Hello.
My name is Maggie Dennis. I’m the Vice President of Community Resilience and Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation.[1] I oversee the Foundation’s Trust and Safety teams (operations and policy), the Community Development team, and the upcoming Foundation Human Rights lead.
On December 2nd, I met with representatives of the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group along with several Trust and Safety personnel, including Global Head Jan Eißfeldt, to understand some of the challenges faced by the members of the group as volunteers in our international movement.[2] It is apparent that many volunteers openly identifying as LGBTQIA+ are targeted and attacked for their identities, with transgender, non-binary, queer, and queer feminist editors in particular at higher risk for such abuse. The members of the group who met with us voiced concerns about the safety and wellbeing of other marginalized communities and groups as well.
In my role, and speaking for the Foundation, I am writing today to restate, reinforce, and firmly assert our commitment to supporting the LGBTQIA+ volunteers in our movement, as well as others who face exclusion and hostility on the basis of identity factors.[3]
The Wikimedia movement is based on the value of inclusivity, that anyone may play a part in not only receiving but curating and sharing knowledge. What volunteers have been able to accomplish in Wikimedia projects is extraordinary, but the movement will never reach its full potential if we do not close the diversity gap which our communities defined so ably in the Movement Strategy process.[4] There continue to be barriers in our movement for LGBTQIA+, women, indigenous communities, and other underrepresented groups. We as a movement have been called upon by a broad and diverse group of our own movement members to promote inclusivity and reduce harms to our participants.
In light of this, one of my teams has been directed by the Board of Trustees to (among other requests) facilitate the drafting of the Universal Code of Conduct called for in the Movement Strategy recommendations.[5] This collaboratively drafted document underwent significant community review in September and October and is currently under review by the Board. We will next be launching a second phase of that work in January, meant to result in enforcement pathways that will make our projects safe spaces for all volunteers.
Following the LGBT+ User Group meeting, we are also building into our plans facilitated support for the LGBT+ User Group and other Wikimedia affiliate organizations focused on marginalized communities to come together to discuss better mechanisms for supporting volunteers who are targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, ethnicity or other identify factors. We expect to solidify plans and launch conversations in January and will be putting out information on how to participate.
In addition, we see the urgency and the opportunity to do more to address the needs of the LGBT+ User Group and others. The Foundation’s Community Resilience & Sustainability function will be connecting more closely with the LGBT+ User Group going forward to ensure that the Foundation’s staff better understand the needs of this community, especially but not solely in our professional Trust & Safety work.
We are committed to supporting volunteers in participating safely in our movement and want to be sure that we do not, through lack of understanding, ourselves do harm. This includes:
-
adopting and disseminating to staff best-practice terminology when conducting community surveys, -
ensuring that volunteers have easier access to existing reporting structures now, even as we build other enforcement pathways in the UCoC, -
being vigilant that incidents where individuals are targeted for identity factors are properly recognized and addressed in our Trust & Safety systems, and -
exploring peer support options.
I thank the members of the user group for inviting us to join them. I’m excited and energized by that conversation and looking forward to finding ways to improve. I hope others in the community will join in the publicly hosted UCoC discussions starting early in the new year to improve the safety of all community members. It will help to ensure that volunteers across the movement, and in all movement spaces online and off, have an opportunity to contribute safely. People should feel welcomed to contribute to our collective and important mission of delivering the sum of all knowledge to everyone.
Warm regards,
Maggie Dennis
P.S. This statement is also on Meta, at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability/2020..., where translation is being enabled today. If you are interested in helping translate, please do!
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT%2B/Portal
[3] I’m borrowing the language of the UN, here: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Pla... .
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review
Dear Maggie,
Thank you for this public statement, our francophone team has just translated the meta version into French. I hope that it gets translated in all languages so that LGBTIQ+ persons can feel valued and supported in our movement.
Warm regards,
Nattes à chat
Le 8 déc. 2020 à 16:24, Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org a écrit :
Hello.
My name is Maggie Dennis. I’m the Vice President of Community Resilience and Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation.[1] I oversee the Foundation’s Trust and Safety teams (operations and policy), the Community Development team, and the upcoming Foundation Human Rights lead.
On December 2nd, I met with representatives of the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group along with several Trust and Safety personnel, including Global Head Jan Eißfeldt, to understand some of the challenges faced by the members of the group as volunteers in our international movement.[2] It is apparent that many volunteers openly identifying as LGBTQIA+ are targeted and attacked for their identities, with transgender, non-binary, queer, and queer feminist editors in particular at higher risk for such abuse. The members of the group who met with us voiced concerns about the safety and wellbeing of other marginalized communities and groups as well.
