The objection I have to CoC documents is that by design they reward people who litigate language to push agendas instead of participating in the community they are designed to support based on genuine welcome. This legalism empowers people who specialize in exploiting leverage to achieve governance, while policing and alienatating contributors. In this sense, CoC's are an anti-pattern that exacerbates the very problem they ostensibly solve.

In Canada, we have a colloquialism that says, "well, that opens up the constitution," which means that when you open up founding principles for change, every obscure chancer takes a shot at getting their niche interest encoded into it. Builders aren't engaged in political struggles, but political strugglers' whole existence is around finding new communities to exploit and govern.

For Wikipedia to spend time on this seems like bike shedding, and there is literally no upside to appeasing the social litigants who benefit most from code of conduct pseudo-legalisms. Products are not countries and they are not societies. They are things, which people make and take responsibility for. Forfeiting responsibility and discretion to these exogenous power struggles arguably betrays the people whose work makes it valuable.

Seems generally harmless. As usual there's the natural tension in self-organizing groups between ensuring inclusiveness while not weaponizing the tools used to protect inclusiveness. No doubt someone will succeed in the latter with the UCoC. No doubt in its absence someone would have abused their position unshackled by these explicit norms. It's just an optimization problem.

But that's just the nature of the thing. The network of WMF controlled sites is just far too big now for efficient auto-cooperation, which often happens. So now we have rules to mediate. The rules don't seem particularly onerous, though doubtless one day someone will find out that I advocated against organ donation on Twitter and drag me through the mud and request a rewrite of all my en-wiki contributions.

But until then, I've found en-wiki very easy to contribute to. I think the norms around picture copyright inclusion are super strict but everything else is easy. I've been a member for more than a decade and auto-confirmed for some long time so maybe that's it, but honestly I don't interact with other people at all, and the other day I looked back and I haven't been reverted once over that period.

To get a sense of the community consensus, it is worth browsing the General Comments section: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Condu...

Additionally, the overall project page (not just the draft review) offers the foundation's arguments for why they believe this needs to be made: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct

Can Wikipedia really be a fair, neutral, and global resource if its code of conduct includes political and cultural positions? For example this code of conduct mentions gender identities and pronouns, a topic that is the subject of significant debate and also very much a product of the American progressive perspective rather than universal. Whether a trans woman is actually a woman is not only controversial (rather than decided), but also a political war over a definition change in one language and culture. There are other cultures where there are instead three categories of gender identities, and the existence of these concepts predates western civilizations even. Given there is this diversity of opinions, it seems strange to require participants in Wikimedia adhere to one set of views.

Asking for discussion: Is there a point at which imposing a specific set of left-wing American cultural values upon functionally autonomous communities elsewhere around the world becomes a form of cultural imperialism?

To leave a more positive comment, I'm glad that the scourge of deletionism is addressed in here.