I second web-betty’s concerns Moshu. (ATTENTION: other moderators)
Not only is this forum important to the WordPress as a community, each individual post no matter how much it angers Moshu or others is important to the poster. Besides those not fluent in english, many like myself have visual impairments or learning disabilities. YES! Some people do dumb things or may be lazy or don’t work in a way that respects the forum before they post. But, these insults become the focus of the thread and as web-betty noted, the “punishment” might be mis-placed. There are many possible reasons a post might come accross incoherant or the poster might seem to be dis-respecting the time of the “helper” or the quality of the forum. As a reader of the forum, I ask the “helpers” here to be more generous with the “benefit-of-the-doubt”. It would be nice to see a set of guidelines or boilerplate for “helpers” to deal with this.
Most people in the United States are somewhat poor(so their education may be limited), non-white and non-technical. (Leave aside gender issues for the moment). These folks are not going to approach working with software and associated documents at all in the way an engineer would. They may be dis-organized or disoriented in working with this software. It seems that the focus of WordPress is to bring website and blogging “power to the people”. The insults work against that.
Now look at the the word camp attendees pics for this year and the flickr gallery for last year and think about demographics. These pictures speak for themselves.
As a community organizer, educator and a humanist, I equate these barbs and minor humiliations based on intelligence or rigor with the barbs and minor humiliations of age-ism, racism, class-ism and male-ism. Not as serious as racial tensions, creating tensions over intelligence and rigor have a dampening effect on the forum and should not be tolerated by the community. If you agree, please log in and post here and wherever insults are being thrown by moderators and helpers on this forum. It is the responsibility of those around an abusive person to help them act appropriately.
Sincerely,
Hari
