a) Co-Rion: your changes seem OK, (however IMHO not needed) so go on and do them

b) Ya'akov I am very concerned about your post. You claim you are a kind of police having the right to control everything that is written related to Perl. And that this is only the best for us, as you would only oppose things that violate your understanding of what is acceptable for our community.

I am especially concerned that you (as the self-imposed higher ethic instance) blame and insult the anonymous monk. I felt unconfortable by many of the posts of that thread. That included anonymous posts, as well as posts by some named monks and by some using throw-away-accounts. So nothing special there.

The discussion inside perlmonks was in no way special than any other discussion on public forums: a questionable remark lead to many counterattacks, the involved parties called their allies, the amount of trolling and personal attacks increased, Godwin's Law was invoked and few days later the discussion ceased. And the community of monks provided their feedback by up- or down-voting the nodes.

You claim that this discussion painted the Perl community in a very bad light. I strongly disagree to this. The only thing that might have painted the community in bad light were some people carrying one side of this discussion to their blogs outside (to a place where discussion and voting is not possible).

You write There is no legitimate basis for interfering in this [the perlmoks} culture. So keep to this. We don't need no police. Nor new rules by someone not interested being part of the community.

Rata

Hei Rata, keep cool! =)

He's new and he doesn't know the rules and he's no threat.

> And the community of monks provided their feedback by up- or down-voting the nodes.

Well I actively ignored it and I hope I wasn't the only one.

Let's stop feeding all this ...

Cheers Rolf

( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

Hello, Rata.

With respect, you seem to have misread my post. I don't claim to be any sort of police, nor that I have any right to "control anything that is written related to Perl". If somehow I managed to convey that, I apologize.

Re-reading my own post, I can't see how you draw these conclusions, but let me make it clear, I am here to appeal to the PerlMonks community, not to govern it in some way. I have said repeatedly that I have no basis for the latter.

I singled out the anonymous posting because it contained the worst of the invective. It also did so without risk to the person's reputation here, which is cowardly. Of course, it could have been some troublemaker who wandered by and decided to post something, but I don't think you believe that. I certainly don't.

As far as blame goes, I don't know how many times I have to say that there is blame on both sides before people notice it. I will say it again, though, as I did in my original post: misbehavior knows no ideological bounds. This is not a zero sum game, people on both sides of this polarizing issue have responsibility for level of discourse.

Why do I deserve such a harsh response? Am I a threat? I have repeatedly said that I am here as part of the greater Perl community of which PerlMonks considers itself a facet. I am here for a discussion about these things, not to somehow force PerlMonks to do any particular thing. If change comes, it will be internal, not external.

I respect your strong defense of PerlMonks as it stands, and I respect your right to disagree with my opinions. But, I would ask you actually consider my opinions before rejecting them. I feel, from what you have written, that you see me symbolically, not as a fellow member of the greater Perl community.

Nothing I have written here is intended to be dismissive of your opinions, beliefs, ideas, or feelings. I am interested in them because they are informed, and relevant. I don't know that I can make this clear, but I am not the person you are concerned about above.

"They were cowardly (being posted anonymously in order to preserve a reputation)"

How do you know this is the case, and just not one of the many anonymous posters we have at the site, for one reason or another? It seems to me that jumping to conclusions isn't wise, as demonstrated by the thread being referenced.

First, I will admit that it took me no small number of attempts before I was able to find an actual non-trivial proposal in this posting. Here is what matters to me:

The request is that you, as PerlMonks, don't ignore the personal attacks when you see them. That you use your standing as a member of the PerlMonks community to show that such things are not the way that we, as members of the larger Perl community expect things to be done. Speak out, or simply downvote the posts that don't match your understanding of how things should go.

I think that is excellent advice when dealing with people face-to-face or even verbally (or even just professionally). In an on-line, text-only forum, I think those are both pretty bad ideas.

The most widely recognized problem with those ideas is the existence of "trolls". Feeding trolls is a bad idea. I'll assume that those who don't already know why can do some quick research.

But even if somebody has not gone all of the way down the continuum to the "troll" mark where they intentionally post provocative text for the sole purpose of provoking responses, feeding text-only responses to people who are upset and being rude is very likely to back-fire and so isn't something I widely encourage.

For me, the fact that the rudeness ended up being done "by both sides" makes for a good example of how easily and completely the idea of "intervention" can fail. Even the textually stuffing of people into buckets rather far down stereo-typed ranges ended up being done by some of those who started out complaining about a perceived textually stuffing of people into extreme stereo-typed buckets.

Those trying to be part of the solution quickly became part of the problem. And that is completely understandable... and predictable.

I saw a couple of replies that did a reasonable job of sticking to just trying to advocate for civil tone and avoiding getting into a heated argument over the perceived insults (or even claims of things that had potential to be insulting). And I think that is fine if the person replying has an unusual level of eloquence on the subject and has unusual clarity of judgement as to the likelihood of getting a positive reaction.

But, for example, chromatic was unusually eloquent in Re^3: How many man-hours would you estimate you have invested in learning Perl? and I don't think he was replying to a troll. But I also don't think he and Jenda would come very close to agreeing what "help the situation" should mean. And he got a relatively healthy dose of downvotes for his efforts. So I'm unsure how much positive over-all impact his efforts obtained.

So I give chromatic praise for not, as far as I can tell, significantly worsening the situation with that reply. But I don't think it ended up helping much and I see how easily it could have made things worse.

So I really don't think calling for everybody to pile on in defense is good advice.

