--On Friday, February 28, 2014 15:52 -0800 "Murray S. Kucherawy" <superuser@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >... > I am fully on board with efforts to make participation by > relative newcomers more smooth and comfortable. However, I > feel the idea of creating an RFC merely to define "ad hominem" > and suggest ways to prevent it is just a bit silly. For > example, I can imagine a citation like "Your comment is an ad > hominem, as defined in RFCxxxx. Please don't do that, or > rephrase your question." And I can imagine both veterans and > newcomers alike thinking that's just a bizarre thing to do, or > to have to do. While agreeing with Barry's recent note, let me take the above a half-step further for the next time this comes up as experience indicates that it will. As others have pointed out, "ad hominem" is not a synonym for "personal attack", "general bad behavior that mentions an individual's name", or anything like that. "ad hominem argument" is simply one of a fairly large number of logic fallacies. Others will have references readily at hand, but my memory is that a catalog of those already exists, is over 2000 years old, and has been _very_ widely translated. Why, in that context, we would need an RFC to do anything more than reference that catalog, I don't know (although an RFC with two lines or content and a normative reference entry would be amusing). For the reasons Murray and Barry suggest, I can't even understand why we would want to do that Ultimately, if "behave like professionals and adults" and "be nice" guidelines are insufficient, I have serious doubts that trying to define and categorize particular types of misbehavior will improve things significantly. And, while many of us need periodic reminders, those two guidelines are in RFC 3184 (BCP 54) in only slightly different form (and that document is now 13+ years old). john