Topic on User talk:The Quixotic Potato/crap

Quiddity (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Hi. Some thoughts on your comments at Talk:Code of Conduct/Draft:

  • This place only works because of the communities.
  • This place is founded on m:Eventualism, the idea that things are currently imperfect, with occasional regressions, but that they slowly improve if people collaborate over long periods of time.
  • The communities are made up of individuals who volunteer their free time, or who work in various areas professionally and semi-professionally (from chapter/affiliate/WMF staff, to educators and archivists and Wikipedians in Residence and more).
  • Those individuals come from every culture and country. Those individuals are generally of the geekier archetypes, but with a huge variety of aptitudes for various technical and social and linguistic areas.
  • Individual people generally don't respond well to aggressive or rude communication. Many of them give up, or don't become regular contributors in the first place, if they're met with aggression and hostility and insults and impatience.
  • Not actively undermining the morale of individuals, is necessary for keeping the individuals in the communities motivated to keep returning. It's not meant to be blissful, but it should not be filled with dread.
  • The projects are not censored. We have (or will have) articles and content on every notable topic (or other project inclusion standards), and we obviously have to be able to discuss them all. But that doesn't give everyone free license to use every aggressive rhetorical flourish available.
  • Attacking the individuals is demoralizing, demotivating, and depressing. The individual you've attacked on the Code of Conduct talkpage, has been a volunteer editor for 12 years and a volunteer-and-then-professional developer for half those years. You wrote "your stupidity is offensive to me" which is a direct personal attack.
  • This place only works because of the communities.
  • Certain best practices in social interaction are necessary, in order to keep the communities thriving. I.e. certain minimal efforts. -- Just like with the content, we have to put in more than a minimal amount of effort towards the people we're working alongside. Even if they're imperfect (and most humans are), we have to try to give the benefit of doubt, try to assume good intentions, try to help each other do better. Even if the content is imperfect (and it often is), we have to start off with the assumption that it might be improvable, as somebody else (or many people) was hopefully doing their best to improve the projects.
  • Hundreds of groups form or adopt a Code of Conduct, and we have many similar policies and guidelines in the Wikimedia content projects, some of which are listed/linked at m:Code of conduct. The technical community (focused on/around Mediawikiwiki) does not currently have anything similar, except for at in-person events, but this current draft is one step along the way to improving that circumstance.
  • Communities without basic principles of expected empathy, tend to fall apart, from tribalism and in-fighting and divisiveness and outsider-hostility. Cf. thousands of people who abandoned projects (like Wikimedia or Python) which they weren't enjoying participating in anymore, despite being contributors of valuable content.
  • This place only works because of the communities. We're trying to help the communities to not only survive (which they're just about managing), but to thrive.
  • Wikimedia should be one of the most valued and respected movements on the planet, but amongst other things, we currently have a widespread reputation for hostility and impatience towards both newcomers and regular contributors. We [all need to] try to do better than we did yesterday, every day. It's not easy, because there are thousands of complexities; with the contents, with the code, with the people. But it only works because of the people, and because the people acknowledge, and adapt to, and slowly improve the complexities.

Hope some of that helps, if/when you return.

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