On Tue, 2014-06-24 at 22:26 +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote: > There's two sides to this coin - concern about alienating > non-english-as-a-first-language speakers who feel undervalued because > their language is nitpicked to death and concern about alienating > english-as-a-first-language speakers who struggle to understand unclear > or incorrect language.
Actually, I think there's a third case which is the one people seem to be worried about here: non-English-as-a-first-language speakers who are trying to read English written by other non-English-as-a-first-language speakers. > Obviously there's a balance to be struck there and different people will > judge that differently, but I'm personally far more concerned about the > former rather than the latter case. So, my personal experience is that, as long as you express your corrections kindly, most non-English-as-a-first-language speakers are receptive and appreciative of corrections. They should be *corrections*, though: "Actually, I think you meant '…'; that would be clearer." Further, unless there are egregious problems, I always try to express my language suggestions as "femtonits", meaning that I don't down-vote a patch for those issues (unless perhaps there are a *lot* of them). The only time I don't suggest corrections is when I really can't understand what was meant, in which case I try to ask questions to help clarify the meaning… > Absolutely, and I try and be clear about that with e.g. "not a -1" or > "if you're rebasing anyway, perhaps fix this". > > Maybe a convention for such comments would be a good thing? We often do > 'nitpick' or 'femtonit', but they are often still things people are > -1ing on. Perhaps we should "formalize" the terminology, maybe by documenting that "femtonit" should mean this in something like the review checklist? We could pair that with a glossary of terms that could be referred to by the "your first patch" bot and mentioned in the Gerrit workflow page. That way, reviewers are using a consistent terminology—"femtonit" is hardly standard English, after all; it's a specialty term we've invented —and developers have guidance on what it means and what they should do in response to it. -- Kevin L. Mitchell <kevin.mitch...@rackspace.com> Rackspace _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
