Katherine, a wonderful reply, including:
"*Members of this community have spent thousands of hours... developing the
processes, roles, and governance structures that are critical to sustaining
English Wikipedia. In doing so, you have not only made English Wikipedia
possible, but shaped the principles of the broader Wikimedia movement.*"
Thousands of hours per person in some cases; millions of hours in all. True
of many global social organizations and frameworks, but particularly
prolific and granular in our case, as each step along the way was done in
publicly versioned text. Time invested does not guarantee a particular
result, nor does it avoid systemic bias. But it does mean that those
committed to the communities have thought intently about even the issues
they have not yet solved; can draw on a deep body of precedent to compress
complexities into references; and remain ready and able to put more time
into improving them.
We are generally ready to consider
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias> bias
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Emijrp/Systemic_bias> and its remedies.
And often good solutions to problems have already been written down, but
trip up over implementation.
Discussing who is pushed away by each of a set of behavioral policies --
and what the obstacles are to implementing known solutions to persistent
problems -- is not a terrible approach when working to update community
norms. (the 'AGF of policymaking'?)
/SJ
On Wed, Jul 3, 2019 at 4:35 PM Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello Wikimedia-l colleagues,
I hope that your day is going well.
There are some updates regarding the topics that we are discussing in this
thread. I am writing this email in a personal capacity.
As a reminder, the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee published an
open letter on 30 June that was directed to the WMF Board
<
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Community_response_to_…
.
I will share a few quotes from that
statement before providing some
updates, and finally making some personal comments.
I am retaining the font styles that Arbcom used in its letter.
* "As of 30 June, two bureaucrats, 18 administrators, an ArbCom clerk, and
a number of other editors have resigned their positions and/or retired from
Wikipedia editing in relation to this issue."
* "If Fram’s ban—an unappealable sanction issued from above with no
community consultation—represents the WMF’s new strategy for dealing with
harassment on the English Wikipedia, it is one that is fundamentally
misaligned with the Wikimedia movement’s principles of openness, consensus,
and self-governance."
* "*We ask that the WMF commits to leaving behavioural complaints
pertaining solely to the English Wikipedia to established local processes.*
Those unsuitable for public discussion should be referred to the
Arbitration Committee. We will solicit comment from the community and the
WMF to develop clear procedures for dealing with confidential allegations
of harassment, based on the existing provision for private hearings in the
arbitration policy. Complaints that can be discussed publicly should be
referred to an appropriate community dispute resolution process. If the
Trust & Safety team seeks to assume responsibility for these cases, they
should do so by proposing an amendment to the arbitration policy, or an
equivalent process of community consensus-building. Otherwise, we would
appreciate the WMF’s continued support in improving our response to
harassment and hostility on the English Wikipedia
* "We feel strongly that this commitment is necessary for the Arbitration
Committee to continue to perform the role it is assigned by the English
Wikipedia community. If we are unable to find a satisfactory resolution, at
least four members of the committee have expressed the intention to
resign."
The following are more recent updates.
* The WMF Board has made a statement
<
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Community_response_to_…
* The WMF Executive Director (Katherine Maher) has also made a statement
<
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Katherine_(WMF)&di…
.
My personal comments follow.
I appreciate the WMF Executive Director's statement. I think that her
statement is a good starting point for further communications between the
staff and the community, particularly the English Wikipedia community.
I was hoping for a statement from the WMF Board that was humble and
apologetic regarding recent disruption that has stressed many people in the
community, led to numerous resignations, and consumed countless hours of
volunteers' valuable time. Perhaps I overlooked them, but I do not see the
words "apology", "sorry", "regret", or similar words in the
statement from
the WMF Board.
In addition to an apology, I was hoping to see the WMF Board focus on
supervising the WMF organization, which I think is its principal job.
I feel that this statement is condescending: "We believe that the
communities should be able to deal with these types of situations and
should take this as a wake-up call to improve our enforcement processes to
deal with so-called "unblockables"." I think that many of us in the
communities are aware of these problems. I do not appreciate WMF creating
unnecessary and widely harmful disruption in its quest to do top-down
social engineering. I encourage the WMF Board to develop humility, refrain
from lecturing the communities, and consider how to support the communities
in our efforts to improve ourselves.
I would encourage the WMF Board to ponder the harms that have resulted from
WMF's actions. I hope that we see a public apology from the WMF Board.
Katherine, thank you for your willingness to have a dialogue regarding
these matters, and your willingness to have a more cautious and respectful
approach in the future.
Writing solely in a personal capacity,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
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Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266