In my role, and speaking for the Foundation, I am writing today to restate, reinforce, and firmly assert our commitment to supporting the LGBTQIA+ volunteers in our movement, as well as others who face exclusion and hostility on the basis of identity factors.[3]
The Wikimedia movement is based on the value of inclusivity, that anyone may play a part in not only receiving but curating and sharing knowledge. What volunteers have been able to accomplish in Wikimedia projects is extraordinary, but the movement will never reach its full potential if we do not close the diversity gap which our communities defined so ably in the Movement Strategy process.[4] There continue to be barriers in our movement for LGBTQIA+, women, indigenous communities, and other underrepresented groups. We as a movement have been called upon by a broad and diverse group of our own movement members to promote inclusivity and reduce harms to our participants.
In light of this, one of my teams has been directed by the Board of Trustees to (among other requests) facilitate the drafting of the Universal Code of Conduct called for in the Movement Strategy recommendations.[5] This collaboratively drafted document underwent significant community review in September and October and is currently under review by the Board. We will next be launching a second phase of that work in January, meant to result in enforcement pathways that will make our projects safe spaces for all volunteers.
Following the LGBT+ User Group meeting, we are also building into our plans facilitated support for the LGBT+ User Group and other Wikimedia affiliate organizations focused on marginalized communities to come together to discuss better mechanisms for supporting volunteers who are targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, ethnicity or other identify factors. We expect to solidify plans and launch conversations in January and will be putting out information on how to participate.
In addition, we see the urgency and the opportunity to do more to address the needs of the LGBT+ User Group and others. The Foundation’s Community Resilience & Sustainability function will be connecting more closely with the LGBT+ User Group going forward to ensure that the Foundation’s staff better understand the needs of this community, especially but not solely in our professional Trust & Safety work.
We are committed to supporting volunteers in participating safely in our movement and want to be sure that we do not, through lack of understanding, ourselves do harm. This includes: adopting and disseminating to staff best-practice terminology when conducting community surveys, ensuring that volunteers have easier access to existing reporting structures now, even as we build other enforcement pathways in the UCoC, being vigilant that incidents where individuals are targeted for identity factors are properly recognized and addressed in our Trust & Safety systems, and exploring peer support options.
I thank the members of the user group for inviting us to join them. I’m excited and energized by that conversation and looking forward to finding ways to improve. I hope others in the community will join in the publicly hosted UCoC discussions starting early in the new year to improve the safety of all community members. It will help to ensure that volunteers across the movement, and in all movement spaces online and off, have an opportunity to contribute safely. People should feel welcomed to contribute to our collective and important mission of delivering the sum of all knowledge to everyone.
Warm regards, Maggie Dennis
P.S. This statement is also on Meta, at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability/2020... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability/2020_December_Foundation_commitment_of_support_for_LGBT%2B_volunteers, where translation is being enabled today. If you are interested in helping translate, please do!
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT%2B/Portal https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT%2B/Portal [3] I’m borrowing the language of the UN, here: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Pla... https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Plan%20of%20Action%20on%20Hate%20Speech%2018%20June%20SYNOPSIS.pdf. [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Provide_for_Safety_and_Inclusion [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review -- Maggie Dennis Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Thank you Maggie and Natascha. Now you can also find the Italian translation.
Camelia
On Tue, Dec 8, 2020, 7:57 PM Natacha Rault via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Dear Maggie,
Thank you for this public statement, our francophone team has just translated the meta version into French. I hope that it gets translated in all languages so that LGBTIQ+ persons can feel valued and supported in our movement.
Warm regards,
Nattes à chat
Le 8 déc. 2020 à 16:24, Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org a écrit :
Hello.
My name is Maggie Dennis. I’m the Vice President of Community Resilience and Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation.[1] I oversee the Foundation’s Trust and Safety teams (operations and policy), the Community Development team, and the upcoming Foundation Human Rights lead.
On December 2nd, I met with representatives of the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group along with several Trust and Safety personnel, including Global Head Jan Eißfeldt, to understand some of the challenges faced by the members of the group as volunteers in our international movement.[2] It is apparent that many volunteers openly identifying as LGBTQIA+ are targeted and attacked for their identities, with transgender, non-binary, queer, and queer feminist editors in particular at higher risk for such abuse. The members of the group who met with us voiced concerns about the safety and wellbeing of other marginalized communities and groups as well.
In my role, and speaking for the Foundation, I am writing today to restate, reinforce, and firmly assert our commitment to supporting the LGBTQIA+ volunteers in our movement, as well as others who face exclusion and hostility on the basis of identity factors.[3]
The Wikimedia movement is based on the value of inclusivity, that anyone may play a part in not only receiving but curating and sharing knowledge. What volunteers have been able to accomplish in Wikimedia projects is extraordinary, but the movement will never reach its full potential if we do not close the diversity gap which our communities defined so ably in the Movement Strategy process.[4] There continue to be barriers in our movement for LGBTQIA+, women, indigenous communities, and other underrepresented groups. We as a movement have been called upon by a broad and diverse group of our own movement members to promote inclusivity and reduce harms to our participants.
