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You and who's army? If one of the world's more questionable
governments decides to target Wikipedians within its territory there's
not a thing you can do about about it. You’re not France. You can’t
threaten governments into submission (and if one of the most powerful
states on earth can’t get Zara Radcliffe out you certainly can’t).
You’re not a mineral extraction company. You don’t have mercenaries on
retainer to try and get your people out.
You policy is worse than useless. It doesn’t help at all but
marginally increases the risk of being involved with Wikipedia as what
can be seen as a harmless hobby writing about trains turns into being
involved with a human rights campaigning organisation.
There seems to be a lot of distress in this email, and I'm sorry to see it. :( I hope I can speak thoughtfully to these issues without raising dangers or making it seem like your concerns - which are completely valid and which I share - are being minimized.
For those who don't know me, I'm the
VP of Community Resilience and Sustainability. For full disclosure, I'm not one of the team working on the Human Rights Policy directly, but one of the people who is working on that directly does report up through my line to me. I hired him. He is our Human Rights Lead in charge of working to intervene in exactly such situations. We hired him because we have faced exactly such situations, and we needed competent approaches for threats that would arise whether we wanted them to or not.
I'm only going to speak here to that element of this policy, since it is one of the specific areas of my focus.
I've spoken about our human rights interventions at the higher level in my office hours several times over the past year. (They are linked, with notes, from the page above.) The role rose when
an early approach one of my teams led to collaborate across particularly high risk regions on finding resources for people in trouble led us to find more critical need for direct support. We CANNOT threaten governments. We are NOT an extraction company. You are totally correct. We need to stay humble in our approaches. Instead, the
Human Rights Team who supports threats on the ground is working on several initiatives to help that includes digital security training and importantly partnerships with organizations around the world who DO have these abilities.
Raising the danger of Wikimedians is something I take very, very seriously. Where I work, I can't help but be incredibly aware that no matter how it is seen, being involved with Wikipedia is not - for many - a harmless hobby writing about trains. Some of the people we've tried to support have joined it expecting precisely that, only to find that malign actors around them already perceived it differently and attempted to pressure or harm them to get what they wanted.
Our Global Advocacy and Policy teams have the hard job of trying to support an environment wherein knowledge remains free. I admire them for it and recognize the hard haul of what they're doing, in a shifting legislative landscape where this can't be taken for granted anywhere.
My focus is on the people who contribute. I think they must be informed - must know the risks when and where they engage - and must be supported in doing so as safely as possible. I think when things go wrong they need to have somebody who can help them. Our Human Rights Team is making connections so that when the things that go wrong come from organized persecution (<--best words I can think of to describe terrorism, government groups, etc. This is distinct from individuals being jerks to each other.)
We are short-staffed at the end of the calendar year and with the rising tide of illnesses globally again, but I do want to note that while I have contributed some information to the FAQ that will be issued by the Global Advocacy Team in due course, I know there's a lot of interest in precisely HOW we work with people who are persecuted.
Y'all, I'm very sorry, but I can't lay out our playbook. Geni is completely right that this can raise the threat level for people. I always think about the English Wikipedia's essay on
BEANs. I don't want to give people ideas or make it easier for them to exploit gaps in our ability to handle problems. For this reason, I've always struggled with whether it's better to
not raise the specter of human rights violations to those who might not have considered that there are rights to violate here or to
not inform the community at large that some people are violating those rights already. There are pros and cons for both approaches, and while I know we won't get the balance perfect I will myself keep trying to figure out how to do it right.
It's also true that it's not yet an "If this/then that" situation. My team also handles the emergency@ workflow, which is very straightforward - assess incoming concerns against a protocol developed by a professional external agency and pass it along to international responders as appropriate through well-defined contacts. Easy to lay out what we do, how we do it, why we do it the way we do it. There's nothing straightforward about this work. We are building out global systems, but work closely with individuals to understand the nature of the threat and to help them tap into safe existing systems for their support.
I'm pretty happy about this policy myself. We've been building out these capacities for a few years now, but there's a lot of ground still to cover. The policy helps (imo) support that our commitment to this remains top of mind. And I think it is the right time, with the systems we HAVE created, to discuss the manifestations of such abuse a little more publicly, in order to protect our people and to better understand as Wikimedians how our own systems may put people in danger.
Sorry for the lot of words. I really want this to remain a safe place for people to write about trains but also about other things. I also will have limited time to respond to follow-ups over the next few weeks for the reasons I mentioned above, but I am due for another office hour where I may be able to talk with those of you who want to about the aspects of our interventions that can be discussed without raising danger.
Warm regards,
Maggie