Open HelenWDTK opened 1 year ago
There is previous discussion on this point at:
A concern raised was the language "House Rules" could be elitist.
I think it's unusual language and using more common, plain English, would be preferable.
I think:
I recall “house rules” for social media was a fad from central government departments and similar many years ago that I think we followed.
was my contribution, see eg.
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/social-media-house-rules/ https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/planning-inspectorate/about/social-media-use#social-media-house-rules https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agov.uk+"house+rules"
I don't think we should be following Government trends like this, doing something different would help show our independence.
Other Services
I've added a PR - #1671 - which adds a couple of different /help
urls as a redirect for the house rules. This will allow us to refer to them using a choice of phrases, as necessary, without breaking any existing links.
WalesOnline uses "house rules", but that links to a "Community Standards" page.
I like "Community Standards" as that's kind of what we're getting at – understanding that WDTK is a shared "place" and that we should be respectful of others while "in" it.
GitHub uses "Community Guidelines", but I think "Standards" sets the tone in a better way; it implies there are minimums that should be met.
Linking to https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme/pull/1665 which includes commits to use "Conditions of use".
“Conditions of use” probably fits our requirements a bit better.
We will need to ensure that we don’t break any links against what is already there - as house_rules
is referred to in a lot of places (support emails and such).
Although I tend to use "site rules" when writing to users, conditions of use would also work.
The BBC's terms of use are written in a way that is fairly easy to understand: https://www.bbc.co.uk/usingthebbc/terms-of-use/
Whilst looking at strengthening the language around unacceptable behaviour, there's been a suggestion that we change 'House rules' to 'Conditions of use'.
I'm strongly in favour of changing the name. I tend not to use house rules when talking to users, and prefer to call them 'site rules' instead.