I can empathize with a desire to "improve things". I actually thought that this particular flame fest was relatively minor compared to many. It would have been even less extreme had people remembered to seriously consider whether or not they might be feeding a troll.

Less involvement in the thread would have been better for everybody, IMHO. And that is not because I condone or encourage creating a hostile environment for women. The majority of the thread beyond the initial pointing out of how it could be taken as hostile served to make the thread more hostile, as far as I can tell. Encouraging people to add to that doesn't help, IME, even when the people adding to it have the main purpose of trying to reduce the problem of perceived hostility.

The key to progress here is more about listening than about asking everybody to speak up. And I can't force people to listen.

So I give chromatic praise for not, as far as I can tell, significantly worsening the situation with that reply. But I don't think it ended up helping much and I see how easily it could have made things worse.

This is the comment chromatic lead with

<Reveal this spoiler or all in this thread>

What does chromatic deserve again?

I believe that is the original version of the other reply from chromatic in that thread. I was very careful to not mention it (like I didn't mention any of the many other bad examples in that thread). Plenty of bad ideas in evidence over there. But thanks for spreading some small part of it around so we can experience the badness all over again.

I only picked out one example so I could show how even the best of that thread was not really that helpful (from what I could tell) and came so close to being unhelpful.

There were only two replies that struck me as fairly positive in what I scanned of that thread (which was probably most of it). I didn't remember the author of the other one and didn't feel like mucking through it again searching. When I saw that even chromatic had decided that his other reply was too ugly to stand, I double checked that I had been very specific about just the one reply.

But, yeah, even the authors who managed to post something somewhat reasonable mostly also ended up stooping rather low as well. More evidence that piling on to respond to insults just doesn't work out very well in practice in this medium / environment.

- tye        

What does chromatic deserve again?

I posted it on purpose and I deleted it on purpose and I stand by both of those purposes.

Unlike almost everything from Anonymonk, it's tied to my professional identity. Reasonable people will interpret it as something intended as satire and unreasonable people—well, there's no reasoning with them, by definition. If I'd thought for one moment that Ratazong would have taken it as a personal attack, I wouldn't have posted it.

Reasonable people may very well disagree whether it made its point well or at all, but that's a debate that bores me. I care a lot more about the silly false equivalences in that thread and this one, or about the idea that "don't feed the trolls" is a stronger guiding principle than "all that is required for incivility to stand is for civil people to say nothing".

so long as they are within the bounds of community consensus.

I will continue to downvote—and resent—all thought police posts and political hand waving.

Actually, that's a gross mischaracterization of consensus. Consensus is actually a matter of greatest common denominator.

Of course you should do what you think is right, but to claim you are waging some sort of battle against "thought police" in relation to me, and my posts here, is to put your agenda before reality. I have no police powers, and I have repeatedly said that people have the right to whatever opinions (thoughts) they feel are correct, and certainly the right to express them in a civil way.

If you resent a call for civility, well, that's just a genuine point of disagreement between us, and no matter how much you resent that I have no way to change it. It is, for me, and as I understand it after study, the baseline consensus of our community. People should be able to express themselves, civilly, regardless of what they choose to express.

I am genuinely sorry that we can't find any common ground, but so be it.

Could this spokesperson get a spokesperson? Please!

Your post is long, long, long and ... what was the word ... oh, I see ... long! Maybe I haven't got enough sleep, maybe it's that my English is not good enough, but I got completely lost in all that "eloquent" mumbo jumbo. Did I miss anything?

Did I miss anything?

No, the "eloquent mumbo jumbo" is also known as "diplomaspeak", its a form of mesmerism

Then what was your purpose? Scare us into change? Lull us? Woo us? Debate us?

Post-facto predendums are a cheap shot at at making or reinforcing your point without further debate. But it is a common enough tactic that many of us routinely go back over threads looking for such sneakiness.

As contributions go, that does not seem very enlightened or helpful.

(Due to inexperience with the PerlMonks interface, my foregoing comment was posted anonymously. I am reposting it, logged in, pro forma and to ensure that the authorship is clear. —Ya´akov)

Where do you find that in my post? If that's what you understood from it, I am sorry that I didn't make it clearer. I took no sides in the debate itself, I complained about the tone and content of some anonymous posts.

Could you explain how you came to your conclusion?

As far as my enlightenment goes, I didn't make any claims about that, and, unfortunately, there are structural constraints that prevent me from being effectively "helpful" in everyone's eyes simultaneously. Perhaps I can be helpful to you in the future, whoever you are.

Meaning does not need to be contained, in order to be implied by the writer and subsequently inferred by the reader. It is when the message inferred differs from that which was implied, that is the cause of the strife in that other thread.

You picked out posts by one or more anonymous posters for particular comment, despite that the most grievous content comes in the earlier, nymed posts that incited those anonymous response.

Which means that you either did not read the thread yourself, or only read in isolation, those portions of the thread to which you were pointed.

And that implies you came here attempting to use the brown envelope of officialdom, to give your second-hand, pre-judicial, biased message the weight of some official judgement.

You therefore compound the original problem, that of one member of the community sitting in unilateral judgement of another, by doing the same again.

Not so much a policeman come to see justice, but a hired mouthpiece come to give final word to one parties view.

Not a calming influence come to smooth the waters, but another cook come to stir the pot.

It can be useful to go to theme settings and pick something distinct to provide a visual cue that you are or are not logged in.
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A math joke: r = | |csc(θ)|+|sec(θ)|-||csc(θ)|-|sec(θ)|| |