On 8/23/15, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Admins? And who are those? Please build a listing of
every admin for
every possible technical venue relating to Wikimedia.
While you're at it, we're going to need them to have a shared hivemind
so enforcement is consistent between venues. They're also going to
need to communicate about sanctions so that behaviour spilling over to
multiple venues can be factored in. And while you're doing /that/
please make sure they all have an appropriate protocol for appealing
things and passing issues upwards.
Or we could have a committee.
I get that this is a technical environment and we are all, myself
included, used to being able to chip in anywhere with some utility.
But please have some respect for the people coming up with these
ideas. The idea of a code of conduct and an associated committee is
coming from smart people, and it did not spring fully-formed from
their brow like Athena from Zeus. It came from literal decades of work
by many, many other smart people in a vast number of communities that
have tried a ton of options. And when we say "why don't we just do
obvious_thing_x?" we are demonstrating a total failure to respect the
expertise other people have in this sort of process, which is
generally /not/ our expertise, and failing to do research to boot. If
it helps, imagine that instead of talking to this group about
behavioural policies, you were explaining to C.Scott or Subbu why
their idea for a parser is overly complicated and they /totally/ don't
need to be doing $THING.
So my suggestion - and this is something I have tried to follow myself
when I don't understand the point of something in the form "bad things
are happening, why don't we do X" is to literally google "why isn't
[the obviously simple thing I thought of] a good idea?", and see what
smart people have already written. It saves from forcing marginalised
individuals to repeat, for the fiftieth time in a thread, why X is a
good approach here, and I tend to learn something along the way.
Really, you're going to tell people to STFW on a thread about conduct?