[Catalyst] The Netiquette thread (OT)

[J. Shirley]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 9:00 PM, Zbigniew Lukasiak <zzbbyy at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have the feeling that this bashing of top posters or bottom posters
> or whatever netiquette you have in disregard is often just showing off
> your status in the community.
> There are studies showing that practical jokes victims (in traditional
> work situations) [1] are the less efficient workers than the
> perpetrators - this is the same online.  I don't like it.  I don't
> want to judge it neither and I don't want to request anyone to change
> this  - but perhaps some people here are capable of this self
> reflection on the true source of their irritation.
>
>
> [1] - http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=3Da738552611~db=3D=
all<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content%7Econtent=3Da738552611%7Edb=3D=
all>
>
> --
> Zbigniew Lukasiak
> http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/
> http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/
>


I find this to be a very different situation.

It's a spectrum of competence -and- confidence.  On the high end you have
people with an abundance of competence or confidence, and happily answer
questions on the list.  On the low end, you have people who have no
competence, but the confidence to ask stupid questions -or- people with
competence but no knowledge, and confidence enough to know it is ok to not
know, and ask well thought out questions.

The people in the middle-ground have an honest and genuine desire to help,
but lack the confidence or competence to do so.  This is why when
bikeshedding moments come up, suddenly the pent up desire to help is
released and you get a lot of noise (and a lot of very wordy "me too"
responses).

In summation, I think that people who bikeshed have very good intentions,
but it is a lack of confidence that is the problem.

In context of the current thread, I think it is a case of people reading the
list and wanting to "help" in whatever way they can.  I'm not going to fault
people, but being on the other end I will happily offer my perspective.

Additionally, I (very sincerely) regret if anybody thinks this is about
"bashing" anybody.  Someone made an off-topic post in response to a single
line I rather automatically prepended in my responses.  I reacted by
pointing out it should be its own thread, and then finally just abandoned
that thread because it was approaching Ridiculous.

Now we have a dedicated thread, where people can discuss the specific
matter.  I just viewed the hijacking of the previous thread to be too
similar to bikeshedding, and aimed to stop it and more importantly,
refrained from personally participating any further.

I think that Octavian has nailed the general philosophy:

If you are asking for help, abide by the rules and advice of the group
helping you.

This has digressed to amazing amounts off off-topic discord, and I hope the
take away message from all of this is that some of the middle-ground lurkers
can gain some confidence to post and respond to technical details.

That whole, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" thing has some
merit.  If your responses are truly awful, someone will gently ask you to
stop ;)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/pipermail/catalyst/attachments/20090428/955a4=
69c/attachment.htm