Soon, the new Code of Conduct will replace the Be Nice policy.
From what I read in the document, there are several points in the new text that are contrasting with the recently introduced "back-it-up policy", but more than the policy itself, the way it's currently enforced. Some relevant quotes (emphasis mine):
- Our mission is to build an inclusive community where all people feel welcome and can participate
- join us in building a learning community that is rooted in kindness, collaboration, and mutual respect
- It applies to everyone using the Stack Exchange network, including our team, moderators
Premise and observations
Meta contains several posts that suggest (possibly mis)using the website tools to address content that is not "backed up":
A killer combination of downvotes + flags + comments:
unsupported answers can and should be downvoted, flagged as NAA, and commented
This would be too much for an answer that is "intentionally" not backed up (I highly doubt people intentionally do that, but who knows?) let alone for the answer of someone that simply forgot to do that and corrects it later on.
A post notice, which is really a tool that is supposed to be used for warning about serious misconduct in answering.
There are also some other issues, it seems:
There has not been a strong agreement about what is enough to be considered backed up, see also:
Can we let adequate explanation be an alternative to "Backing it up"?
I'd say answers that are not based on personal experience or references should be allowed, as long as: [...]
Anyone could claim "it happened to me before and it worked" even if it isn't true.
The policy is inconsistently enforced, partly because most of the strongest enforcement actions occur after someone flags and not every answer gets flagged.
This leads to some users thinking it's unfair that they are threatened of deletion and at the same time others "get away" with it.
Question(s)
Is the back-it-up policy and the way it is enforced going to stay the same with the new Code of Conduct? Is anything going to change in order to comply with the new CoC, to adhere to a welcoming attitude and to strive for fairness in the moderation process?
Short personal opinion
IPS is the only website on the network where I started to feel really unwelcome and midly uncomfortable for how some other users were treated as well. Despite having a single highly received (and backed up) answer I have decided to stop answering while the situation remains this much uncertain.
There are examples (1) (2) of stunning answers that (according to current policy) should be deleted. IMHO the first thing to care about is the content quality, then site policy should be at the second place. But I digress.