On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 9:27 PM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org wrote:
There is some discussion now about how the Code of Conduct Committee should be formed. See:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Code_of_conduct_for_technical_spaces/Dra...
and
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Code_of_conduct_for_technical_spaces/Dra... .
Glad to see steps forward!
But I strongly recommend we seek out people who have experience with organizing this sort of thing before we try cobbling together an enforcement committee on our own, just as we seek out people with domain expertise on technical issues that we wish to implement.
More generally:
I think it's pretty well-known within our community (that includes me, that includes you if you're reading this, that includes everyone who works on MediaWiki, MediaWiki extensions, JS gadgets and user scripts, templates and Lua modules for Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and other sites, etc) that we've seen lot of negative interactions between people: anger, put-downs, "not my department", "RTFM", passive-aggressive eye-rolling sarcasm, etc -- these are the sorts of things that poison a community and make it harder to attract and retain people who start out excited about helping.
I believe it's important that we explicitly acknowledge this and improve our community norms -- and especially our enforcement systems -- with it in mind. Among other things, this means that listing out specific offenses has only limited utility; toxic behavior can easily extend itself through "rules-lawyering", as I think we've all seen on Wikipedia.
-- brion