[python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Dec 26 14:26:33 CET 2012


On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 8:36 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> We don't want to be mean to somebody who genuinely appears to be
> trying to help, but eventually we have to look at his net impact and
> say "keeping our productive volunteers happy is more important than
> trying to include someone who has demonstrated over an extended period
> of time that they lack the ability to collaborate effectively". At the
> very least, that means revoking tracker and python-dev posting
> privileges. I'd vote for cutting him off from python-ideas, too.

Something I've realised may not be obvious to everyone - the problem
isn't low SNR per se (if you dig up some of my early postings to
python-list and python-dev, you'll find a *lot* of noise, so me
chastising new posters for low SNR would be the height of hypocrisy),
as the fact that Anatoly's SNR hasn't improved over the years, despite
core devs (and others) putting plenty of effort into trying to help
him learn. The breaking point for me was when he recently declared
that he was completely unrepentant about the fact that he repeatedly
wastes other people's time by failing to do his research [1]:

"""It's too boring to live in a world of existing knowledge and
expertise, and yes, I am not aware of any open collaboration stuff
expertise. Any reading recommendations with concentrated knowledge
that can fit my brain?"""

FFS, it's the internet. Search engines exist. I, for one, am done
spoon feeding him answers that are off topic for the core Python
lists, and that he should be able to answer on his own (although I'll
still reply to other people that reply to him).

If we start with a suspension rather than a ban, that would also be
fine by me. As others have noted, we've given *one* tracker suspension
that I'm aware of and it seemed to work wonders.

Regards,
Nick.

[1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2012-June/015304.html

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia


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