On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 10:57 AM, Sydney Poore <sydney.poore@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi there,

I'm flagging the major issues that need to be considered.

1) we can not promise anonymity for the people acting as adjudicators. Any attempt to have anonymous people hearing a case will attract attention from a group if obsessive people who out anyone who is anonymous. Plus at times harass them.

2) the reasons that people enforcing the rules on Wikipedia ignore incivility, harassment, and trolling is because that approach is often the best way to stop attention seeking behavior. The idea to "not feed trolls" is well engrained into the culture and advise given by mature and experienced people on the Internet.

3) blocks on Wikipedia are not suppose to be punitive but intended to immediately stop disruptive user behavior. Attempts to use them to change conduct is generally not successful. Instead people who are blocked often become entrenched in proving that they are being treated poorly.

3) there is no way to stop people from editing Wikipedia. The wiki software as used by WMF allows easy access to join, and edit. Attempts to stop blocked or banned users from editing is part of what causes administrators to burn out and ignore problems or over react to them.

4) banning people very engaged in the community rarely causes them to go away.

Sydney

So we can't bar people from using the site, and we don't have effective moderation tools (or moderators). We also realize that even if we had either, they would be used on only a teeny tiny sliver of all pages, and only by those who know about them and how to take advantage of them.

This all suggests that the only "cures" to civility are to radically restrict how freely users can interact, or change the culture of the Internet. The first is antithetical to the nature of Wikimedia projects, and the second is impossible, so...

Perhaps we decide that curing incivility is a bridge too far, and focus efforts to narrow the gender gap on other more practical opportunities.