User:Chicocvenancio/report

Summary of a discussion in archive of code of conduct draft

Discussion around a few changes to the draft proposal of the Code of Conduct for technical spaces.

The discussion was about a few edits to the Code of conduct for technical spaces draft. Matt Flaschen did a great job of succinctly describing the changes and the discussion.

Background

To fully understand the discussions around this attempt at a code of conduct it is useful to have a few points about the Wikimedia Movement as a whole and the MediaWiki community in specific.

Movement

The Wikimedia Movement is a very diverse movement and composed of a good number of interconnected communities. It is customary to divide the communities by the projects and language, so as to call each project in a different language as different community, such as Wikipedia in Portuguese or Wikibooks in English. A few of these projects are multilingual and traverse all other communities. Wikimedia Commons is such a project, it is a project to host media files to be used by the other projects.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is also such a project, but in a more essential way, it is home to the software that powers all Wikimedia projects. As such it harbors a very diverse set of users and developers. Beyond the developers hired by WMF to work on the foundation's priorities there is also a good deal of voluntary developers working on whatever area they wish. As an opensource online development community it suffers issues of harassment and conduct as much as any other. This discussion being summarized is precisely one of policy on how to deal with harassment in the MediaWiki community and in a larger attempt to enact a code of conduct.

Changes

Matt's summary:

Slight change to the scope paragraph in intro

• Rephrasing of the principles
• Addition of neuroatypicality
• Addition of positive expected behavior
• Flexibility about how project maintainers can respond
• Slight change to "Unacceptable behavior"
• Addition of explanatory section that explains things the Committee will not consider violations, and how they will take the context of incidents into account.

—Matt Flaschen, [1]

The changes also included the addition of the publication of private communication as unacceptable behavior.

Changes to sections other than the introduction, "Principles", Expected behavior" and "Unacceptable behavior" can also be seen in the diff but were not discussed in these talk page sections.

Discussion

Again, Matt's summary:

Summarizing some issues I noticed come up more than once:

• A couple people had a problem with how "we" was used; most people did not even mention this, and I pointed out that many CoCs are similar in this regard.
• There was a good amount of support for prohibiting publishing non-harassing private communication, but other people strongly opposed it.  Among the supporters of this provision, some thought it should add 'without permission'.
• There was some support for the Expected behavior/positive guidelines, but they also attracted opposition, particularly to "Participate in an authentic and active way".  I suggested moving this out of the CoC to a guidelines page.
• There was an objection to parts of the Unacceptable behavior section, particularly "prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people's comfort" and "Refusal to explain or debate social justice concepts." (both also other sub-points here).  However, this was also called out by supporters.
• One person explicitly supported adding 'neuroatypicality' (in addition to the person who actually added it to the document).  No one objected to this part in particular, besides a mocking anonymous post from an IP with no history.
• There were a couple hesitations/objections to approving/disapproving on the whole thing at once, rather than continuing to refine.  Since consensus was not reached on the overall change, we do now have the opportunity to refine the specific parts that people had issues with.
• Finally, several of the supporters were in favor of moving on with this draft, despite some hesitations they may have had about parts.  Although we don't have the consensus to simply use that whole text intact, there is a discussion about freezing the parts that were not controversial, and working on the parts that were.

—Matt Flaschen, [2]

It is hard to find a flaw in Matts summary, hence the use verbatim, but I'll expand a bit on each discussion.

Plural First Person

This was a brief discussion with Matt, MZMcBride and a comment by Nemo. Since there was no rebuttal from MZMcBride after Matt's explanation it seems there was a tacit consensus on this point. Nemo's opposition, as a very tangential point, does not alter the discussion much.

Publishing Non-Harassing Private Communication

There was a good deal of discussion on this point. Krenair led the opposition while a few editors tried to make the case for the considering of this as inappropriate behavior. Krenair's point was mainly that not all publication of private communication should be considered inappropriate, while other editors pointed that in many instances this opens up the other party of the communication to harassment. It was proposed to change the wording to "Inappropriate or unwanted publication of private communication" and this change was supported by most editors, though Krenair remained opposed.

Expected Behavior/Positive Guidelines

Sparked by a comment from Neil P. Quinn, discussion mostly focused on the wording of one phrase within that section. There was no consensus on the wording to that phrase, as Neil, Tgr, Nemo, and Yaron Koren opposed the wording as Fhocutt and Matt defended it. Ultimately Matt proposed to move the whole section "expected behavior" to a new page.

Unacceptable behavior

The biggest change to this section, aside from the publication of private communication addressed earlier, was the addition of examples of non-violations. The discussion around this topic was led by Tgr, Kaldari and Yaron Koren on opposing the changes and Ironholds, Fhocutt and Matt defending them. The disagreement centered around the usefulness of such a list in the code of conduct. While supporters pointed that the list would clearly convey that common (in their view) attempts to use codes of conduct as tools to further harass, opposers claimed that the list, as worded, would introduce confusion and not create any new useful rules.

Conclusion

In the end, Matt's closing of consensus was to continue discussion of a few points in the mentioned sections and to further discuss the code of conduct.

Chico Venancio (talk) 00:08, 12 February 2017 (UTC)