In light of this, one of my teams has been directed by the Board of Trustees to (among other requests) facilitate the drafting of the Universal Code of Conduct called for in the Movement Strategy recommendations.[5] This collaboratively drafted document underwent significant community review in September and October and is currently under review by the Board. We will next be launching a second phase of that work in January, meant to result in enforcement pathways that will make our projects safe spaces for all volunteers.
Following the LGBT+ User Group meeting, we are also building into our plans facilitated support for the LGBT+ User Group and other Wikimedia affiliate organizations focused on marginalized communities to come together to discuss better mechanisms for supporting volunteers who are targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, ethnicity or other identify factors. We expect to solidify plans and launch conversations in January and will be putting out information on how to participate.
In addition, we see the urgency and the opportunity to do more to address the needs of the LGBT+ User Group and others. The Foundation’s Community Resilience & Sustainability function will be connecting more closely with the LGBT+ User Group going forward to ensure that the Foundation’s staff better understand the needs of this community, especially but not solely in our professional Trust & Safety work.
We are committed to supporting volunteers in participating safely in our movement and want to be sure that we do not, through lack of understanding, ourselves do harm. This includes:
- adopting and disseminating to staff best-practice terminology when
conducting community surveys,
- ensuring that volunteers have easier access to existing reporting
structures now, even as we build other enforcement pathways in the UCoC,
- being vigilant that incidents where individuals are targeted for
identity factors are properly recognized and addressed in our Trust & Safety systems, and
- exploring peer support options.
I thank the members of the user group for inviting us to join them. I’m excited and energized by that conversation and looking forward to finding ways to improve. I hope others in the community will join in the publicly hosted UCoC discussions starting early in the new year to improve the safety of all community members. It will help to ensure that volunteers across the movement, and in all movement spaces online and off, have an opportunity to contribute safely. People should feel welcomed to contribute to our collective and important mission of delivering the sum of all knowledge to everyone.
Warm regards, Maggie Dennis
P.S. This statement is also on Meta, at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability/2020..., where translation is being enabled today. If you are interested in helping translate, please do!
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT%2B/Portal [3] I’m borrowing the language of the UN, here: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Pla... . [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review
-- Maggie Dennis Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, < mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe <wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>>
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Great news. Vulnerable contributors to Wikimedia projects should be owed a duty of care, not least because they make good, well-informed contributions, but also that those projects should not become the preserve of a socially and politically advantaged elite.
However, what he have here is only much less than half of the story. Those who are falsely accused of unacceptable, maybe criminal behaviour, when there is a significant lack of evidence to support that, have little or no comeback. Minds seem to be irretrievably poisoned against you.
I make no secret of the fact that I am User:Rodhullandemu on multiple Wikimedia projects. I was blocked or banned (it's not been made clear) on en:WP in 2011 on the basis of some fake Usenet posts that Roger Davies found, and for some reason gave credence to, despite the policy [[:en:WP:Usenet]]. There is no pretending that this is not the case, given
--- New Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail replacement - get it here: https://www.oeclassic.com/
the entry in my block log on en:WP. As an experienced user on Wikipedia, I know exactly what "Refer all enquiries to Arbitration Committee" means. It's a code which everybody understands, and as it stands, is a defamatory libel as an innuendo.
I have asked Roger to copy those Usenet posts to me, compete with headers. I have no doubt that he will be unable, or will refuse, to do so.
Meanwhile, I cannot trust ArbCom to understand their role in relation to due processs and the rules of natural justice, given the recent input into my desysop on Commons from two sitting arbs, one of whom was such in 2011, and one of their clerks. So I can't ask them to unblock me. They are irretrievably poisoned.
Meanwhile, WMF T&S refused to do anything to intervene when someone misguidedly complained about me to them. Shameful, as I said at the time. I deserve at least as much as those who are against me. Jimbo Wales's decision on my appeal against my block missed the point completely. He suggested that I shoud prove myself sane. That's both impossible and ridiculous, and mentioned in my RFA on Commons.
Time, perhaps, for the WMF to get its act together and say to people "That was the wrong thing to do, and we have no hesitation in correcting it". Fortunately I am no longer alone; I have people interested in exposing the arbitrariness of arbitration.
Phil Nash/Rodhullandemu
----- Original Message ----- From: Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org Reply-To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: 08/12/2020 15:24:15 Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Foundation commitment of support for LGBT+ volunteers
Hello.
My name is Maggie Dennis. I’m the Vice President of Community Resilience and Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation.[1] I oversee the Foundation’s Trust and Safety teams (operations and policy), the Community Development team, and the upcoming Foundation Human Rights lead.
On December 2nd, I met with representatives of the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group along with several Trust and Safety personnel, including Global Head Jan Eißfeldt, to understand some of the challenges faced by the members of the group as volunteers in our international movement.[2] It is apparent that many volunteers openly identifying as LGBTQIA+ are targeted and attacked for their identities, with transgender, non-binary, queer, and queer feminist editors in particular at higher risk for such abuse. The members of the group who met with us voiced concerns about the safety and wellbeing of other marginalized communities and groups as well.
