both keeps a good signal/noise ratio and also it's good for a multicultural, diverse community as we are. It also means leaving others the space (in this case, silence) to express themselves. I personally don't have problems with your opinions, just with the tone and frequency of those.
Again, IMHO, the assumption that fierce, logic but aggressive debate is welcome at anytime and anywhere is probably the biggest fallacy in the whole Wikimedia movement (just because we're white nerdy males, and we just roll like that).
Sorry all for the OT.
Aubrey
[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/author.html