@Nemo: It could be that the priority change was not seen as aggressive, and probably it was not initially as we have the "be bold" tradition. However, that changes as the issue heats up and becomes an edit war. In this case it didn't get to that point (less than 3 reverts, although the reverts might be perceived more strongly in Phabricator, and because the person doing them had a position of power). Linguistically it is also challenging because maybe the person using the word "troll" was not aware that it could have been interpreted as "assuming bad faith". Even if an act is qualified as "troll" there is some judgement about something that the author of the action might have not intended.
It is not fair to put all the blame on WMF employees, they might be part of the issue, but every coin has two sides. WMF employees could improve their openness with the frustration they get from the community, and also the community should be more willing to be constructive and understanding. Probably neither the WMF employees nor the community is getting the help needed to collaborate better, but whose role is to provide it?
I agree that normally the weakest suffer the most, and that somebody (again, who?) should take the lead in this case to explain to the contributor what happened and offer an apology.
@Fae: indeed friendly mediation seems more appropriate in this case, but again, by who? The people involved in this case didn't have anywhere to go, so I find it understandable that they resort to their only available option right now.
If the TCC wants to create a friendly environment, they cannot tackle unfriendliness in an unfriendly way (unless there are no other options, or the gravity of the situation requires so).
I am not worried about the lack of transparency of the TCC, because actually it should be done that way to protect its participants (cfr. Chatham House Rule), but of course they could document how they reached difficult decisions. It could be useful to assess future cases.
Micru
On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 11:19 AM Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
The lack of transparency of TCC actions and assessment processes is troubling. TCC was supposed to be a means to handle serious misuse or harassment, not to use steel boots to stamp out all "non-positivity".
Trivial cases like this should best be handled firstly by off project grown-up mediation, rather than TCC warnings for which the next step may be a global ban.
Honestly, the TCC's actions have looked so authoritarian to my eyes, I fear I am adding evidence to a case for a permanent ban of my account by writing non-positive words here. The TCC is guilty of creating a hostile environment that appears unwelcoming and threatens volunteers in all "technical spaces".
Fae
On Sun, 24 Jun 2018, 22:46 MZMcBride, z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Hello, Please refrain from name calling, the CoC has received some reports
about
users being offended by you calling them trolls. While those comments might not have been malicious they are not constructive and do not contribute to a welcoming environment for contributors.
Best
-- This email was sent by TechConductCommittee to MZMcBride by the "Email this user" function at MediaWiki. If you reply to this email, your email will be sent directly to the original sender, revealing your email address to them.
Wikimedia Foundation Inc. employees have blocked the ability of new users to report bugs or file feature requests or even read the issue tracker. But yes, please focus on me calling Andre a troll for resetting the priority of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T197550. My single
comment
("andre__: Such a troll.") is clearly what contributes to an unwelcoming environment for contributors, not blocking them from reading the site and demanding that they be vetted first. Great work, all.
A pseudo-focus on "civility" while you take a hard-line and skeptical
view
toward outsiders. Maybe these people are auditioning for roles in the Trump Administration. :-)
I'm mostly forwarding this garbage here so that there's some better and more appropriate context when, in a few months, someone says "well, the code of conduct committee has dealt with dozens of incidents! Clearly
it's
necessary!" The people pushing this campaign for more bureaucracy have repeatedly declined to provide specifics about incidents because it's pretty obvious that nobody would take them seriously (and rightfully!) if there were a clearer understanding of what they're actually doing.
Best!
MZMcBride
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