In my role, and speaking for the Foundation, I am writing today to restate, reinforce, and firmly assert our commitment to supporting the LGBTQIA+ volunteers in our movement, as well as others who face exclusion and hostility on the basis of identity factors.[3]
The Wikimedia movement is based on the value of inclusivity, that anyone may play a part in not only receiving but curating and sharing knowledge. What volunteers have been able to accomplish in Wikimedia projects is extraordinary, but the movement will never reach its full potential if we do not close the diversity gap which our communities defined so ably in the Movement Strategy process.[4] There continue to be barriers in our movement for LGBTQIA+, women, indigenous communities, and other underrepresented groups. We as a movement have been called upon by a broad and diverse group of our own movement members to promote inclusivity and reduce harms to our participants.
In light of this, one of my teams has been directed by the Board of Trustees to (among other requests) facilitate the drafting of the Universal Code of Conduct called for in the Movement Strategy recommendations.[5] This collaboratively drafted document underwent significant community review in September and October and is currently under review by the Board. We will next be launching a second phase of that work in January, meant to result in enforcement pathways that will make our projects safe spaces for all volunteers.
Following the LGBT+ User Group meeting, we are also building into our plans facilitated support for the LGBT+ User Group and other Wikimedia affiliate organizations focused on marginalized communities to come together to discuss better mechanisms for supporting volunteers who are targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, ethnicity or other identify factors. We expect to solidify plans and launch conversations in January and will be putting out information on how to participate.
In addition, we see the urgency and the opportunity to do more to address the needs of the LGBT+ User Group and others. The Foundation’s Community Resilience & Sustainability function will be connecting more closely with the LGBT+ User Group going forward to ensure that the Foundation’s staff better understand the needs of this community, especially but not solely in our professional Trust & Safety work.
We are committed to supporting volunteers in participating safely in our movement and want to be sure that we do not, through lack of understanding, ourselves do harm. This includes: adopting and disseminating to staff best-practice terminology when conducting community surveys, ensuring that volunteers have easier access to existing reporting structures now, even as we build other enforcement pathways in the UCoC, being vigilant that incidents where individuals are targeted for identity factors are properly recognized and addressed in our Trust & Safety systems, and exploring peer support options.
I thank the members of the user group for inviting us to join them. I’m excited and energized by that conversation and looking forward to finding ways to improve. I hope others in the community will join in the publicly hosted UCoC discussions starting early in the new year to improve the safety of all community members. It will help to ensure that volunteers across the movement, and in all movement spaces online and off, have an opportunity to contribute safely. People should feel welcomed to contribute to our collective and important mission of delivering the sum of all knowledge to everyone.
Warm regards, Maggie Dennis
P.S. This statement is also on Meta, at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability/2020..., where translation is being enabled today. If you are interested in helping translate, please do!
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT%2B/Portal [3] I’m borrowing the language of the UN, here: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Pla.... [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen... [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review
I'm sorry that you've chosen to hijack this thread, Rodhullandemu. Nonetheless, I will point out that it was *me* who indefinitely blocked you in the middle of an arbitration case, for reasons that didn't actually have anything to do with the case, and for edits that met the requirements for suppression. Those edits were also reported to the predecessor of the Trust & Safety department at the time. There was also nothing to do with Usenet - it was your own words that resulted in your block. I hope that the circumstances that led to your block have improved significantly since that time. Your block remains appealable to the current Arbitration Committee, and I am certain neither I nor Roger Davies (who subsequently reblocked you to remove email access) would object to the block being reviewed.
Returning to the key subject of this thread, I thank Trust & Safety for making a statement, and also thank our colleagues for arranging translations into other languages.
Risker/Anne
On Tue, 8 Dec 2020 at 19:07, Phil Nash via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Great news. Vulnerable contributors to Wikimedia projects should be owed a duty of care, not least because they make good, well-informed contributions, but also that those projects should not become the preserve of a socially and politically advantaged elite.
However, what he have here is only much less than half of the story. Those who are falsely accused of unacceptable, maybe criminal behaviour, when there is a significant lack of evidence to support that, have little or no comeback. Minds seem to be irretrievably poisoned against you.
I make no secret of the fact that I am User:Rodhullandemu on multiple Wikimedia projects. I was blocked or banned (it's not been made clear) on en:WP in 2011 on the basis of some fake Usenet posts that Roger Davies found, and for some reason gave credence to, despite the policy [[:en:WP:Usenet]]. There is no pretending that this is not the case, given
New Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail replacement - get it here: https://www.oeclassic.com/
the entry in my block log on en:WP. As an experienced user on Wikipedia, I know exactly what "Refer all enquiries to Arbitration Committee" means. It's a code which everybody understands, and as it stands, is a defamatory libel as an innuendo.
