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.]