Hi everyone, This is a long email, so the less TL;DR version is: there is a request for comment on Meta about a community policy for global bans.[1] This is vitally important, and I hope you will both comment and help spread the word in your community. The background on why we're doing this follows... One of the most important elements of the new Terms of Use,[2] at least from my perspective, is the fact that it clearly and unequivocally states that if you engage in harassment, threats, stalking, or other kinds of behavior that harm other people you are not welcome on any Wikimedia project. The Terms state that we do not tolerate harassment etc., and on the individual project level, I think we deal with that with a stunning degree of effectiveness for a volunteer movement. However, there is an area of weakness: someone banned or indefinitely blocked on multiple projects can simply go to a new project and start up all over again, even when a large number of community members from different projects agree that this person poses a danger to others. Now, the traditional way other big, participatory sites enforce these kinds of requirements to simply hire a team of people to moderate these requests. That's the way Facebook, YouTube, et. al. do it today. While the ToU does say that the Foundation may have some prerogative to remove people's access when required, we all know that in reality, having the WMF handle any global banning requests by default is not in line with our values. That's not us. The volunteer community is at the core of our movement, and the Terms state this over and over again. The lack of a policy and process for Wikimedians from different communities to collectively agree that someone should be globally banned allows bad actors to exploit our instinct to Assume Good Faith in all situations, and use smaller projects as a safe harbor for continuing to harass others. Even if the new Terms empower Wikimedia overall to deal more strongly with harmful behavior, to do this in a volunteer-led way, we need a global bans policy. A framework for how to reach a consensus decision on global bans has been put forth,[3] so we need to make a decision about whether it's the right approach. The RFC has been translated into some of the most important languages other than English, but anything you can do to forward this on to the community you're a part of would be most appreciated. Thanks for reading, -- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/ 1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Global_bans 2. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use 3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_bans P.S. On a personal note, I wanted to say that though I'm writing this with my staff accout during working hours, this is not really a part of my core job description now that I've joined Engineering and Product Development. I've spent my time authoring this policy and proposing it because I think it's really important, not merely because I was assigned to do so. P.P.S. If you'll be at Wikimania next week and want to talk about this, please don't be shy. :)