I have asked Roger to copy those Usenet posts to me, compete with headers. I have no doubt that he will be unable, or will refuse, to do so.
Meanwhile, I cannot trust ArbCom to understand their role in relation to due processs and the rules of natural justice, given the recent input into my desysop on Commons from two sitting arbs, one of whom was such in 2011, and one of their clerks. So I can't ask them to unblock me. They are irretrievably poisoned.
Meanwhile, WMF T&S refused to do anything to intervene when someone misguidedly complained about me to them. Shameful, as I said at the time. I deserve at least as much as those who are against me. Jimbo Wales's decision on my appeal against my block missed the point completely. He suggested that I shoud prove myself sane. That's both impossible and ridiculous, and mentioned in my RFA on Commons.
Time, perhaps, for the WMF to get its act together and say to people "That was the wrong thing to do, and we have no hesitation in correcting it". Fortunately I am no longer alone; I have people interested in exposing the arbitrariness of arbitration.
Phil Nash/Rodhullandemu
*----- Original Message -----* *From:* Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org *Reply-To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Sent:* 08/12/2020 15:24:15 *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Foundation commitment of support for LGBT+ volunteers
Hello.
My name is Maggie Dennis. I’m the Vice President of Community Resilience and Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation.[1] I oversee the Foundation’s Trust and Safety teams (operations and policy), the Community Development team, and the upcoming Foundation Human Rights lead.
On December 2nd, I met with representatives of the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group along with several Trust and Safety personnel, including Global Head Jan Eißfeldt, to understand some of the challenges faced by the members of the group as volunteers in our international movement.[2] It is apparent that many volunteers openly identifying as LGBTQIA+ are targeted and attacked for their identities, with transgender, non-binary, queer, and queer feminist editors in particular at higher risk for such abuse. The members of the group who met with us voiced concerns about the safety and wellbeing of other marginalized communities and groups as well.
In my role, and speaking for the Foundation, I am writing today to restate, reinforce, and firmly assert our commitment to supporting the LGBTQIA+ volunteers in our movement, as well as others who face exclusion and hostility on the basis of identity factors.[3]
The Wikimedia movement is based on the value of inclusivity, that anyone may play a part in not only receiving but curating and sharing knowledge. What volunteers have been able to accomplish in Wikimedia projects is extraordinary, but the movement will never reach its full potential if we do not close the diversity gap which our communities defined so ably in the Movement Strategy process.[4] There continue to be barriers in our movement for LGBTQIA+, women, indigenous communities, and other underrepresented groups. We as a movement have been called upon by a broad and diverse group of our own movement members to promote inclusivity and reduce harms to our participants.
In light of this, one of my teams has been directed by the Board of Trustees to (among other requests) facilitate the drafting of the Universal Code of Conduct called for in the Movement Strategy recommendations.[5] This collaboratively drafted document underwent significant community review in September and October and is currently under review by the Board. We will next be launching a second phase of that work in January, meant to result in enforcement pathways that will make our projects safe spaces for all volunteers.
Following the LGBT+ User Group meeting, we are also building into our plans facilitated support for the LGBT+ User Group and other Wikimedia affiliate organizations focused on marginalized communities to come together to discuss better mechanisms for supporting volunteers who are targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, ethnicity or other identify factors. We expect to solidify plans and launch conversations in January and will be putting out information on how to participate.
In addition, we see the urgency and the opportunity to do more to address the needs of the LGBT+ User Group and others. The Foundation’s Community Resilience & Sustainability function will be connecting more closely with the LGBT+ User Group going forward to ensure that the Foundation’s staff better understand the needs of this community, especially but not solely in our professional Trust & Safety work.
We are committed to supporting volunteers in participating safely in our movement and want to be sure that we do not, through lack of understanding, ourselves do harm. This includes:
adopting and disseminating to staff best-practice terminology when conducting community surveys,
ensuring that volunteers have easier access to existing reporting structures now, even as we build other enforcement pathways in the UCoC,
being vigilant that incidents where individuals are targeted for identity factors are properly recognized and addressed in our Trust & Safety systems, and
exploring peer support options.
I thank the members of the user group for inviting us to join them. I’m excited and energized by that conversation and looking forward to finding ways to improve. I hope others in the community will join in the publicly hosted UCoC discussions starting early in the new year to improve the safety of all community members. It will help to ensure that volunteers across the movement, and in all movement spaces online and off, have an opportunity to contribute safely. People should feel welcomed to contribute to our collective and important mission of delivering the sum of all knowledge to everyone.
Warm regards,
Maggie Dennis
P.S. This statement is also on Meta, at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability/2020..., where translation is being enabled today. If you are interested in helping translate, please do!
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT%2B/Portal
[3] I’m borrowing the language of the UN, here: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Pla... .
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review
-- Maggie Dennis Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
I prefer to let WMF sort this one out. Whether you are correct or not, my block has an intolerable odour about it. Will someone please open a window?
