Thanks for sharing for the WMF board María,
Though I have been highly critical of aspects of the Universal Code of Conduct, the consultation process has been widely cast and approached using reasonable, logical, methods. Those WMF employees running those consultations have tried to keep an open mind and tried not to censor or mute critical feedback. It's not an easy task.
Most, maybe over 90% of folxs that subscribe to this email list have in mind the English, French, Spanish, German Wikipedias when making comments, but from the perspective of the WMLGBT+ user group, our members frequently raise abuse and harassment cases in minority language projects where the admin 'corps' may be a small club and where members of minority groups are genuinely scared of hostile repercussions from editing on controversial topics such as local politics and rights for minority groups. It may feel especially unsafe for those who have been targeted and previously outed themselves during edit-a-thons or similar. Our user group is an important supportive resource so that some of those affected can discuss their experience on our off-wiki groups, without having to publicly "victimize" themselves and without needing to litigate an Arbcom case or painfully compile evidence for WMF T&S. Sometimes those cases turn in to on-wiki action, more often nothing happens on-wiki but the contributor feels better by having a safe space to talk and are welcome to stay anonymous.
Even on the bigger projects, we see user pages with alt-right and anti-LGBT+ opinions being expressed with hostile userboxes, extremist icons and statements to the effect that "this user opposes XXX rights for XXX minority groups" and these users happen to be well established, with many years within that Wikimedia project, or having functionary roles like sysop rights, or access to OTRS. A significant step forward to making our projects more open and accessible for all good-faith contributors is the UCoC section on "Abuse of power, privilege, or influence". Those of us that have been around the projects for a few years are aware of cases of sysops that routinely abused their authority, bullied their way in disagreements and they were eventually de-sysopped after the pattern of abuse became too blatant and extreme for anyone to ignore any longer. In very rare cases on minority projects, the local community and/or processes were not up to the task of holding those with tools to account, and we saw T&S take necessary and entirely justifiable action. We hope to see the UCoC firmly set the a basic minimal standard to ensure these cases of abuse are identified and acted on locally and promptly, without forcing extreme measures. We know that for each extreme case that gets dealt with, there are several more that remain unsatisfactory and those abusers and harassers are never held to account, but continue as "life long" authority holders.
The UCoC publication is welcome. Its existence is not a threat to the autonomy and authority of Wikimedia projects, because there's nothing in the UCoC that any project should resist having policies and procedures to address. If your sysops, check users, stewards, bureaucrats, Arbcom members or Founder don't want to comply with the very basic good governance and good behaviours spelt out in the UCoC, hurry up and show them the door, they never were competent.
The implementation discussions to follow may become complex and heated, but I'm sure that most of us now suspect that on our better run projects it means no changes to policies at all, just do for real what those policies say, rather than making excuses for bad behaviour from those with big hats or a self-perpetuating mobile peanut gallery of jokey lads.
Thanks Fae https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT+