Hi all, Roan, thanks for the even-handed treatment on this subject. More inline:
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Roan Kattouw <[email protected]> wrote: > Specifically, in the thread where Ryan called out MZ, the > question "but what are you doing to fix this?" was repeated in some > form or other in three posts (2 by MZ, one by Michel) before Daniel > said he was working on it and Ryan posted the above. On the original > thread, there were suggestions as to how the links could be fixed, but > no one in ops responded to those posts, or acknowledged them, or even > acknowledged that it's something that should be worked on until Daniel > and Ryan did that just now. MZ's post complained about a lack of > communication from ops about issue #2, and the response to it was a > more active lack of communication from ops about issue #2. When the question "shouldn't someone being doing something about X?" comes up on this mailing list, where X is a well-defined bug or problem with our infrastructure, it should go into Bugzilla (even if it also exists in RT, which people outside of WMF should feel free to pretend doesn't exist). > Hostile behavior has no place on this list and calling it out is a > good thing. We should be thoughtful about how we call people out, and lead by example. We shouldn't fight fire with fire. > But what happened here is an anti-pattern that I've seen > around here before: when someone says something in an inappropriate > way, people call them out on it (which is good), but subsequently > refuse to discuss the substance of what was said, to the point where > whenever it's brought up it's either ignored or the conversation is > steered back to the inappropriate behavior. I'm not sure you've identified which part is the anti-pattern. The anti-pattern is ignoring the polite requests to fix things, and having an all-hands-on-deck response when someone lobs a grenade. I'm not terribly motivated to tease out "the real issue" when someone lobs a grenade, and I suspect other people are the same. Now, when someone lobs a grenade after several polite requests, and it looks like "yeah, we should have dealt with that", at a minimum, go back and find the polite request, and respond to *that*. That's still rewarding the grenade lobber a little bit, but acknowledging the way we prefer to get requests. > In this case it was > eventually addressed after repeated questions from multiple people, > but that hasn't always happened. I've been in a situation where I > wrote overly aggressive criticism and got called out on it, which is > fair, but the substance of the criticism was never addressed and > because the subject is apparently tainted, reviving the discussion is > futile. I tried, and it went straight back to everyone piling on me > for how hostile I'd been, so I gave up. I think there's a pretty big difference if the person apologizes or digs their heels in about the original rudeness. If the person apologizes, drop it already. If someone else who hasn't been rude raises it, respond. In the case of a "poisoned" thread, just start a new thread politely. In this case, Brian *almost* pulled it off with his incredibly constructive message. If he had changed the subject line, I could have jumped all over you for threadjacking. ;-) > But what pisses me off is that it's > apparently impossible to get people to discuss real issues once > they're tainted with inappropriate communication. That's unhealthy and > needs to stop. So by all means, call people out on hostility. But > don't ignore stifle discussion about real problems. I don't think the ends justify the means in the vast majority of poisoned threads. I think this thread ("Can we make an acceptable behavior policy?") is poisoned by the fact that MZ was specifically called out here, especially because I think this particular offense here was relatively mild. So I'd prefer to just chill on this for a while. However, I think it would be a good idea for us to discuss this topic later on when we have some distance from this thread. Rob _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
