Brion Vibber wrote:
I would advise you generally to treat wikitech-l like a
professional
workspace, which it is for those of us who are employees of WMF or WMDE.
I think there's a big schism that you're pointing to here: why do you
think it's appropriate for you or anyone else to impose your particular
U.S. workplace standards on a global community of volunteers? For many
users, wikitech-l, Phabricator, and other venues are specifically not
workplaces, they're places for technical work on hobby projects.
If your corporate HR department would frown at you
making a statement
about people's character or motivations with derogatory language, think
twice about it. Treat people with respect.
Sure, treat people with respect. As a colleague of Greg Varnum, have you
privately messaged him to let him know that closing valid tasks is
inappropriate? Have you told him that gaslighting users into thinking that
an obvious bug is an intentional design choice is unacceptable behavior?
Have you discussed with Greg V. that un-assigning yourself from a task and
attempting to orphan it is bad practice?
Or are you simply focused on trying to shame and silence volunteers who
are critical of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. employees?
Regarding the word fuck generally, I've been here long enough to remember
commits such as <https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/commit/32936ec8>.
There are also many commits and tasks that use similar language. As the
English Wiktionary notes, "what the fuck" is a common interjection:
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/what_the_fuck#Interjection>. I do not
think it's a phrase that should be commonly used on Phabricator, but at
times it can be appropriate, _as your code commit from 2008 notes_, to
underscore the severity of a particular issue. What Greg did was really
bad and is compounded, in my opinion, by his continued silence and the
lack of resolution to the issue of German text appearing on an English
landing page. Saying what Greg V. did was confusing and bad, even
forcefully, is not the real issue here.
For what it's worth, here's Daniel using the same language in 2016:
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T110728#2227182>. And MatmaRex using
the same language in the same year:
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T130478>. A quick search of Phabricator
for "what the fuck", "fuck", or "wtf" shows that none of
them are rare.
MZMcBride