Wikipedia’s community is facing the same sort of problem with Fram that the Linux community has faced with Linus and that the OpenBSD community has faced with T

Wikipedia’s community is facing the same sort of problem with Fram that the Linux community has faced with Linus and that the OpenBSD community has faced with Theo. Is conduct relevant if someone is otherwise a good contributor of good work output in service of the project? Many, including a significant fraction of HN upvoters, have cheered on Linus and Theo over the years for conduct perceived as both hostile and contributory. Fram, too, has for many years had conduct perceived as both hostile and contributory. Therefore, it should come as little surprise that Fram has supporters. The question raised near the end of the article is relevant: Why did Fram’s peers allow Fram’s conduct to continue? To answer that question, we need only look inward: Linus is taking conduct training, so that he can continue to contribute usefully while conducting himself respectfully (but not necessarily politely). This change is not universally liked, as there are many who feel that they should have the right to disrespect anyone, and this is a critical turning point of sentiment against their “freedom”. The advent of codes of conducts in open source invoked the same problem and the same reaction, at a larger scale: people who swear they will boycott contributions to any project that restricts their freedom of conduct in any way. HN openly restricts the freedom of conduct of commenters, so I always smile when I see people post here that they’ll boycott some project over having their rights abrogated - they don’t see the irony and pointing it out would be inflammatory, so I keep it to myself. But it’s absolutely not “much ado about nothing”. It’s right at the core of whether “the right of free speech” includes “the right of speech perceived by others as inconsiderate, disrespectful, derogatory, and/or harmful”. HN commenters don’t yet agree on this point, and it’s no stretch to consider that Wikipedia editors don’t either.