

Ethical Code – Let's Clean Up GitHub - RossPenman
http://ethicalco.de/events/cleanupgh/

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ggreer
I personally don't care if some repos with one watcher are full of idiocy, but
I think opening pull requests is the wrong way to go about this. The old
advice is, "Praise in public, criticize in private." If someone doesn't
understand that they're offending others, a short e-mail will probably solve
the problem. Pull requests and public "discussion" will just feed trolls.

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opless
Let's not pander to the radical "politically correct" folk.

"people publicly posting code with comments that could make so many people
feel awful, unwanted, and excluded"

Really? REALLY?

Let's call this for what it really is shall we?

A group of vigilantes being dicks to people who they feel are being dicks,
because of something as intangible as "hurt feelings".

Oh please, are they feeling privileged enough? In my day bullies left bruises
and broke bones, not offended and hurt feelings.

I'm offended at your offence to being offended by the word "fuck" in a comment
someone else wrote. If you really want to do something, write some code. Make
some art. Build something. Don't bully some other guy/girl/furry/etc into
sanitising their code for the newspeak of the day.

Will Wheatons law applies here - "DON'T BE A DICK"

~~~
k1kingy
> I'm offended at your offence to being offended by the word "fuck" in a
> comment someone else wrote.

I think you missed the entire point of this article. While I agree with you
that it shouldn't be up to a group of people to decide what should and
shouldn't be allowed, the entire idea of this campaign isn't to rid github of
swearwords.

What they're wanting to achieve is to clean up the blatant/pointless
derogatory terms. I mean why does someone think a commit message "What kind of
massive faggot tries to use gayQuery with node" is acceptable.

~~~
dictum
The problem with iniciatives like these is that they make it hard for me to
know that someone is the kind of person who would write "faggot" and
"gayQuery" unironically.

When toxic or just obnoxious people are instructed to hide behind crisp
language, you only find out about their toxicity or obnoxiousness in person.

~~~
opless
That's a very good point. +1

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DanBC
What's the book where one character is dating an artist and she decides that
binary - the phalic 1 and the yonic 0 - is symbolic of the patriarchy and so
she has a team re-write software to invert the digits?

I think it was Neal Stephenson?

Because while I am in favour of carefuy chosing your language when picking
names for stuff and leaving messages I worry that this kind of thing in the
wrong hands can go too far.

I'm not sure what the research says about effective methods of asking people
to make a change. I'm going to need something substantial to persuade me that
this is a good method.

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jonnybgood
> Okay, that’s great and all, but who decides what is right and what is wrong?

> We the people.

No, it's the brigade that decides.

So, a GitHub Ethical Brigade who will harass repos because an individual in
the brigade decided to take offense?

~~~
sigzero
Doesn't the repo owner still have to accept the change? And what if the owner
ignores it?

~~~
jonnybgood
It's harassment, regardless.

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dictum
It's good that people will use their freedom of speech to voice their
dissatisfaction with what other people wrote.

I just hope those who join this project don't eventually make it a them vs. us
thing: "look at these disgusting dudebros who refuse to change these words!"

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a_bonobo
I think this is a good thing - searching for the n-word on Github reveals a
lot of static swear-word lists for filters (which are OK) [1] but also lots of
rather strange choices for tests (what's up with weboob's test.py?). We as a
community of open source developers have to stop and think about how the
outside world perceives us.

There's already lots and lots of negative flak in regards to sexism about
Silicon Valley and IT-culture, which doesn't help when the "normal" non-IT
population already sees IT-people as a bunch of hateful nerds with absolutely
zero social skills.

This is a good action in that it's an open signal to change things - it might
not achieve much, but it's a signal.

[1]
[https://github.com/search?l=python&p=1&q=nigger&ref=searchre...](https://github.com/search?l=python&p=1&q=nigger&ref=searchresults&type=Code)
link from [http://tommorris.org/posts/8053](http://tommorris.org/posts/8053)

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dmishe
Imagine all of this energy directed to actually fixing bugs in popular libs,
huh.

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walshemj
Given whats been happening what github needs is a major clear-out at the top
and some proper adult supervision.

~~~
nefasti
Only one side speaking. I would wait for both parties to speak before drawing
my conclusions.

~~~
walshemj
Really I have a lot of experience in hr/ir it's a complete CF

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neurobro
Somebody, give that scrollbar a sandwich.

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crassus
Ok, you win. You're holier than me. I must confess, I never thought of
searching people's repos for crimethink comments and variable names. Take me
to the inquisitor. I'd take it as a mark of pride to be assaulted by this
group of idiots.

~~~
BESebastian
Just for clarification, are you stating that you're proud to be a bigot?

Because your comment kinda comes off like that.

~~~
opless
No, I think it comes off as sarcasm.

