Talk:Community health

health?

When the community liaison reached out to the German language community and promoted a project "community health" some weeks ago, the name raised questions. While it is nice to aim at a healthy community in general terms, some took issue with calling out the perceived trouble and the trouble makers as diseases. Is it healthy to call the issues within our communities diseases and fight them with antibiotics, meaning in ancient Greek simple "killing" them? Or is the term health antagonistic to an including approach because of its opposite? Anyway, we are aware that the cultural background of health is positive and benign in contemporary oral American, so we do not oppose in principle to using it here. But no one came up with a suitable translation into German yet, so maybe this is an issue beyond just one language. --h-stt !? 17:39, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi H-stt, even when I am a member of a community health team, team I agree that "Community health" applied to online communities might bring different types of semantic connotations to different people, leave alone in different languages. However, note that this happens with plenty of terms. For instance, the way you portrait "health" as a matter of killing pathogens causing diseases is also very different from other ways to look at what keeping a healthy system means (see the intro at w:Health or also w:de:Gesundheit#Definitionen and so on). To me, "health" in "community health" is about respect, productive collaboration, well-being, satisfaction, happiness. I don't believe in the medicine based in antibiotics, extirpation and, in general as you say, killing (even if I do see the point of these methods when nothing else is left to avoid suffering and preserve decent life in a body). That would also explain my personal approach to community health. This name does sound artificial in my mother languages too. However, as a neologism (especially when applied to online communities) I'm sure that so it does for many English speakers as well. Until you get used to it. Said all this, I am not attached to the name, and if someone brings alternatives to name this team, we will consider them.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 08:21, 13 September 2017 (UTC)