[Haskell] Guidelines for respectful communication

[Jerzy Karczmarczuk]

Le 09/12/2018 à 19:03, Richard Eisenberg a écrit :

> What this email seems to suggest to me is that our guidelines assume 
> good faith, and yet some participants act in bad faith. I agree this 
> is not well accounted-for in the guidelines.
> ...
I don't really think that Philippa Cowderoy's warning
> /... guidelines like this risk doing even more damage than not having 
> any. Not only do they lack the means to handle incidents that have 
> already occurred, they actively discourage the community from finding 
> those means.
> /
points to a true danger. Teaching a "correct" behaviour is anyway a 
never-ending process.
Although I have seen a good deal of nastiness on the Web, practically 
never related to Haskell. There have been some doctrinal, not very 
serious disputes, occasionally an X or Y had too much adrenaline, but 
the true bad faith is something at most marginal. Perhaps the reason is 
-- I cite Simon: /The Haskell community is such a rich collection of 
*intelligent*, passionate, and committed people/.
The intelligence is crucial here. It is not democratically distributed 
[[my goodness, am I already insulting people?!]], so we will always need 
Constitutions, Catechisms, sportmanship rules, etc., even without the 
accompanying  "criminal codes".  The text of Simon is NOT a proposal to 
introduce  Haskell Inquisition.

In the context of the Haskell community, spending time on prevention & 
punishment of potential bad faith seems to me a bit horrible.

Ben Lippmeier says
> /The way I see it, guidelines for Respectful Communication are 
> statements of the desired end goal, but they don’t provide much 
> insight as to the root causes of the problems, or how to address them. 
> At the risk of trivialising the issue, one could reduce many such 
> statements to “Can everyone please stop shouting and be nice to each 
> other.”/
It is true  that most etiquette rules, as vestimentary  codes, etc. are 
somehow superficial, but the "root causes of the problem" may be 
terribly complicated. It is possible to degenerate a communication 
system without shouting or being manifestly brutal/impolite, and here 
and there the wish to be '/effective/' wins over the diplomacy.

Some of my students stopped  asking questions on the Stack Overflow 
forum because of that, and there are many other places avoided by 
newbies, by fragile people... Sending people away because of 
(apparently; often not so) duplicate questions, "downvoting", forming 
casts of power-enabled "gurus", who behave disrespectfully, since they 
are gurus, issuing statements such as: "read /some/ tutorial, and /then/ 
come back", etc., all this exists, may trigger angry answers, but does 
not implies bad faith (although too often signals somehow weak knowledge 
of psychology).

Let's be optimistic. I think that it would do a favour for the [larger] 
community, if Simon agreed to send the guidelines to haskell-cafe (and 
perhaps to some forum outside Haskell as well), I knew many people (my 
former students for example), who read only the  -café list...

Live long and prosper.  🖖
Jerzy Karczmarczuk
[France.]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/attachments/20181210/2c3b574c/attachment.html>