This is (hopefully) a community. When somebody fucks something up, they own up to it and somebody fixes it (sometimes the person who did it fixes it, sometimes somebody else). The proper way to phrase it would have been "So how can we go about fixing this?". By saying that you're not putting one person on the spot.
As far as an acceptable policy, how about just don't be a dickhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_a_dick ?
*--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 10:26 PM, Brandon Harris bharris@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On Aug 16, 2012, at 7:18 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
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 mess you made". Right there, in that phrase, you have aggressively indicated thefollowing:
a) That you believe someone fucked up; b) That you think they're incompetent; c) That you think they're being lazy about it None of that is helpful. This communication style typically causes the exact oppositeresponse from what you apparently want to have happen. I can't speak for others, but when someone talks to *me* this way, I start tuning them out.
Honey = flies.
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
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