[Wikimedia-l] Re: UCoC Phase 2 Ratification Results Announcement

Our conduct policies were carefully crafted by hundreds of brilliant people over the course of twenty years, building upon endless experience and detailed discussions that could fill books upon books. The UCoC Project ... seems to be built to supersede all that we've built in this area, with an extremely inadequate replacement. It apparently abandoned the idea of being a "minimal baseline" in favor of including every preferred (and even aspirational) point available. The Enforcement Guidelines thoroughly place the UCoC itself front-and-center, requiring extensive linking and pushing it to be read by everyone (we have a hard enough time getting people to read the existing conduct policies; making everything link to UCoC will definitely drastically reduce the reach of existing policies if not eliminate their presence outright), mandatory pledges/affirmations of the UCoC and compulsory UCoC training (both as prerequisites to sysop participation, conditions which will likely strip the ranks). The UCoC is a text that the community did not write. It remains filled with dozens of very serious issues, but volunteers were never invited to edit it. Basic attempts at even cleaning up the document's language were reverted, as the staff are quite clear that it is not a Wikimedia document that community efforts may be directly part of. Larger issues were ignored. Even if we were to grant the idea that we would centralize conduct policies and remove local variation in acceptable practices, it looks to me that this attempt at producing a viable policy did not work. The WMF appointees who wrote the UCoC, while they surely worked hard on the document over the few months given to write the text, were quite reasonably not capable of doing the kind of work we typically expect from the large numbers of experienced volunteers who build core policies over the course of a much longer time period. Even taking into account the WMF's extensive campaign to convince people that the UCoC was good (and to vote accordingly), and their admission that they intended to keep pushing the UCoC indefinitely until a vote passed in the direction they wanted, I am surprised and dismayed at the result of the vote. The 57% support outcome (or 58.6% if one discounts neutral votes, as is often the practice), while well below the amount typically needed to establish consensus for a policy, is above the threshold the WMF determined to use for their own purposes. I don't know where we can go from here, or what the Board will do with this situation. Numerous contributors have already pointed out that these numbers fall clearly under "no consensus". The staff seem to have realized that removing sysop tools from a large portion of the admin corps as required would be disastrous. One of the more egregious problems present in the UCoC text is already likely to be the subject of review following an open letter by a user group, though many, many others remain largely unconsidered. Local community preparatory work for dealing with possible WMF action is ... roughly what I would expect (including the commitments to not cooperate with UCoC efforts, or to implement them). This is a pretty bad situation. -- Yair Rand ‫בתאריך יום ג׳, 5 באפר׳ 2022 ב-17:32 מאת ‪Stella Ng‬‏ <‪ sng@wikimedia.org‬‏>:‬ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)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(a)lists.wikimedia.org