User blog:Nults McKagan/About Swearing in Chat

''Note: This only concerns swearing in chat, not on pages. Swearing on pages should be left alone, as long as the author puts a warning on top like I did with this blog.''

My Thoughts
The changes in our wiki's rules about swearing in chat have been very... interesting, to say the least. We've never gone all in or all out, instead resorting to incremental changes; legalizing one word at a time via community votes. While this was all nice and fine back in the day, POTCO is long gone, and with it, most of our former community. I remember back in the day there were a lot of people on this wiki who I was barely acquainted with, but now I know every single person who frequents here very well; the community is tiny now.

Being a tight-knit community is just fine, but occasionally the topic of "should we try to expand and bring in TLOPO people?" comes up (mostly from my badgering). Obviously no matter what way we slice it, trying to expand into the POTCO/TLOPO community will be a difficult task for us. I feel like our swearing rules in chat would drive them away. Allowing the swears we do may drive a lot of them away already, but those who stick around may be confused with the disparity in how we treat those who say legal swears vs illegal swears: I can say "crap crap crap" as much as I want in chat (provided I don't spam or get way too excessive), but the second I say "shit", I'm a bad guy and I need to be punished.

On the other hand, in practice, it's mostly just the same people inhabiting chat day in and day out. Most of us are very close friends, but chat can suddenly become displeasant when somebody says "shit" or uses some sort of abbreviation involving the word "fuck". Suddenly, being close friends for all these years doesn't matter: "you broke the rules, you need to get out."

I feel like we really need to decide what direction we want to go in concerning swearing in chat. We've been going down a sort of weird "middle-road" that bothers everybody for a while now.

My Idea
I think maybe we should have a Discord channel for the wiki where swearing is allowed, since linking Discord channels to wikis is a thing we can do now (see: one of our partner wikis), while disallowing swearing and other offensive content on the actual wiki chat. This will allow people who just wanna pal around with their friends and be offensive goofballs a place to do it, but also not actively repulse other people from the TLOPO community (since they'll have a clean, family-friendly chat room to hang out in)

TL;DR
Our policy of allowing some swears but not others may repulse the more prude elements of the POTCO/TLOPO community (that we may want to bring here at some point), but also repulse those who just want to pal around with their friends and be goofballs. We really should either go all in or all out.