Hi Jeremy,
I appreciate this important topic of community stewardship being brought up in this thread.
The Core team stands by the principles that we want the Swift community to be an open and inclusive community. That includes supporting users who may have different preferences in choice of language for discussion. As such, the Core team feels it is appropriate for users to be able to use whatever language they choose for discussion.
This comes with some considerations:
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Members of the Core team will need to rely on community members to monitor and escalate cases of poor conduct on the forums, especially for posts written in a language members of the Core team lack fluency. Once such cases are brought to the attention of the Core team, there are various ways to translate posts and evaluate the concerns raised about a post, and if necessary, take action. This isn't really any different from the status quo today, as Core team members do not have the capacity to read every single post.
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As a matter of courtesy, it feels reasonable that responses to a post should be in the same language as the original post, with the option of providing additional text in a different language. Changing the language in a response from that of the original post can become a form of exclusion in the discussion, particularly to the author of the original post.
I will update Swift.org with this clarification of policy.
Thank you for bringing up this topic!