--- New Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail replacement - get it here: https://www.oeclassic.com/
----- Original Message ----- From: Risker risker.wp@gmail.com Reply-To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: 09/12/2020 01:06:18 Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Foundation commitment of support for LGBT+ volunteers
I'm sorry that you've chosen to hijack this thread, Rodhullandemu. Nonetheless, I will point out that it was *me* who indefinitely blocked you in the middle of an arbitration case, for reasons that didn't actually have anything to do with the case, and for edits that met the requirements for suppression. Those edits were also reported to the predecessor of the Trust & Safety department at the time. There was also nothing to do with Usenet - it was your own words that resulted in your block. I hope that the circumstances that led to your block have improved significantly since that time. Your block remains appealable to the current Arbitration Committee, and I am certain neither I nor Roger Davies (who subsequently reblocked you to remove email access) would object to the block being reviewed.
Returning to the key subject of this thread, I thank Trust & Safety for making a statement, and also thank our colleagues for arranging translations into other languages.
Risker/Anne
On Tue, 8 Dec 2020 at 19:07, Phil Nash via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Great news. Vulnerable contributors to Wikimedia projects should be owed a duty of care, not least because they make good, well-informed contributions, but also that those projects should not become the preserve of a socially and politically advantaged elite.
However, what he have here is only much less than half of the story. Those who are falsely accused of unacceptable, maybe criminal behaviour, when there is a significant lack of evidence to support that, have little or no comeback. Minds seem to be irretrievably poisoned against you.
I make no secret of the fact that I am User:Rodhullandemu on multiple Wikimedia projects. I was blocked or banned (it's not been made clear) on en:WP in 2011 on the basis of some fake Usenet posts that Roger Davies found, and for some reason gave credence to, despite the policy [[:en:WP:Usenet]]. There is no pretending that this is not the case, given
--- New Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail replacement - get it here: https://www.oeclassic.com/
the entry in my block log on en:WP. As an experienced user on Wikipedia, I know exactly what "Refer all enquiries to Arbitration Committee" means. It's a code which everybody understands, and as it stands, is a defamatory libel as an innuendo.
I have asked Roger to copy those Usenet posts to me, compete with headers. I have no doubt that he will be unable, or will refuse, to do so.
Meanwhile, I cannot trust ArbCom to understand their role in relation to due processs and the rules of natural justice, given the recent input into my desysop on Commons from two sitting arbs, one of whom was such in 2011, and one of their clerks. So I can't ask them to unblock me. They are irretrievably poisoned.
Meanwhile, WMF T&S refused to do anything to intervene when someone misguidedly complained about me to them. Shameful, as I said at the time. I deserve at least as much as those who are against me. Jimbo Wales's decision on my appeal against my block missed the point completely. He suggested that I shoud prove myself sane. That's both impossible and ridiculous, and mentioned in my RFA on Commons.
Time, perhaps, for the WMF to get its act together and say to people "That was the wrong thing to do, and we have no hesitation in correcting it". Fortunately I am no longer alone; I have people interested in exposing the arbitrariness of arbitration.
Phil Nash/Rodhullandemu
----- Original Message ----- From: Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org Reply-To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: 08/12/2020 15:24:15 Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Foundation commitment of support for LGBT+ volunteers
Hello.
My name is Maggie Dennis. I’m the Vice President of Community Resilience and Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation.[1] I oversee the Foundation’s Trust and Safety teams (operations and policy), the Community Development team, and the upcoming Foundation Human Rights lead.
On December 2nd, I met with representatives of the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group along with several Trust and Safety personnel, including Global Head Jan Eißfeldt, to understand some of the challenges faced by the members of the group as volunteers in our international movement.[2] It is apparent that many volunteers openly identifying as LGBTQIA+ are targeted and attacked for their identities, with transgender, non-binary, queer, and queer feminist editors in particular at higher risk for such abuse. The members of the group who met with us voiced concerns about the safety and wellbeing of other marginalized communities and groups as well.
In my role, and speaking for the Foundation, I am writing today to restate, reinforce, and firmly assert our commitment to supporting the LGBTQIA+ volunteers in our movement, as well as others who face exclusion and hostility on the basis of identity factors.[3]
The Wikimedia movement is based on the value of inclusivity, that anyone may play a part in not only receiving but curating and sharing knowledge. What volunteers have been able to accomplish in Wikimedia projects is extraordinary, but the movement will never reach its full potential if we do not close the diversity gap which our communities defined so ably in the Movement Strategy process.[4] There continue to be barriers in our movement for LGBTQIA+, women, indigenous communities, and other underrepresented groups. We as a movement have been called upon by a broad and diverse group of our own movement members to promote inclusivity and reduce harms to our participants.
In light of this, one of my teams has been directed by the Board of Trustees to (among other requests) facilitate the drafting of the Universal Code of Conduct called for in the Movement Strategy recommendations.[5] This collaboratively drafted document underwent significant community review in September and October and is currently under review by the Board. We will next be launching a second phase of that work in January, meant to result in enforcement pathways that will make our projects safe spaces for all volunteers.
Following the LGBT+ User Group meeting, we are also building into our plans facilitated support for the LGBT+ User Group and other Wikimedia affiliate organizations focused on marginalized communities to come together to discuss better mechanisms for supporting volunteers who are targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, ethnicity or other identify factors. We expect to solidify plans and launch conversations in January and will be putting out information on how to participate.
In addition, we see the urgency and the opportunity to do more to address the needs of the LGBT+ User Group and others. The Foundation’s Community Resilience & Sustainability function will be connecting more closely with the LGBT+ User Group going forward to ensure that the Foundation’s staff better understand the needs of this community, especially but not solely in our professional Trust & Safety work.
We are committed to supporting volunteers in participating safely in our movement and want to be sure that we do not, through lack of understanding, ourselves do harm. This includes: adopting and disseminating to staff best-practice terminology when conducting community surveys, ensuring that volunteers have easier access to existing reporting structures now, even as we build other enforcement pathways in the UCoC, being vigilant that incidents where individuals are targeted for identity factors are properly recognized and addressed in our Trust & Safety systems, and exploring peer support options.
I thank the members of the user group for inviting us to join them. I’m excited and energized by that conversation and looking forward to finding ways to improve. I hope others in the community will join in the publicly hosted UCoC discussions starting early in the new year to improve the safety of all community members. It will help to ensure that volunteers across the movement, and in all movement spaces online and off, have an opportunity to contribute safely. People should feel welcomed to contribute to our collective and important mission of delivering the sum of all knowledge to everyone.
Warm regards, Maggie Dennis
P.S. This statement is also on Meta, at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability/2020..., where translation is being enabled today. If you are interested in helping translate, please do!
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT%2B/Portal [3] I’m borrowing the language of the UN, here: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Pla.... [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018- 20/Recommendations/Provide_for_Safety_and_Inclusion [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review
Hello Phil,
It would be optimal if you did not continue to use this thread in an attempt to draw attention to your block. Were someone to open your list of contributions on the English Wikipedia, they would find a bunch of suppressed edits, some on arbcom pages, and a block placed referring people to arbcom. Nothing remotely abnormal about that.
And regarding letting the “WMF sort this one out”, the WMF is not in the business of handling individual local block appeals, at least not yet. Community processes exist to handle such appeals, and in continuing to hijack an otherwise constructive mailing list thread you make the chances of appeal, if they ever existed in the first place, diminish. If you believe the WMF should take action on your case, for whatever reason, the avenue to pursue that is not Wikimedia-l, and I request you cease utilizing this thread for your own purposes unrelated to this thread’s subject.
Regards, Vermont
On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 01:46 Phil Nash via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
I prefer to let WMF sort this one out. Whether you are correct or not, my block has an intolerable odour about it. Will someone please open a window?
New Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail replacement - get it here: https://www.oeclassic.com/
*----- Original Message -----* *From:* Risker risker.wp@gmail.com *Reply-To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Sent:* 09/12/2020 01:06:18 *Subject:* Re: [Wikimedia-l] Foundation commitment of support for LGBT+ volunteers
I'm sorry that you've chosen to hijack this thread, Rodhullandemu. Nonetheless, I will point out that it was *me* who indefinitely blocked you in the middle of an arbitration case, for reasons that didn't actually have anything to do with the case, and for edits that met the requirements for suppression. Those edits were also reported to the predecessor of the Trust & Safety department at the time. There was also nothing to do with Usenet - it was your own words that resulted in your block. I hope that the circumstances that led to your block have improved significantly since that time. Your block remains appealable to the current Arbitration Committee, and I am certain neither I nor Roger Davies (who subsequently reblocked you to remove email access) would object to the block being reviewed.
Returning to the key subject of this thread, I thank Trust & Safety for making a statement, and also thank our colleagues for arranging translations into other languages.
Risker/Anne
On Tue, 8 Dec 2020 at 19:07, Phil Nash via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Great news. Vulnerable contributors to Wikimedia projects should be owed a duty of care, not least because they make good, well-informed contributions, but also that those projects should not become the preserve of a socially and politically advantaged elite.
However, what he have here is only much less than half of the story. Those who are falsely accused of unacceptable, maybe criminal behaviour, when there is a significant lack of evidence to support that, have little or no comeback. Minds seem to be irretrievably poisoned against you.
I make no secret of the fact that I am User:Rodhullandemu on multiple Wikimedia projects. I was blocked or banned (it's not been made clear) on en:WP in 2011 on the basis of some fake Usenet posts that Roger Davies found, and for some reason gave credence to, despite the policy [[:en:WP:Usenet]]. There is no pretending that this is not the case, given
New Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail replacement - get it here: https://www.oeclassic.com/
the entry in my block log on en:WP. As an experienced user on Wikipedia, I know exactly what "Refer all enquiries to Arbitration Committee" means. It's a code which everybody understands, and as it stands, is a defamatory libel as an innuendo.
