New subject: Discussion about proposed Technical Code of Conduct (TCC)

20 Nov 2016

      I'm partly in agreement with Pine, this is more about policy than a bug and it should be being discussed on meta not phabricator.
I disagree with Pine re the IRC channels. If the people running a particular IRC channel want it to continue as the recommended channel from a particular Wikimedia wiki then it is reasonable for the community to require that channel to comply with community norms. What happens on IRC channels that are unconnected with the movement is arguably out of our control. IRC has been a problem area in the past, I doubt I'm the only person on this list who has discovered, sometimes long after the event that community IRC channels were misused either to canvas against them or to say things that you'd be blocked for saying on wiki. Clearly we can't implement an IRC policy on freenode channels that conflicts with freenode policy. But I'd be surprised if we couldn't require a stricter policy than freenode seems to for IRC channels promoted on wiki.
More broadly my concern with the approach is that it misses the main target. The nastiest trolling, personal attacks and certainly the rape and murder threats will get people blocked anywhere in the movement except maybe, definitely in the past but hopefully not today, on IRC. We need to think how to protect members of our community from people who barely count as members of our community and who may not even consider themselves as such.
There is an argument for being stricter about incivility amongst the community, I suspect with the ongoing greying of our communities this will happen regardless. My main concern is not with shifting the boundary of what is or isn't acceptable but with dealing more effectively with the worst stuff that is currently happening. That has implications both technical and for legal/privacy. I'd like to change our privacy and Checkuser policies to presume in favour of "fishing trips". If members of our community are being seriously harassed on wiki I think it should be the norm to check the IP address and see if any good hand accounts are also run by the same person. We all as individuals have patterns around our editing, it shouldn't be beyond the capabilities of modern technology to flag up a warning to the check users when a new editor appears with a similar pattern to a banned troll. Dealing with off wiki harassment is more complex, the technology and social mores may be outside our control. But some of the nastiest stuff that happens online such as revenge porn is illegal or at least culturally unacceptable pretty much everywhere. Tracking down where servers are, whose jurisdiction they are in and liaising with local law enforcement are big tasks. I'd like to see the movement and specifically the foundation and chapters as trail blazers in this.
Regards
Jonathan/wereSpielChequers
...
On 20 Nov 2016, at 12:00, wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:

Discussion about proposed Technical Code of Conduct    (TCC) (Pine W)
Re: Implementing Katherine's Vision: "Discussing    Discussions"
(Pine W)

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2016 21:45:42 -0800
From: Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com
To: Wikimedia Mailing List Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org,  Matthew
   Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Discussion about proposed Technical Code of
   Conduct    (TCC)
Message-ID:
   CAF=dyJiSgR_5+yTQ7Ynm4WnTDmfC1kwQjHxZ=_TwHs1jfo2vQA@mail.gmail.com
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I'm forking this discussion from the (no subject) thread.
I think it might be a good idea to have some sort of guidance, such as a
TCC, for how incivility is handled in technical spaces beyond reporting
problems with WMF employees to their WMF managers and/or HR, because not
everyone works for WMF, so it might be good to have a way to handle
situations when someone who is not a WMF employee causes problems in
technical spaces.
However, I'm not sure that I agree that the TCC is "a (draft) community
policy, being approved by the community.  The community has already
approved a large fraction of it.  It's not a (draft) WMF policy."
A substantial proportion of the comments on the talk page (and the
archives) are from WMF employees, not community members. I realize, Matt,
that you have been attempting to recruit broader participation, but it
looks like the results have been less than one would have hoped.
Given WMF's history of clashing with the community about subjects such as
Superprotect, VisualEditor, and ACTRIAL, it seems to me that while WMF
participation in discussions such as this is good, the high proportion of
WMF representation on the talk page makes the resulting document more
likely to reflect the view of WMF and its employees rather than the larger
community. So, no, I would not consider this draft to be a community
document at this time. The proportion of participation from WMF staff is
too high.
However, there are some paths forward: (1) Proceed with this as a policy
that applies to WMF staff only, (2) get the WMF Board to approve the
document as a policy, or (3) get the document to pass a community RFC,
closed by a community steward.
My advice, if WMF wants this TCC to hold weight with the community, is to
put a lot of distance between WMF and this document. WMF can support the
document's creation, but should not be in a leadership role, and WMF staff
should be far less prominent on the talk page. That the lower the
proportion of WMF involvement in the creation of this document, the more
likely the document is to be viewed in a positive light by the community.
I don't mean to sound like I intend to halt the entire TCC process, but I
would advise proceeding with it differently than the talk page suggests has
been happening so far.
Regarding the applicability of the proposed policy to IRC, I view the
proposed TCC as requiring explicit opt-in from IRC channels through their
own internal governance processes. The TCC's assertion that it applies to
IRC channels does not, by itself, actually make that happen without
explicit opt-in from those channels; similarly, my drafting a policy on
English Wikipedia that claims to apply to #wikipedia-en would have no
validity without opt-in from #wikipedia-en.
I need to attend to other matters so I won't participate in further
discussions on this topic for the near future, but I welcome comments (and
differing opinions) from others. To reiterate: I think that there could be
benefits from a TCC, but I would suggest (1) softening the WMF's role in
the creation of this document and (2) stating that the TCC applies to IRC
channels on an opt-in basis.
Pine

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Discussion about proposed Technical Code of Conduct (TCC)