Steven Walling wrote:
What kind of standards for behavior we want and think are acceptable is a core concern of everyone in the Wikimedia and MediaWiki technical communities.
This kind of personally-directed and demeaning feedback ("This seems to be a pet issue of yours") is, perhaps ironically, precisely an example of why it would improve interaction in technical spaces to have some clearer ground rules.
Clearer ground rules for what? Is this proposed code of conduct intended to reiterate that stalking and harassment are bad or is the policy intended to be a tool of people intent on policing civility?
From reading this mailing list and some of the talk page discussion, it
seems I wasn't the only person who found the "we" language a bit strange.
When discussing a feature request or a bug fix of almost any kind, I generally focus on the problems and use-cases that are relevant to the task. A code of conduct page on mediawiki.org is a particular implementation, but there has not been sufficient discussion of what problem(s) this proposed solution is intended to solve.
Isarra asks on the talk page "What generally comes up now as problems, how do existing channels fail, and how will this resolve that?"
Bawolff writes "I guess, the biggest question I have along the why is it needed lines, is why (concretely) is the friendly space policy not enough, and what is the intended relationship between this policy and that one."
The responses to these posts has been incredibly unsatisfactory so far.
Some of the comments on the talk page such as "Why? Why wait for something bad to happen to call it out instead of saying 'these kinds of things are bad, don't do them here'." seem to support the notion that what we're currently in a classic case of a solution searching for a problem.
MZMcBride