Ryan Lane wrote:
What is your plan to clean up the mess you made?
I need to call you out on this MZ. This is an incredibly rude way to phrase this.
I get that our community tends to accept this kind of behavior, but I think we should really put effort into coming up with some method of discouraging people from acting this way.
What would have been a politer way to phrase the question? I originally wrote "when are you going to clean up the mess you made?", but I rewrote it.
The answer can be as simple as "apologize and move on." It's a little unclear to me what the extent of the damage is, but I don't think it's unreasonable if someone actively breaks something to expect them to deal with (or at least mitigate) the consequences, particularly if it's within their power to do so. I hit this issue at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Deprecating_inline_styles before it was mentioned on the mailing list. I read Daniel's reply as "shit happens" (which is a perfectly acceptable response sometimes). But given the open editing nature of the sites primarily affected and the fact that the sites track external link usage, I'm not sure it's out-of-line to suggest that the person (or people) who made the mess of the links clean it up. If it was out-of-line, I apologize.
Regarding an acceptable behavior policy, what did you have in mind?
MZMcBride