Hello all. I was part of the LCCWG that created the current Etiquette Guidelines, and I can offer a few data points. I’m speaking only for myself, though I believe many of my colleagues may share my views.
First, we did explicitly pay for a service “Plain English Campaign” that helped simplify the writing substantially to make it easier to read for those who are not native speakers.
They were very good at this and we were grateful for their input. I’m not sure we could have done any more to make this more approachable.
We also went through many of the same discussions that are going on here, and we had multiple rounds of public review, and took it all into account when we finalized the text in front of us. I know that some people are not happy with all parts of it, but we made the best decision we could.
In particular, we specifically avoided creating a legal-type code that spelled out every possible offense, because these end up being roadmaps for those who want to cause trouble by gaming the system (“technically what I did was not XYZ”), and it creates arguments about text and not about behaviors.
A result is that it gives a great deal of discretion to the moderation team, and this was intentional: people operating in good faith can judge the good faith of others to distinguish between possibly inadvertent offenses (poor use of a slang term, perhaps) and clearly bad behavior.
In the case of the talk-list moderators, they are answerable to the OSMF Board, and I figure that if you don’t trust the moderation team, you can’t fix that by more words in the CoC.
which version of the Etiquette Guideline is binding if the English version and a translation contradict each other
To me this is easy: a community adopts a set of guidelines in a specific text. This specific text will be in your own language, with the obvious changes for cultural and regional differences that the community finds important.
So in a sense this is not really “translating” the Etiquette Guidelines, but building your own: it may start with the English version - and we hope we provided a good foundation - but you’ll add your own changes to reflect the character and culture of your community.
Steve