On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 5:03 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:

I'm familiar with the three failed attempts, and actually helped to fail WP:TOV myself. What sets a policy specifically related to school threats apart is that it, well, specifically addresses a significant element of threats that has a much higher public profile than any other sort of threat we might encounter. If I remember, WP:SUICIDE does not mention school threats at all - even in passing along with other sorts of threats. It seems mostly, as its shortcut suggests, related to threats of suicide. The most recently proposed policy (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_threats) does not attempt to require action, only encourage it.

If an essay is the most that will ever be achievable, so be it. I for one would not like to be the one being interviewed when someone from the Times or USA Today says "Can you explain why Wikipedia editors don't think reporting threats against schools to the police is a good idea?" At the least WP:SUICIDE should also be shortcutted by WP:THREATS and it should deal more specifically with the various types of threats, including threats of violence at schools.

I think WP:THREAT goes to the No Legal Threats policy now. It's conceivable that it's more important to point it to the physical threats essay - you might float that on AN.

If you were to go add school violence threats explicitly to the essay, right now, I'd encourage it. I'm headed off now for several hours of meetings and so forth, or I'd just go do it right now. If I have bandwidth later tonight, after the meetings and interview I have to do, then I'll try to. But this is a fine case where bold would be good.

We should think about this a bit- It's possible to go overboard and enumerate all the possible threat types (school violence, workplace violence, spousal abuse, etc) we might want to list, in a too big too clunky list.

I think that we see enough incidents of kids making school threats, and it's particularly sensitive, where it is clearly useful to add it. But we should probably think about overdoing it and adding others (not saying we shouldn't, but let's stop after this and think about it a bit).