On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 8:18 AM Daniel Zahn <dzahn(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
But we should not make it mandatory to keep a copy of
this file in each and
every repo.
I'd argue we should, but let me say first that if we do make it mandatory,
that should happen via some mechanism that's appropriate for making policy
(RfC, TechCom decree, CoC committee decision, whatever) and not by making
threats in a gerrit comment thread. I don't doubt that everyone involved
had good intentions but the way the patch was merged was unfortunate IMO.
That said:
* The code of conduct is a tool to make contributors feel welcome. For some
of us being welcomed when we contribute our time and knowledge to an
opensource project is so natural that the effort might seem weird. Others
(especially those belonging to a historically oppressed or heavily
stereotyped group) have different experiences and might have become more
cautious about putting time and mental and emotional effort into getting
involved with a project, when such involvement in the past often resulted
in them being criticized or insulted for reasons having nothing to do with
their contributions. We should reach out to those people and tell them that
we care, that the MediaWiki/Wikimedia developer community is a respectful
space and they should feel safe to invest their time energy.
* Site footers are not a good place for that message, because people only
see them when they are fairly involved already. (Realistically, not even
then. Do you use Github? Have you ever read Github's terms of servce? I
didn't think so.) People interact with the files first, so that's the most
obvious place to put such a message. Moreover, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md is now
the standard way of doing that notice, thanks to Github's efforts to
promote it, so that's where people will look. If we want to signal
something very conspicuously, and there is a standard way of signaling it,
it would be dumb not to make use of that.
* Wikimedia technical spaces are the ones where we can directly enforce the
code of conduct. I don't think this means it ceases to exist at the borders
of those spaces. I stand by the thought experiment I gave when this topic
was discussed last year in the task Yaron linked: "Imagine a contributor
who is very misogynist but also very respectful of social contracts. This
person uses
gerrit.wikimedia.org to host their code but runs their own
issue tracker. Female developers get mocked and insulted when they file
bugs, but their code submissions are treated politely because the gerrit
ToU demands that. It seems ridiculous to me to suggest that the Wikimedia
technical community should accept such a situation and not do anything
against it, on the grounds that the abuse happens outside our technical
spaces."
* There can be all kinds of reasons why the CoC file is not appropriate for
some repository (which is why it wasn't added to all repositories, just
MediaWiki and its extensions). But if we let people remove it for the sole
reason that they don't like the code of conduct, what does it say about out
commitment to enforce it? It sends the message "we have a code of conduct,
and we'll use it to protect you, except when the maintainer of some
repository disagrees". I do not think we want that.
I would be more sympathetic if I saw how having the CoC file there might
harm or even just inconvenience maintainers, but removing it just to make
some kind of philosophical point is unhelpful. Yaron, I respect you a lot
as a developer, I think your involvement in the CoC discussions was always
constructive despite clearly not liking the whole idea, and I'm sure you
wouldn't act (inside or outside Wikimedia technical spaces) in ways
inconsistent with the spirit of the code of conduct anyway, but this was a
silly fight to pick and I hope you'll reconsider (or if you have pragmatic
reasons for not wanting the file, you'll explain those).