@Pine, there are indeed rules for addressing security breeches, "A block for protection may be necessary in response to:...an account appearing to have been compromised (as an emergency measure), i.e. there is some reason to believe the account is being used by someone other than the person who registered the account." This is a policy, not a guideline. (1)

To address your other points:

1. There was just a discussion of this concluded on meta. (2) If there is something else you feel should be covered, it may be worthwhile to start a new discussion on the talk page.

2. This is already being done. For reference see Kevin Gorman's comments here: (3) And I would urge anyone who is thinking of responding to this line of discussion to read Kevin's comments carefully first. "For reference, I moderate our Gender Gap mailing list, I seriously regularly receive twenty to thirty emails a week related to Wikipedia-related problems from women who do not want to participate in any of our official processes because of what happens to them when they do."

3. If there are any laws that are not being enforced, I would be interested to know what they are--failing that, what laws should be in place.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_policy#Protection
(2) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement/Leadership_Development_Dialogue
(3) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Danielle_Citron_speaks_at_WikiConference_USA_2015#Question_.231:_Official_Wiki_process_and_banning_all_the_women

On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 1:36 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for those notes. I'm boldly pinging Katherine here in case she'll want to respond to these comments.

On the subject of harassment, I was one of the many people today, mainly administrators and WMF staff, trying to address incidents of compromised Wikimedia accounts that have happened in the recent past. One of the things I noticed was how cooperative the (mostly male) loose cohort of people was in our response to these incidents. It crossed my mind to wonder how we could take this same civil approach that many of us responding to this incident seem to share, and propagate that same civility through the Wikimedia community. I'm not sure that more rules (as Katherine seems to be implying; correct me if I'm wrong) is the way to make that happen. I don't think any of us addressing these security incidents acted as we did because someone told us we were required to do so; we were self-motivated to act as we did. Rather than setting a floor for behavior with rules and expectations (which are difficult to define; how does one define "civility", for example, especially in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual environment?), I'm wondering if we should instead set aspirational goals, and emphasize norms rather than rules.

Administrators and other folks in the Wikimedia law-enforcement establishment can, and do, block people on a regular basis for problematic behavior. The behavior that Katherine described in her speech is already against countless Wikimedia rules (and probably some real-life laws), but unfortunately all of these rules and all of the enforcement from administrators (who do a lot of enforcement already) is not stopping the kind of situation that Katherine described in her speech.

Instead of writing yet more expectations and rules, I'd rather see us look at:

1. Goals and norms. I think that a way to make progress in that regard is by better training and acculturation.
2. Better administrative tools, to help keep out the people that administrators and other people with enforcement authority have already decided should be excluded from Wikimedia sites.
3. Additional real-life legal enforcement in the limited circumstances where that seems likely to help a situation.

Pine

On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 5:02 PM, Neotarf <neotarf@gmail.com> wrote:
Transcript and video of Katherine Maher speaking on "Privacy and Harassment on the Internet" at MozFest 2016 is now up on Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Katherine_Maher_at_MozFest_2016

Slides from Maher's Oct 9 keynote at Wikiconference North America 2016 "Building an Inclusive Movement" are posted on Commons, but I don't believe a video is available. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WikiConference_North_America_2016_-_Katherine_Maher_keynote_presentation.pdf

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