The inapposite and totally inapt intervention of the WMF, a la bull in a china shop, caused a Streisand effect on the alleged harassment that is stated to have take place. I do not knew the editor which has been pointed as the source of the denounce, or if she has made any denounce at all, but I certainly would not want to be in her shoes right now. She seems to have become the target of secere harassment off wiki, and at minimum a lot of pressure on wiki. She completely stopped editing since this case began. If the idea was to combat and prevent harassment, I must say WMF has failed completely and miserably, on all accounts. And God save me of being "protected" this way, if I ever find myself in a situation that I have to appeal to the WMF for protection.
I absolutely agree that something has to be done to fight onwiki harassment, including this kind of picking some victim and going after all their editions tagging, reverting, copyediting, so that the person feels constantly under vigilance. I personally know of a case very much like this at the Portuguese Wikipedia happening right now, and going on for years, also with a woman as a victim of victim . The community systematically tolerates and protects the harassers (a group of 3 or 4 "umblockables") , and stops short of banning the victim. She constantly contacts me and other editors asking for help, and I sincerely don't know what to do. Last time I and others requested the intervention of the WMF (T&S) at Wikipedia, in a rampage of cases of harassment and even blackmail, the result was absolutely disastrous, with public exposure of the victims, destruction of the editors involved in denouncing the situation, and an actual empowerment of the aggressors.
I do not know what the solution is, and I really would like to know to where one could appeal on such situation. WMF does not seem to be a good option, as they have a solid record of making the problem way worse than what it already is.
I also would like to know what means to T&S "risk of harm to himself", as the last time a fellow editor confidenced to me they were about to kill themselves, I felt completely lost with the answer I have received from the official T&S account, and ended up dealing with the situation myself the best I could. Fortunately the person is alive.
Paulo
A quinta, 13 de jun de 2019, 17:27, Bence Damokos bdamokos@gmail.com escreveu:
I think it is important that the WMF is taking the question of harassment seriously. If the community processes are not adequate, it is not an incorrect response to take direct action to protect the individuals that are being harassed. Ideally, community processes should be improved and WMF can give a hint, but it would be too much to expect the victim to continue to be harassed while the long discussion around changing community processes takes place.
As I understand, community health is an important element of the on-going strategy work and WMF has repeatedly drawn attention to solving the issue of harassment on wiki[1], so it is not like they have not told the communities that this is an issue that should be dealt with or that the community discussions needed to empower the communities to do so are not happening at all.
Best regards, Bence
[1] https://blog.wikimedia.org/tag/harassment/
On Thu, 13 Jun 2019 at 17:36, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
This misses the point, as others have highlighted already.
The WMF can and /should/ globally and permanently ban paedophiles, terrorists, system hackers and people making multiple cross-wiki death threats or threats of suicide. There are perfectly good and understandable reasons as to why the evidence behind these attacks and threats would be kept unpublished, it's seriously personal or criminal stuff.
The WMF making topic bans, interaction bans and limited project specific bans against Wikipedians is a brand new invention, which goes against the pre-existing understanding that the WMF do not replace existing and perfectly adequate community agreed procedures for banning bad behaviour on our projects. Once full time WMF employees start doing in parallel what volunteer administrators already do, then we should question why we do not *pay* volunteers administrators the same hourly rate and we are likely to see a mass exodus of administrators. After all, would you, say, deliver the post for free in your area for fun, but thereby take away decent full time employment with a guaranteed pension for your local postie?
If the reason for the WMF stepping in to ban Fram for a year is because the WMF do not trust Wikipedia administrators or Wikipedia's Arbcom to take sensible action in harassment cases, then they should be raising that honestly and openly with Arbcom. If the English Wikipedia's policies are not fit for purpose, or implementation of policy is incompetent, we need a much bigger discussion than whether Fram did something so terrible it cannot be named, but oddly was not worth a global ban but only the equivalent of a 12 month block on Wikipedia while they are free to do whatever they feel like on other Wikimedia projects.
Fae
faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
On Thu, 13 Jun 2019 at 15:35, John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
When you bad mouth other users there should be, and will be,
consequences.
An admin got desysoped and banned after repeated warnings? So what? The only ting to be learned is that some people believe they can do
whatever
they want and it has no consequences, and other people goes ballistic
when
consequences happen.
I would have given desysoped fram and 14 days to cool off, and if that
did
not work out repeated with one month. Banning someone for one year is
like
telling them to leave and don't come back. Someone at WMF is clearly
overly
sensitive, but not reacting would also be wrong. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
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