Archive:E-mail Objection Policy

Invariably, in the course of vigorous discussion of any topic by mailing list participants, people will find the content or character of some e-mails to be objectionable. This is natural and we recognize it as crucial to the value of our communication.

We also recognize that e-mail provides an inadequate medium for serious friendly disagreements because such a large part of those exchanges is heavily influenced by tone of voice and body language, which do not and cannot translate well to e-mail. Because of the limitation, I propose this policy for handling disagreements:


 * What qualifies as a non-trivial disagreement?
 * If anyone disagrees strongly enough to respond with a statement largely explaining the disagreement and seeking a correction, it is probably non-trivial.


 * How do we eliminate copypasta and lengthy disagreement responses on the list, especially for common yet important disagreements on topics such as terminology?
 * A cogent, informative page should be added to the SFFC wiki and a link to the wiki should be sent to the list in place of an in-depth explanation of the disagreement. This will decrease the wall-of-text factor, eliminate copypasta, and move further discussion of the details from the thread to the wiki's talk page.


 * How do we establish a consensus when the outcome is crucial to healthy communication and camaraderie among participants in the email list?
 * After interested parties have had the opportunity to edit the wiki page and its discussion page, a new email thread might be started to solicit further participation in drafting a useful, friendly, and informative guideline. It might be useful in exceptional cases to have this guideline officially blessed by the SFFC board of directors.