
Wikimedia Foundation: Universal Code of Conduct/Draft Review - g42gregory
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review
======
motohagiography
The objection I have to CoC documents is that by design they reward people who
litigate language to push agendas instead of participating in the community
they are designed to support based on genuine welcome. This legalism empowers
people who specialize in exploiting leverage to achieve governance, while
policing and alienatating contributors. In this sense, CoC's are an anti-
pattern that exacerbates the very problem they ostensibly solve.

In Canada, we have a colloquialism that says, "well, that opens up the
constitution," which means that when you open up founding principles for
change, every obscure chancer takes a shot at getting their niche interest
encoded into it. Builders aren't engaged in political struggles, but political
strugglers' whole existence is around finding new communities to exploit and
govern.

For Wikipedia to spend time on this seems like bike shedding, and there is
literally no upside to appeasing the social litigants who benefit most from
code of conduct pseudo-legalisms. Products are not countries and they are not
societies. They are things, which people make and take responsibility for.
Forfeiting responsibility and discretion to these exogenous power struggles
arguably betrays the people whose work makes it valuable.

~~~
sleepysysadmin
Your assertion that people will abuse the code of conduct of push agendas is
interesting. I don't necessarily disagree, but I'm not seeing that as
different.

Wikipedia already pushes agendas; they don't need the code of conduct to push
those agendas.

~~~
motohagiography
The shortest version of this is: a set of principles provides a basis for
recourse and a means for people to reconcile their differences, but a code-of-
conduct is like just throwing them a bag of hammers and knives to police each
other with.

The only rational response to a code-of-conduct accusation is not
reconciliation, but litigation by rejecting the legitimacy and standing of
both the code and the accuser, by any and all means necessary, and in this
sense they are a foundation of conflict that produces permanent struggle.

------
renewiltord
Seems generally harmless. As usual there's the natural tension in self-
organizing groups between ensuring inclusiveness while not weaponizing the
tools used to protect inclusiveness. No doubt someone will succeed in the
latter with the UCoC. No doubt in its absence someone would have abused their
position unshackled by these explicit norms. It's just an optimization
problem.

But that's just the nature of the thing. The network of WMF controlled sites
is just far too big now for efficient auto-cooperation, which often happens.
So now we have rules to mediate. The rules don't seem particularly onerous,
though doubtless one day someone will find out that I advocated against organ
donation on Twitter and drag me through the mud and request a rewrite of all
my en-wiki contributions.

But until then, I've found en-wiki _very_ easy to contribute to. I think the
norms around picture copyright inclusion are super strict but everything else
is easy. I've been a member for more than a decade and auto-confirmed for some
long time so maybe that's it, but honestly I don't interact with other people
at all, and the other day I looked back and I haven't been reverted once over
that period.

~~~
ars
It doesn't really address the actual problems on Wikipedia - things like
people "owning pages", or people contributing incorrect information, or people
appointing themselves as the arbiter of what is and isn't useful (or correct)
information.

In my entire time contributing I've never even once, been aware of the other
person's physical characteristics, or social standing. So it seems rather
pointless to include those (although I guess harmless).

What I would like for a COC is things like not demeaning other people's
contributions by just removing them with barely even a comment, or just a
dismissive one.

~~~
chris_wot
I nearly died because of bullying. One of the worst moments of my life,
obviously it exacerbated an existing condition but it was terrible. A CoC
would definitely have helped.

~~~
Thorrez
Wow, sorry to hear that. I'm glad you're still around. Was this on Wikipedia?

~~~
chris_wot
It was, it was awful and had there been a code of conduct around respect then
I’m pretty certain it would have been dealt with a lot better.

------
Qub3d
To get a sense of the community consensus, it is worth browsing the General
Comments section:
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Condu...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review#General_comments)

Additionally, the overall project page (not just the draft review) offers the
foundation's arguments for why they believe this needs to be made:
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct)

------
throwawaysea
Can Wikipedia really be a fair, neutral, and global resource if its code of
conduct includes political and cultural positions? For example this code of
conduct mentions gender identities and pronouns, a topic that is the subject
of significant debate and also very much a product of the American progressive
perspective rather than universal. Whether a trans woman is actually a woman
is not only controversial (rather than decided), but also a political war over
a definition change in one language and culture. There are other cultures
where there are instead three categories of gender identities, and the
existence of these concepts predates western civilizations even. Given there
is this diversity of opinions, it seems strange to require participants in
Wikimedia adhere to one set of views.

~~~
tasogare
Hopefully I’m living in a place where this pronoun thing have not been
imported, but if someone is ever trying to bully me with his invented words
(acknowledging self-declared gender with existing ones is totally fine, using
"hir" is not), I’ll ask for reciprocity and I’ll impose the use of a made up
pronouns that contains some of my favorite writing systems (they’re all
logographic) and a few Unicode characters outside BMP. If they don’t want to
play that game, why should I play theirs? It will be an easy way to uncover a
lot of hypocrisy.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
Fix your heart.

~~~
tasogare
Fix your grammar.

