[OSM-talk] Code of Conduct: civil discussion, lists etc.

Ulf Lamping ulf.lamping at googlemail.com
Sat Oct 16 10:32:32 BST 2010


Am 16.10.2010 10:54, schrieb Steve Bennett:
> On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 7:36 PM, Ulf Lamping<ulf.lamping at googlemail.com>  wrote:
>> In the long run they tend to do more harm than good.
>
> Hi, can you give an example of this?

The german Wikipedia has so much "please do this", "please read that" , 
"please follow ...", ... that it turns out to be no more fun working 
there. I've almost stopped it for exact this reason.

> I'm at a loss to understand how
> asking people to follow simple rules like "be collaborative" and "be
> considerate" could end up being harmful?

It's not the "be collaborative" aspect I'm worrying about. It's the 
"otherwise we'll ban you" - without any transparency.

In the german ML we had some cases where a few people publicly and 
privately asked the "problematic persons" nicely: "please reconsider 
your behaviour". It worked remarkably well.

It's an illusion that the discussions will end or that the problematic 
people will just go away if they are banned. They will often get really 
angry and "behave even uglier" than before ...

> I'm very much in favour of adopting such a policy. At the very least,
> we can then stop debating whether or not we need such policies, and
> whether or not people's behaviour is harmful - we can simply discuss
> whether they are in line with the policy or not.

And who will decide that? ;-)
And who will decide to change the policy "just in case"? ;-)

Regards, ULFL



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