The CoC does not exist in a vacuum and is itself ultimately only has any authority through the largess of the WMF board and its resolutions. The Code of Conduct Committee is dangerously arrogant if its members believe they are independent of the WMF's policies or WMF legal. For the Committee to make any claim of good governance, the committee must be seen to demonstrate that:
1. The Code of Conduct Committee fully applies the Wikimedia values.[1]
2. The Committee commits to transparency and (credible external) accountability, and is taking positive steps to assure the wider community that it is itself /seen/ to be well governed.
3. The Committee is committed to ensuring natural justice in its actions, i.e. its decisions are evidence based, unbiased and those being acted on have a right to a fair hearing.
There is no such thing as "good governance" if it all happens behind closed doors. The defensive reactions to the whistle-blowing of this case against a long standing volunteer, rather than attempting to improve or learn from the views of the wider community is especially worrying.
No Amir, you cannot build a logical post-hoc rationale for this block for the debatably single inappropriate use of WTF, if it hangs on cherry picking an essay from the English Wikipedia as "positive evidence", while choosing to ignore "negative evidence" published at the same place, such as a WMF Trustee using "fucking bullshit", along with prior precedent of justifying far more vulgar language in on-wiki debate. Wales is not a haphazard rogue in this, our previous CEO Sue Gardner has regularly justified the use of "fuck" as a way of making a strong point in multiple channels.[3] It is not natural justice to hang our most productive volunteers out to dry by arbitrarily holding them to a higher standard of super-duper nice behaviour and polite genteel language than those at the apex of authority, where their identical choice of words is spread over the international press, not just Phabricator threads literally read by a handful of people.
To be seen to be wise in using its massive ban hammer, the Committee members need to use it sparingly. Treat long term committed volunteers, even those you may see as disruptive, as respectfully you would any teenager or Jimmy Wales, by exhausting conventional adult to adult talking options, before slamming them down in what now appears to be easily avoidable escalation of a very minor infraction of civility.
Links 1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Values/2008 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_justice 3. https://twitter.com/SuePGardner/status/907625338963886080
Fae
On Thu, 9 Aug 2018 at 08:41, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
2018-08-08 21:42 GMT+03:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com:
The message which was sanctioned was even of an especially thoughtful kind, in my opinion, because it didn't attempt to submerge the other users with walls of text, politically correct tirades or otherwise charged statements. It was merely a heartfelt interjection to help people stop, reconsider their actions and self-improve without the need of lectures. Was this peculiar effort at constructive facilitation considered? If not, what alternatives or constructive suggestions were provided?
No, it was not thoughtful. What actually happened is that the other users are now submerged with dozens of emails analyzing that interjection. Sure, it's pretty easy to ignore this thread or even mute it in one's email reader, but one could just as well ignore that bug report. So no, it's not thoughtful. It's provocative, unnecessary, and nonconstructive.
Using the f-word shouldn't be fully banned, but it should be obvious that it is not always OK. Every case of using such language is supposed to trigger a consideration: "Is it OK to use it now?". This should be common sense, but apparently it isn't, so it's good to have a CoC to encourage people to be considerate. And it's good to enforce the CoC when necessary.
The fact that the f-word was used elsewhere in the code and on Phabricator is not an excuse. This is also what the well-known English Wikipedia essay "Other stuff exists"[1] is about: by itself, precedent is not justification. In this case it was not OK. It often happens that a bug that shouldn't have been closed is closed. When one thinks that this happened, one can reopen it with a constructive explanation. It doesn't have to be a wall of text, but it really shouldn't be an f-word.
Can the process around the CoC be better? Probably. Could the process around deploying the new WMF website be better? Definitely.
Is it OK to use f-words to complain about it? Absolutely not. It's not friendly, it's not thoughtful, it's not funny, it's not constructive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Other_stuff_exists
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com