On 10 August 2015 at 09:18, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote: > Oliver Keyes wrote: >>But we /can't/ have one for Wikimedia, you see, because we need to >>discuss it more. Yes, it's nice that you've come up with a policy, >>based on those other policies that have helped in those similar areas >>- but we need to discuss it more and justify why it should exist. > > There's nothing wrong with discussion and justification > >>But we are BEYOND "ooh, I don't know whether this is useful ~even in >>theory~ or not" and the fact that such a discussion is going on is >>proof positive that we have a problem. Because there are marginalised >>voices speaking out within our community, and marginalised voices >>within the wider tech ecosystem, and pretty much all of them agree >>that yes, this is useful, in theory and in practice. > > Who in our community is marginalised and speaking out?
Several people involved in drafting the initial version of this, and in subsequent discussions, fall into marginalised groups. I'm not comfortable outing them because it's not my role and I'd like to respect their wish to avoid this discussion as it stands right now. > A number of people > have asked for concrete examples of problems so that a proposed solution > can meet the appropriate requirements. This is standard practice in almost > any technical community: evaluate the problem(s) and then discuss > potential solutions. That's not what seems to be happening here. Indeed, but approaching social problems like technical problems is not a great lens to look at it through; people and machines are very different things. > > A proposed code of conduct like this is quite expensive to implement and > enforce/maintain. I personally don't get the sense from reading your > replies that you acknowledge the high cost. As the person who lead the drive to get my language community to implement and enforce an anti-harassment policy and who has previously (in other communities, admittedly) sat on committees tasked with handling violations of community guidelines, I am most definitely aware of the cost. The cost of setting these up is why I got pretty much nothing done in June. > >>This policy is not for you. This policy is not for me. This policy is >>for the people who are marginalised and shoved aside and lack >>franchise in our existing processes and ways of interacting. > > Can you please be more specific here? Who lacks franchise in our existing > processes and ways of interacting? Can you name a specific problem or > problems that have come up in the past? How would having this proposed > code of conduct have helped? It's reasonable, prior to creating additional > bureaucracy, for people to push back and ask whether it's necessary. Honestly, anyone who lacks confidence, be that genuine confidence or confidence driven by insecurity. Our discussions tend to be incredibly aggressive - not in the sense of rargh hulk smash but in the sense that the processes for making change are highly adversarial. It is /a/ way of working but it is not /the/ way, and it combines very unhealthily with (for example) the gender essentialism taught in most human societies. Or to put it another way, we trend towards dominance-based decision-making and different demographic groups (a) react differently to this, (b) are perceived differently iff engaging themselves due to unconscious bias, and (c) find this more or less familiar and welcoming. On specific examples; sure, here's one just from me. It's actually fairly mild, imo. I am a not-terrible programmer, in my opinion (and, more weirdly, in the opinion of some other people. At some point that will stop shocking me). A few years ago when I was first learning to code I threw...I think it was a MySQL query I was playing around with, up on the internet in the hopes someone could fix a particular bug in it. Then I wandered into #mediawiki to find a long term MediaWiki developer - a staffer, even! - who had pulled this query out and decided that the best thing to do with it was to throw it in front of hundreds of people and ridicule it extensively, for no particular reason than that it was funny to him how bad it was. That wasn't a "healthy amount of constructive criticism" and it certainly wasn't contributing to the development of the software; I'd like to think a policy around treating people like, well, people, would've stopped that sort of attitude being totally acceptable. The consequence of this is that, absent localisation tweaks and one occasion in which one of the apps had a toe-curlingly bad choice of language, I have utterly avoided going anywhere near MediaWiki. I contribute big chunks of our Hadoop ETL code, a ton of stuff around data extraction and visualisation platforms, but I refuse to go anywhere near MediaWIki - because the last time I did, I was humiliated in public because a bored developer's got a kick out of it. And I am, frankly, scared of going anywhere near MW - despite the fact that I come from a background that pre-programs me to sort of uncomsciously assume that I have a right of entry or admission in any environment I want. These sorts of experiences scared the hell out of me; I can't imagine how deeply unpleasant they'd be to people /without/ that problematic social conditioning. > > MZMcBride > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- Oliver Keyes Count Logula Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
