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@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@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.

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

_______________________________________________
Gendergap mailing list
Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap


_______________________________________________
Gendergap mailing list
Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap


_______________________________________________
Gendergap mailing list
Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap



--
Katherine Maher

Wikimedia Foundation
149 New Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94105

_______________________________________________
Gendergap mailing list
Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap