Thu, 05 May 2011
On pedantry
Sometimes, I get annoyed when I feel that other people are being pedantic and wasting people's time with an issue that, in my opinion, doesn't matter. "There are more important things to think about! We have work to do, saving the world!" I think.
Sometimes I add, "This conversation is surely alienating to new people on the list, which makes it hard for our movement to grow."
Sometimes I think that I do a reasonably okay job with this, like a recent OpenHatch devel list post, where I explained my feelings and the standard I hold myself to.
But I just spent too much of the past 20 minutes arguing about if it's important to call it GNU MediaGoblin, or if it should be okay to call it just MediaGoblin casually sometimes.
I was trying to argue that the GNU MediaGoblin folks should fiercely resist to chastize people when they forget the "GNU".
In my passionate arguing, I became a naming pedant (rather, a backwards anti-naming-pedant pedant).
That's the same trap.