English is the only foreign language I can read where I routinely have to
pause to wonder and read sentences again to be sure of what’s going on because
of purposely messed up pronoun usage. Normally I’m lucky as the rules are the
same as my native language (his encompass both genders when speaking of a
group). However recently I’ve come across usage such as singular they and even
more striking ‘her’ to encompass both gender. This bugs me out each time, not
because I’m trying to be offended of everything I read (that’s an easy
game...) but because if a text is deviating from convention it’s normally to
put the focus or emphasis on something. In the case of her for example, this
screams "warning: in this sentence the human under discussion is a woman and
this is a very relevant fact for the understanding of the text". So I
naturally start paying more attention to that. Except it’s not an important
detail at all so it doesn’t need any attention whatsoever. This is the
infuriating thing. The most ridiculous recent example of this I read was a
technical document written by a Microsoft employee, where her was used as the
default generic pronoun for programmers... I took me a few seconds to realize
I wasn’t reading doc written in a parallel universe. For made up pronouns,
they require searching on the web which is super annoying too.

So yes, I refuse to play the attention game of a few people that are decided
to ruin fluid reading for anyone else for their own self-important interests.
They are doing the same in my native language on a larger scale and my
opposition is consequently stronger there. Language is a shared good and is
the basis of human communication, so it must not weaponized by an infime
minority to create division among people.

------
Mizza
Asking for discussion: Is there a point at which imposing a specific set of
left-wing American cultural values upon functionally autonomous communities
elsewhere around the world becomes a form of cultural imperialism?

To leave a more positive comment, I'm glad that the scourge of deletionism is
addressed in here.

~~~
hkt
I'm in the UK and am happy to report the values are not American. Ask some
Aussies or Kiwis and I'm sure they'd say the same.

I'd also remark that perhaps you wouldn't be so quick to comment in such a
trite way if Wiki had instead make a statement on respecting people's
sexualities. Once controversial, now widely accepted as a facet of who people
are, and originally a darling cause of the left. It's recognised as a human
rights issue, which is to say it has outgrown reasonable politics. I look
forward to gender identity doing the same.

~~~
Mizza
This isn't in any way about gender identity, it's about the fact that there
_isn't_ a universal values system.

You mentioned the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand - do you notice a pattern
there? Throw in Canada and you've perfectly recreated the FIVEEYES
international surveillance pact members. It's a culturally homogeneous group.

I think you'd get very different results if you were trying to come up with a
universal conduct framework and you actually bothered including Russia, China,
India, Venuzuela..

Of course, they weren't properly asked and provided no input , because this is
a subtle form of upper class Western imperialism.

~~~
bawolff
Of course there is not a universal value system. If you asked someone from
nazi germany how they felt about jewish people editing wikipedia, they would
probably respond negatively.

Does it follow that we should care? Creating Wikipedia is fundamentally a
political act. It subscribes to views like information should be free,
amateurs can compete with professionals in information compilation, articles
should attempt to neutrally represent the facts, etc. These are all
ideological views, many of them controversial. Why should we succumb to moral
relativism when deciding on how wikipedians ought to collaborate, when we
don't subscribe to moral relativism in other aspects of the creation of
wikipedia. To put another way: being neutral in article content doesn't imply
that we have to be neutral in literally every organizatiinal aspect.

See also:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)

~~~
raxxorrax
You have a part about solidarity being expected as if it could be enforced.
Completely ridiculous. Solidarity with whom?

So, I expect you are some high official of Wikipedia/Wikimedia?

Wikipedia was not political act to enforce behavior, it was an act to share
information in good faith. And that goal is endangered by multiple interests I
don't feel guarded against those with this set of rules. What about people
investing money to adjust their own pages? It isn't even mentioned and perhaps
one of the most immediate issues.

I was an amateur contributor 6 or 7 years ago but lost interest at some point.
I don't know if you even can get bullied on Wikipedia, I am sure it is
possible, but that is probably not an issue for most contributors.

No comment on the Nazi stuff, just be aware that some Jews would noticed your
misplaced usage of "we" if you really want to make an argument in their name.

~~~
bawolff
> You have a part about solidarity being expected as if it could be enforced.
> Completely ridiculous. Solidarity with whom?

Well for starters, solidarity with
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Purpose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Purpose)
(and equivalents in other langs). The page
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_enc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_encyclopedia)
talks extensively about how a certain baseline of alignment is needed to
contribute to Wikipedia.

> So, I expect you are some high official of Wikipedia/Wikimedia?

Umm no. I've been around Wikimedia for a while and have opinions. At most, I
am a contributor to the MediaWiki open source project, which may give me some
clout in certain technical conversations - but this is definitely not a
technical conversation. (Full disclaimer - in the past i used to be employed
as a contractor by WMF to do work on MediaWiki, but haven't been for several
months now. My views are purely my own)

> What about people investing money to adjust their own pages? It isn't even
> mentioned and perhaps one of the most immediate issues.

Why would it be mentioned in this document - its off topic and is already
extensively covered by other rules and policies. Trying to cover all things in
one document would probably doom it to failure.

> No comment on the Nazi stuff, just be aware that some Jews would noticed
> your misplaced usage of "we" if you really want to make an argument in their
> name.

I don't understand what you mean by this. The antecedent of "we" in my comment
was Wikipedians. Note that this example wasn't purely hypothetical.

~~~
raxxorrax
The links don't talk about solidarity. Wouldn't you agree that forcing
solidarity wouldn't work?

Baseline of alignment fits exactly the arguments of Nazi against cultural
participation of Jews. It is plain gatekeeping you try to enforce in my
opinion. Perhaps it is a misjudgment, but I believe not.

~~~
bawolff
> The links don't talk about solidarity. Wouldn't you agree that forcing
> solidarity wouldn't work?

They talk about solidarity of purpose.

To quote the definition of solidarity: "A bond of unity or agreement between
individuals, united around a common goal..."
[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/solidarity](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/solidarity)

I would also point out that "solidarity" was not my choice of wording.

