[Foundation-l] Etiquette, Civility

Tue Mar 21 00:16:19 UTC 2006

On 3/20/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Cormac Lawler wrote:
>
> > Is it not considered rude to ignore someone?
>
> If that "someone" is a troll or a stalker, it is they who are
> rude, and not their victim.  Some questions are nothing but
> provocations ("have you stopped beating your wife?" being the most
> well-known example). You cannot really have rules to keep people
> from being rude, because the truely rude will always abuse such
> rules to their own benefit.  We're all volunteers here, nobody is
> forced to do any work or answer any questions.

This is all fine if we want to create a rule that gives flexibility to
people acting in good faith, and doesn't expect them to answer stupid,
petty, provocative or otherwise pointless questions. But that's not
what I'm talking about here. To repeat, with a bit more context, what
I'm talking about is a situation where i noticed that two users were
in an edit conflict, which provoked a question on this person's talk
page, which this person deleted. I then made a similar comment that
was more broad in scope, and the user then deleted this. I restored my
question, asking to please discuss the matter with me. He deleted
again.

I'm not being rude, I'm not trolling (I might have come across
slightly authoritatively, and I've apologised for this). I'm asking
for clarification on a point of conflict, and pointing out where their
behaviour isn't very helpful, which this person refuses to talk about.
(The full context of this makes it even worse, but I'm deliberately
not giving it here to be fair to the person, who admittedly is pretty
new.) I can't believe that people here don't think this is clearly
being uncivil. What I'm arguing for is a general point of at least
*trying* to engage with other people -  this is showing good faith.
Sure, we work as volunteers, but we also work in an inherently
collaborative environment. Give them a chance - don't delete a comment
on your first contact with someone, unless it is itself clearly
uncivil. And, to be clear, I'm not talking about a rule or law to hold
people to - I'm simply talking about setting out good and bad examples
of behaviour. It'd be pretty clear if someone was trolling and used
the fact that someone didn't respond to a question against them, that
this person was still a troll. But that's just not the case here.

Cormac

>
>
> --
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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