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 “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore