Jimmy Wales wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Titoxd@Wikimedia wrote:
I'm not entirely sure that a random user of an
online site qualifies as an
employee of any site, so I don't think that *workplace* sexual harassment
laws have anything to do with this case. After all the commotion lately with
MySpace, it seems quite real that these situations do have some sort of
legal backing under some sort of sexual harassment statute, although IANAL.
In many of these cases, it is just safer to report the case, and if the
police asks for anything, just provide them access to the Apache and Recent
Changes logs.
Providing this data should only be done in response to a court order.
Mere police investigation is not enough. There are many more situations
where a person has legitimate reasons for remaining anonymous. This
might seem like very obvious circumstances for providing information,
but there are other activities where we diverge significantly about the
legality of the activity, and it is not our place to start making
judgements about legality. Civil rights and free speech are important,
and if it means having to tolerate occasional idiotic speech that's a
very small price to pay.
In some cases I would agree, but when there is a clear threat of
physical violence (rape), that's a simple boundary line for me.
There's a difference too between sexual harassment and threats of
violence. Telling a female Wikipedian, "A bitch like you belongs in the
kitchen, not on ArbCom," may be fairly interpreted as sexual harassment,
but it does not carry a threat of violence. We can deal with that idiot
through our own internal processes. Credible threats of violence do
raise the issue to a higher level. We were certainly right to act when
the kid in Connecticut was threatening suicide.
At the other end of the scale Canadian courts have consistently refused
to force the release of such information when the recording industry was
saying that they needed to know who was sharing music files. We can
delete what we suspect to be copyvios, but it would be over-the-top to
tell the copyright owner about it every time it happened unless he had
demanded that action in the first place
Two examples: (1) a vandal posts "Principal
Skinner is a poopy head", we
do not notify the school or authorities, because it is just a stupid
childish comment and who cares. (2) a vandal posts a physical threat of
violence against Principal Skinner... we forward it to the school and/or
appropriate authorities, and cough up the ip address if we have it and
there is a police request.
In this example we also want to make sure we aren't sending them on a
fool's errand in an imaginary Springfield. ;-)
Is the second also just a stupid childish comment?
Yes, in many cases,
but I am personally not comfortable making that judgment. Tolerating
the occassional idiotic speech really is a small price to pay, as you
say. Tolerating threats of violence is just a bad idea.
Essentially I agree. It all comes down to mature judgement, and who is
capable of exercising it. We have a lot of people who can too easily
jump to conclusions.
Ec