The fundamental problem here is that the WMF's response to everything is simply *reactive*. A policy is instituted, with zero real collaboration, little or no discussion, foggy goals, sparsely answered direct questions and then simply announced to the community in faux-press release fashion. And then when people in the community like Andreas Kolbe, who has been an important voice of caution on many issues, speak up, they're told that this isn't the specific bureaucratically appointed time to have a discussion.
Then, various WMF-affiliated people assure that we can talk about this, which is basically "this is our decision, not yours, but we'll be happy to tell you why we did this, though we're not going to change anything" with any substantive changes require near rebellion in the Wiki movement. And telling the community things like that "there's a secret playbook we have" is making everything worse. *Why* is there a secret playbook for a collaborative movement? That is not how collaboration and consensus work.
If I and my five friends are collaborating to make a fancy dinner, that involves *discussing*. It doesn't mean that I decide what the six dishes will be, inform the other five friends what my decision is, and then simply assuage them afterwards that I'd love to hear their input. If K says she doesn't like the parsnip dish I decided on, I don't say "well, I considered that as part of my decision, so that's that." If P asks why we don't have a dessert, I don't tell him that this is not the time of the dinner planning that we may talk about dish choices, but he can ask about it between 4 PM and 4:30 PM next Tuesday. My friends would get very angry at this very quickly.
The WMF likes the *idea* of this being a community-driven, collaborative project rather than actually doing the stuff that *makes* it a community-driven, collaborative project. How many times does this process have to repeat in identical fashion before we stop pretending that this *is* a community-driven collaborative project? If the goal is simply to be another generic top-down Silicon Valley information charity, just one that has somehow procured a gigantic unpaid workforce that the elites can command, then just state it outright so that people don't spend their free hours toiling in the delusion they're part of a movement.
Best,
Dan
On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 8:52 AM Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Sat, Dec 18, 2021 at 8:07 PM geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
You and who's army? If one of the world's more questionable governments decides to target Wikipedians within its territory there's not a thing you can do about about it. You’re not France. You can’t threaten governments into submission (and if one of the most powerful states on earth can’t get Zara Radcliffe out you certainly can’t).
You’re not a mineral extraction company. You don’t have mercenaries on retainer to try and get your people out.
You policy is worse than useless. It doesn’t help at all but marginally increases the risk of being involved with Wikipedia as what can be seen as a harmless hobby writing about trains turns into being involved with a human rights campaigning organisation.
There seems to be a lot of distress in this email, and I'm sorry to see it. :( I hope I can speak thoughtfully to these issues without raising dangers or making it seem like your concerns - which are completely valid and which I share - are being minimized.
For those who don't know me, I'm the VP of Community Resilience and Sustainability https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability. For full disclosure, I'm not one of the team working on the Human Rights Policy directly, but one of the people who is working on that directly does report up through my line to me. I hired him. He is our Human Rights Lead in charge of working to intervene in exactly such situations. We hired him because we have faced exactly such situations, and we needed competent approaches for threats that would arise whether we wanted them to or not.
I'm only going to speak here to that element of this policy, since it is one of the specific areas of my focus.
I've spoken about our human rights interventions at the higher level in my office hours several times over the past year. (They are linked, with notes, from the page above.) The role rose when an early approach one of my teams led to collaborate across particularly high risk regions on finding resources for people in trouble https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Voices_under_Threat led us to find more critical need for direct support. We CANNOT threaten governments. We are NOT an extraction company. You are totally correct. We need to stay humble in our approaches. Instead, the Human Rights Team https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_Team who supports threats on the ground is working on several initiatives to help that includes digital security training and importantly partnerships with organizations around the world who DO have these abilities.
Raising the danger of Wikimedians is something I take very, very seriously. Where I work, I can't help but be incredibly aware that no matter how it is seen, being involved with Wikipedia is not - for many - a harmless hobby writing about trains. Some of the people we've tried to support have joined it expecting precisely that, only to find that malign actors around them already perceived it differently and attempted to pressure or harm them to get what they wanted.
Our Global Advocacy and Policy teams have the hard job of trying to support an environment wherein knowledge remains free. I admire them for it and recognize the hard haul of what they're doing, in a shifting legislative landscape where this can't be taken for granted anywhere.
My focus is on the people who contribute. I think they must be *informed*
- must know the risks when and where they engage - and must be supported in
doing so *as safely as possible*. I think when things go wrong they need to have somebody who can help them. Our Human Rights Team is making connections so that when the things that go wrong come from organized persecution (<--best words I can think of to describe terrorism, government groups, etc. This is distinct from individuals being jerks to each other.)
We are short-staffed at the end of the calendar year and with the rising tide of illnesses globally again, but I do want to note that while I have contributed some information to the FAQ that will be issued by the Global Advocacy Team in due course, I know there's a lot of interest in precisely HOW we work with people who are persecuted.
Y'all, I'm very sorry, but I can't lay out our playbook. Geni is completely right that this can raise the threat level for people. I always think about the English Wikipedia's essay on BEANs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose. I don't want to give people ideas or make it easier for them to exploit gaps in our ability to handle problems. For this reason, I've always struggled with whether it's better to* not *raise the specter of human rights violations to those who might not have considered that there are rights to violate here or to *not* inform the community at large that some people are violating those rights already. There are pros and cons for both approaches, and while I know we won't get the balance perfect I will myself keep trying to figure out how to do it right.
It's also true that it's not yet an "If this/then that" situation. My team also handles the emergency@ workflow, which is very straightforward - assess incoming concerns against a protocol developed by a professional external agency and pass it along to international responders as appropriate through well-defined contacts. Easy to lay out what we do, how we do it, why we do it the way we do it. There's nothing straightforward about this work. We are building out global systems, but work closely with individuals to understand the nature of the threat and to help them tap into safe existing systems for their support.
I'm pretty happy about this policy myself. We've been building out these capacities for a few years now, but there's a lot of ground still to cover. The policy helps (imo) support that our commitment to this remains top of mind. And I think it is the right time, with the systems we HAVE created, to discuss the manifestations of such abuse a little more publicly, in order to protect our people and to better understand as Wikimedians how our own systems may put people in danger.
Sorry for the lot of words. I really want this to remain a safe place for people to write about trains but also about other things. I also will have limited time to respond to follow-ups over the next few weeks for the reasons I mentioned above, but I am due for another office hour where I may be able to talk with those of you who want to about the aspects of our interventions that can be discussed without raising danger.
Warm regards, Maggie
-- Maggie Dennis She/her/hers Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org