[python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution

[Brett Cannon]

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 8:26 AM, Łukasz Langa <lukasz at langa.pl> wrote:

> Wiadomość napisana przez Martin v. Löwis <martin at v.loewis.de> w dniu 7
> lis 2012, o godz. 13:06:
>
> Am 07.11.12 09:45, schrieb Łukasz Langa:
>
> I'd like to raise a concern that Anatoly's actions are disruptive and
> largely unhelpful. His passive-agressive writing style is well known but
> it seems this no longer satisfies him. Today, without consulting anyone
> he edited our Wiki guidelines and removed the "Do not remove guidelines
> you do not agree with!" note (yes, really):
>
> http://wiki.python.org/moin/WikiGuidelines?action=diff&rev1=35&rev2=36
>
> Should we react in any way? How do you perceive his contributions in
> general?
>
>
I perceive his contributions as worthless. He points out real issues and
then blows way past reasonableness with how to resolve them, being rude in
the process.


>
> I (am known to) perceive his contributions in the most negative way.
> For several times, I was close to banning him from certain systems I
> care about, but rather chose to ignore him instead.
>
>
> I have been doing the same thing for quite some time, too. Lately though I
> gave some thought into this and I think maintaining the status quo is
> harmful to us as a community. I'd like us to react somehow.
>
> I agree with Jacob Kaplan-Moss when he says [1]: "I will call out
> antisocial behavior, enforce professionalism in the communities where I
> have the power to do, and leave the communities that cannot at least
> offer civility."
>
> More generally, Eliezer Yudkowsky's opinion [2] resonates with me: "good
> online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves". While
> this sounds overly dramatic, it describes the gist of the problem: quality
> goes down to the point where helpful members stop caring.
>
> What can we do? Apart from the obligatory joke of nudging him gently
> towards Ruby, I think calling his behavior out is a good idea.
>

So before I started to send his emails into a blackhole, I called him out
multiple times, to the point of basically yelling at him over email for
being a jerk (this was when he called for the dissolving of the PSF board
because he thought they were doing a bad job). He has been told multiple
times he needs to change his attitude and he has yet to do so.


> Cory Doctorow also thinks that "many trolls are perfectly nice in real
> life -- sometimes, just calling them on the phone and confronting them with
> the human being at the other end of their attacks is enough to sober them
> up" [3].
>

He actually cornered me at PyCon in 2011 and he is pushy in person. He
wasn't rude, but trying to explain to him that his view isn't reasonable
doesn't not get through in-person either. I actually had to just walk away
from the conversation to stop myself from yelling at him (he thought the
state of the web-related libraries, e.g. urllib, were not great so to
resolve it all the core developers should participate in rewriting
python.org from scratch in order to suffer and thus be motivated to fix the
libraries).


>  If that fails, banning him would show that we care about the quality of
> communication and technical prowess is no excuse for abusive behavior.
>
>
The problem is how do we do that? Do the owners of various systems take it
upon themselves or do we take on some concerted effort across the whole
community? I mean I'm a moderator on python-ideas, but no one has directly
complained to python-ideas-owner@ yet (although I guess I indirectly
complained to myself when I started to auto-delete his emails and some
people have personally vented to me as a friend) and I can't make him never
appear on the issue tracker again (at least I don't think only Martin can).
Does the PSF need to get involved somehow if we try to do a community-wide
thing instead of a per-system thing where it's more at the discretion of
the maintainers?


> All in all, is anyone of the opinion that losing him as a community member
> is worse than keeping him around?
>

No.

-Brett



>
> [1] http://jacobian.org/writing/assholes/
> [2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
> [3]
> http://www.informationweek.com/how-to-keep-hostile-jerks-from-taking-ov/199600005
>
>   --
> Best regards,
> Łukasz Langa
> Senior Systems Architecture Engineer
>
> IT Infrastructure Department
> Grupa Allegro Sp. z o.o.
>
> http://lukasz.langa.pl/
> +48 791 080 144
>
>
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>
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