Criticism of the process: * No public consultation or even announcement was done before the policy was finalized. No opportunity to influence the outcome was given. * The policy was preceded by a human rights impact assessment, commissioned by the WMF. The report was given to the WMF in July, but has still not been made public. * No details are given on the mentioned "Human Rights Steering Committee", including structure or membership. * It looks like the policy wasn't even proofread before approval, and is exceedingly ambiguous in parts. * The policy is stated to act as a "North Star" guiding the efforts of other parts of the movement as well, ignoring the WMF's actual position relative to the other groups and where movement guidance actually comes from. Given the level of disassociation between this process and Wikimedia, it's hard to tell how to interpret these events. This looks to me like another example of the WMF simultaneously marginalizing itself from the movement while also pushing itself as a greater portion of activities. This is a problem. (The merits of the actual text are separate from the process issues, and this criticism should not be taken as a position on the correctness/value of such a policy.) -- Yair Rand ‫בתאריך יום ה׳, 9 בדצמ׳ 2021 ב-10:25 מאת ‪Richard Gaines‬‏ <‪ rgaines@wikimedia.org‬‏>:‬ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

Criticism of the process: * No public consultation or even announcement was done before the policy was finalized. No opportunity to influence the outcome was given. * The policy was preceded by a human rights impact assessment, commissioned by the WMF. The report was given to the WMF in July, but has still not been made public. * No details are given on the mentioned "Human Rights Steering Committee", including structure or membership. * It looks like the policy wasn't even proofread before approval, and is exceedingly ambiguous in parts. * The policy is stated to act as a "North Star" guiding the efforts of other parts of the movement as well, ignoring the WMF's actual position relative to the other groups and where movement guidance actually comes from. Given the level of disassociation between this process and Wikimedia, it's hard to tell how to interpret these events. This looks to me like another example of the WMF simultaneously marginalizing itself from the movement while also pushing itself as a greater portion of activities. This is a problem. (The merits of the actual text are separate from the process issues, and this criticism should not be taken as a position on the correctness/value of such a policy.) -- Yair Rand ‫בתאריך יום ה׳, 9 בדצמ׳ 2021 ב-10:25 מאת ‪Richard Gaines‬‏ <‪ rgaines@wikimedia.org‬‏>:‬ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

As I stated in the conversation hour [2], the Foundation urgently needs such a policy in order to meet our responsibility to protect members of our community from real, growing threats in the world. More governments are increasingly aggressive about trying to control and manipulate information spaces, including Wikimedia projects, and to threaten people who act to share knowledge, and govern free knowledge projects independently of their governments’ requirements. At the same time, as the Foundation globalizes and as the Movement works actively to increase participation across the world, a growing percentage of people who we are bringing into the projects are living in places where contributing to free knowledge projects is more difficult or dangerous than it is for people in North America or Western Europe or other places where the projects have the largest number of long-time volunteers. For this among other reasons, we believe it is urgent to have a policy that clearly articulates the Foundation’s responsibility to actively work to understand how our platforms and operations affect the rights of everyone who interacts with the projects, how we will work to mitigate threats and harms to members of the movement, and how we will work with people across the Movement to implement these policies over the coming years. We don’t believe that our responsibility to respect, protect and promote human rights is up for negotiation.

On Sat, Dec 18, 2021 at 8:07 PM geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip> 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 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/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 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Voices_under_Threat> 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 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/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 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose>. 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 -- Maggie Dennis She/her/hers Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

Hi, Nosebagbear. As I said in my first email on the subject (and I said a lot, so I'm not surprised if it gets missed!), I really can only speak to my part of this - I work with the Human Rights Team that does on the ground interventions. The lead of this team has been a substantial input to this process, but the work in the policy is far more expansive than my part. THAT human rights intervention is where we have a playbook to which I refer, and although we don't talk about how, it's not been intended to be a secret that it exists. I first posted about the team on Meta in 2020 and spoke about it at my second office hour, here. I believe it has come up in subsequent calls, and I have mentioned it in each office hour announcement (at least that I wrote myself). I don't think we can safely talk about HOW we are handling human rights threats to community members, but it's never been my intention to downplay that we're working on it! I will let the Global Advocacy and Public Policy teams speak to the policy as a whole. But in terms of the questions you mailed in, I imagine they received others as well and are working to aggregate them. Best, Maggie On Tue, Dec 21, 2021 at 7:31 AM &lt;nosebagbear(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Maggie Dennis She/her/hers Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

The WMF likes the *idea* of this being a community-driven, collaborative project rather than actually doing the stuff that *makes* it a community-driven, collaborative project. How many times does this process have to repeat in identical fashion before we stop pretending that this *is* a community-driven collaborative project? If the goal is simply to be another generic top-down Silicon Valley information charity, just one that has somehow procured a gigantic unpaid workforce that the elites can command, then just state it outright so that people don't spend their free hours toiling in the delusion they're part of a movement. Best, Dan

safeguard the human rights of someone? Example: If a Wikimedian's human right is in danger for using Wikimedia's/OSM's disputed map[1], what's the "exact" procedure? I do understand that the implementation plan is to be made (around 13:48 of the video[2]) and I fully understand that it is going to be difficult on a global scale. However the execution plan and procedure will be more important.

4) (around 20:00 of the video) "Three people on the Wikimedia-l mailing list asked ..." I am one of the three I don't think we/I asked about royalty etc. What we speak about is about Wikimedians' lives in different socio-economic backgrounds. This is connected with editor retention, community health, (and human rights). I'll be very happy to discuss it separately on my Meta-Wiki talk page[3] or elsewhere.

Hi Tito and all, Tito said, in part, 1) Okay, we have an "urgent" policy. What is the plan and procedure to As for the first question, it is early days, but could you give some indication what you think you can do to safeguard someone's human rights in another country? You could open communication channels to human rights organisations, perhaps, and inform them of problematic cases. Is this the kind of action you have in mind? I must say I sympathise with what Geni says in his mail – surely the WMF is quite limited in what it can do. Geni's point about the WMF potentially being perceived as a hostile campaigner (or, I would add, even a US foreign policy instrument), thus increasing the risks of participation for individuals, is worth pondering as well. As Tito says, there was also a question about the feasibility of royalties. This mentioned Tito's and others' posts here, though I think the questioner was only using those questions about healthcare and minimum pay as a springboard for their own question. They wondered whether there was any way to get royalties or licence fees from re-users who use more than a certain volume of Wikimedia data, and to provide support to volunteers in this manner. The answer was that it didn't seem likely. But it occurred to me that the for-profit Wikimedia Enterprise is doing a similar thing, charging large re-users for API services. So couldn't some of the profits from that business be used in the way the questioner suggested? The money would come from much the same companies. Andreas _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

Hello! The Global Advocacy team has published some additional questions and answers regarding the Human Rights Policy, based on many of your earlier questions and concerns. Please take a moment to review these questions and answers here > https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Human_Rights_Policy/Frequently…lt;. Additionally, our team will be participating in the upcoming Office Hour with the Board of Trustees on 17 February to update the community on this policy and to take questions. We hope you'll be able to join us there > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Community_Affairs_Comm…lt;. We expect additional conversation hours to occur in the future, as well. Best regards, Ricky Gaines _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org