On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 8:18 AM Daniel Zahn <[email protected]> wrote:
> But we should not make it mandatory to keep a copy of this file in each and > every repo. > I'd argue we should, but let me say first that if we do make it mandatory, that should happen via some mechanism that's appropriate for making policy (RfC, TechCom decree, CoC committee decision, whatever) and not by making threats in a gerrit comment thread. I don't doubt that everyone involved had good intentions but the way the patch was merged was unfortunate IMO. That said: * The code of conduct is a tool to make contributors feel welcome. For some of us being welcomed when we contribute our time and knowledge to an opensource project is so natural that the effort might seem weird. Others (especially those belonging to a historically oppressed or heavily stereotyped group) have different experiences and might have become more cautious about putting time and mental and emotional effort into getting involved with a project, when such involvement in the past often resulted in them being criticized or insulted for reasons having nothing to do with their contributions. We should reach out to those people and tell them that we care, that the MediaWiki/Wikimedia developer community is a respectful space and they should feel safe to invest their time energy. * Site footers are not a good place for that message, because people only see them when they are fairly involved already. (Realistically, not even then. Do you use Github? Have you ever read Github's terms of servce? I didn't think so.) People interact with the files first, so that's the most obvious place to put such a message. Moreover, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md is now the standard way of doing that notice, thanks to Github's efforts to promote it, so that's where people will look. If we want to signal something very conspicuously, and there is a standard way of signaling it, it would be dumb not to make use of that. * Wikimedia technical spaces are the ones where we can directly enforce the code of conduct. I don't think this means it ceases to exist at the borders of those spaces. I stand by the thought experiment I gave when this topic was discussed last year in the task Yaron linked: "Imagine a contributor who is very misogynist but also very respectful of social contracts. This person uses gerrit.wikimedia.org to host their code but runs their own issue tracker. Female developers get mocked and insulted when they file bugs, but their code submissions are treated politely because the gerrit ToU demands that. It seems ridiculous to me to suggest that the Wikimedia technical community should accept such a situation and not do anything against it, on the grounds that the abuse happens outside our technical spaces." * There can be all kinds of reasons why the CoC file is not appropriate for some repository (which is why it wasn't added to all repositories, just MediaWiki and its extensions). But if we let people remove it for the sole reason that they don't like the code of conduct, what does it say about out commitment to enforce it? It sends the message "we have a code of conduct, and we'll use it to protect you, except when the maintainer of some repository disagrees". I do not think we want that. I would be more sympathetic if I saw how having the CoC file there might harm or even just inconvenience maintainers, but removing it just to make some kind of philosophical point is unhelpful. Yaron, I respect you a lot as a developer, I think your involvement in the CoC discussions was always constructive despite clearly not liking the whole idea, and I'm sure you wouldn't act (inside or outside Wikimedia technical spaces) in ways inconsistent with the spirit of the code of conduct anyway, but this was a silly fight to pick and I hope you'll reconsider (or if you have pragmatic reasons for not wanting the file, you'll explain those). _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
