OK, points taken below from Oliver Keyes about talking to trolls.
But here's what (knock wood) got my well known long term abuse harasser (1000+ nasty and/or threatening emails, hundreds of reverts of edits to me during last 6 months) off my back without going to the cops --which I easily could have done, and still would do if I felt they were coming to my side of the continent with ill intent:
*Got roll back which helped with all the danged reverts. *Updated and cleaned up his Long-term abuser page and made sure it was real clear what the various modus operandi were and how to deal with them since I'm not the only one he goes off on, just one of the worst recently *Put Wikimedia foundation email in a box at the top of project page so editors with similar problems knew one place to go right away *Added a bunch of info on the laws on cyber-harassment in HIS state and linked to the larger article from the abuse page *Every time he'd have a new spate of insulting me I'd go to some article relevant to arrest/prosecution/imprisonment/psychiatric evaluation for his various crimes and do some minor clean up, just so he'd get the message
since then just got a few non-threatening nasty emails and a couple reverts; knock wood again that it keeps on working!!
So starting long-term abuse pages for harassers and using them is a really good idea.
CM
On 5/9/2013 4:42 PM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
This would involve incredible overhead on the Foundation's role. It also wouldn't provide any real protection for the individuals being harassed.
Let's be clear here; there are really two types of harassment we should be concerned about. The first is, simply, illegal; where such harassment occurs, and a complaint to the police results, the WMF has procedures in place to provide (for example) IP addresses and other identifying information on receipt of a valid request from a court, and these can then percolate back through ISPs and such to identify the person responsible for the statements or actions. All very simple, all very well-handled. I'd argue our failing here is not in not having a mechanism for illegal harassment, but simply a greater societal issue; internet harassment is, while a crime, something with few benefits for the police to prosecute. We can't solve for that; we could reduce the barrier a bit by cutting out the middle man and being able to provide the police with the real-world identity of contributors, sure, but again, that's going to be a ton of work.