On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 5:44 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
The question, then, is what if any moral imperative does this impose on us? And if some of us feel compelled to report such instances to the police, and others do not, what if any should the extent of policy be on this issue? Personally I can't agree to any Wikipedia policy that mandates or punishes behavior off-wiki. On the other hand, I do think a policy that encourages all editors to report specific school threats to AN and (when willing and possible) to the police is workable and a good idea. Frankly, I'm surprised and I'm sure many others would be as well to learn that there isn't already such a Wikipedia policy. At a minimum, we should have a policy of forwarding all such threats to the Wikimedia Foundation for "official" action if necessary.
If it only encourages people to do something then it's not a policy, it's an essay, which is more than appropriate in this case. Even a guideline would be better than policy.
IMO any threat with the slightest hint of seriousness should be immediately reported. But making it a blockable offense to not report would not only be very bad for the project, it would be unenforceable in just about every case. Which would in turn make it generally a useless policy.
On another note, a noticeboard where things like this can be posted would be helpful. People who know how to go about reporting something like this could monitor the page. (Law enforcement could even subscribe to an RSS feed of the page history, if they wanted to be proactive about it.)