Hi Katherine,
Thanks for commenting. Here are some thoughts to consider:
* Firm floors are relatively easy when dealing with vandalism and other
scenarios that don't remotely resemble constructive participation on
Wikimedia sites. But lots of cases have more ambiguity; hence, for example,
protracted debates at the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee pages.
* While consistent enforcement is an impossibility (even professional
police forces and professional judges have widely varying standards of
enforcement, and an all-volunteer cadre of administrators is not likely to
do better), I think that training may be beneficial in helping with some
situations. For example, training might be helpful in (1) de-escalation
techniques, (2) identifying and handling scenarios that involve harassment,
and (3) dealing with newbies (it's easy to forget what it's like to be new
when one has been around for a long time, and particularly when one spends
a lot of time dealing with problems and is already overworked dealing with
problematic behaviors and ungrateful users.)
I agree that we can make some progress, but I think there are many
ambiguous scenarios and I would not want to try to box in administrators
with black-and-white rules when so many scenarios are colored in shades of
gray.
I also think that we need to acknowledge that administrators are humans,
not robots, and that there will inevitably be varying perspectives,
personalities, and cultures in the mix.
Finally, I would encourage WMF to take an approach that is supportive.
Hearing "we should have clear rules and enforce them consistently" is much
less helpful than "how can we help our community to improve its
self-governance, protect itself from bad actors, detoxify its climate, and
grow its diversity?"
Thanks,
Pine
On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 9:42 AM, Katherine Maher <kmaher(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hi all,
Thanks everyone for engaging with this talk. But most of all, thanks to
Molly for letting me tell her story.
Pine -
As you rightly point out, we have lots of rules which are often flouted.
However, some of these rules could be improved and enforcement could almost
certainly be applied more consistently across the movement.
But I don't necessarily think more rules are the only answer. I don't know
exactly what the other answers are, but I do have a lot of trust in Maggie
and Patrick to identify and co-develop solutions that meet the needs of our
community.
Now having said that I don't have the full solution, allow me to speculate
a bit. I don't think the following is comprehensive, but based on what I
know of the findings of SuSa, and efforts on other platforms, here's what I
expect would probably find its way into a proposed approach, in some
combination and with varying degrees of emphasis.
- As you suggest, an aspirational set of values against which we set
cultural expectations around behavior and participation, combined with firm
floors (rules) rooted in those values, which are consistent across
projects, and clearly articulated and understandable to all contributors.
- Consistent enforcement, with the application of judgments linked
back to the aspirational values, as a means of building consistent cultural
norms. (This is the approach we are taking with our current WMF values
discussion.)
- Capacity building and training for community leaders (as Neotarf
pointed out, efforts here are underway.)
- Technical support of better blocking and enforcement tools for both
community members and staff.
- Clear pathways of escalation through the SuSa team for intractable
and most severe cases, and ancillary support for victims who have been
seriously victimized.
As I said in the Q&A at MozFest, my dream scenario is where our community
internalizes a culture of respectful participation and discourse to such an
extent that bad behavior is identified quickly at a maintenance level, with
a similar rigor and uniformity to the way we spot copyvios. We should dream.
On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 11:01 AM, Neotarf <neotarf(a)gmail.com> wrote:
@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/Leaders
hip_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(a)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(a)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/wik
i/File:WikiConference_North_America_2016_-_Katherine_Maher_k
eynote_presentation.pdf
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Wikimedia Foundation
149 New Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635
+1 (415) 712 4873
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