I have asked Roger to copy those Usenet posts to me, compete with headers. I have no doubt that he will be unable, or will refuse, to do so.
Meanwhile, I cannot trust ArbCom to understand their role in relation to due processs and the rules of natural justice, given the recent input into my desysop on Commons from two sitting arbs, one of whom was such in 2011, and one of their clerks. So I can't ask them to unblock me. They are irretrievably poisoned.
Meanwhile, WMF T&S refused to do anything to intervene when someone misguidedly complained about me to them. Shameful, as I said at the time. I deserve at least as much as those who are against me. Jimbo Wales's decision on my appeal against my block missed the point completely. He suggested that I shoud prove myself sane. That's both impossible and ridiculous, and mentioned in my RFA on Commons.
Time, perhaps, for the WMF to get its act together and say to people "That was the wrong thing to do, and we have no hesitation in correcting it". Fortunately I am no longer alone; I have people interested in exposing the arbitrariness of arbitration.
Phil Nash/Rodhullandemu
*----- Original Message -----* *From:* Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org *Reply-To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Sent:* 08/12/2020 15:24:15 *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Foundation commitment of support for LGBT+ volunteers
Hello.
My name is Maggie Dennis. I’m the Vice President of Community Resilience and Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation.[1] I oversee the Foundation’s Trust and Safety teams (operations and policy), the Community Development team, and the upcoming Foundation Human Rights lead.
On December 2nd, I met with representatives of the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group along with several Trust and Safety personnel, including Global Head Jan Eißfeldt, to understand some of the challenges faced by the members of the group as volunteers in our international movement.[2] It is apparent that many volunteers openly identifying as LGBTQIA+ are targeted and attacked for their identities, with transgender, non-binary, queer, and queer feminist editors in particular at higher risk for such abuse. The members of the group who met with us voiced concerns about the safety and wellbeing of other marginalized communities and groups as well.
In my role, and speaking for the Foundation, I am writing today to restate, reinforce, and firmly assert our commitment to supporting the LGBTQIA+ volunteers in our movement, as well as others who face exclusion and hostility on the basis of identity factors.[3]
The Wikimedia movement is based on the value of inclusivity, that anyone may play a part in not only receiving but curating and sharing knowledge. What volunteers have been able to accomplish in Wikimedia projects is extraordinary, but the movement will never reach its full potential if we do not close the diversity gap which our communities defined so ably in the Movement Strategy process.[4] There continue to be barriers in our movement for LGBTQIA+, women, indigenous communities, and other underrepresented groups. We as a movement have been called upon by a broad and diverse group of our own movement members to promote inclusivity and reduce harms to our participants.
In light of this, one of my teams has been directed by the Board of Trustees to (among other requests) facilitate the drafting of the Universal Code of Conduct called for in the Movement Strategy recommendations.[5] This collaboratively drafted document underwent significant community review in September and October and is currently under review by the Board. We will next be launching a second phase of that work in January, meant to result in enforcement pathways that will make our projects safe spaces for all volunteers.
Following the LGBT+ User Group meeting, we are also building into our plans facilitated support for the LGBT+ User Group and other Wikimedia affiliate organizations focused on marginalized communities to come together to discuss better mechanisms for supporting volunteers who are targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, ethnicity or other identify factors. We expect to solidify plans and launch conversations in January and will be putting out information on how to participate.
In addition, we see the urgency and the opportunity to do more to address the needs of the LGBT+ User Group and others. The Foundation’s Community Resilience & Sustainability function will be connecting more closely with the LGBT+ User Group going forward to ensure that the Foundation’s staff better understand the needs of this community, especially but not solely in our professional Trust & Safety work.
We are committed to supporting volunteers in participating safely in our movement and want to be sure that we do not, through lack of understanding, ourselves do harm. This includes:
adopting and disseminating to staff best-practice terminology when conducting community surveys,
ensuring that volunteers have easier access to existing reporting structures now, even as we build other enforcement pathways in the UCoC,
being vigilant that incidents where individuals are targeted for identity factors are properly recognized and addressed in our Trust & Safety systems, and
exploring peer support options.
I thank the members of the user group for inviting us to join them. I’m excited and energized by that conversation and looking forward to finding ways to improve. I hope others in the community will join in the publicly hosted UCoC discussions starting early in the new year to improve the safety of all community members. It will help to ensure that volunteers across the movement, and in all movement spaces online and off, have an opportunity to contribute safely. People should feel welcomed to contribute to our collective and important mission of delivering the sum of all knowledge to everyone.
Warm regards,
Maggie Dennis
P.S. This statement is also on Meta, at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability/2020..., where translation is being enabled today. If you are interested in helping translate, please do!
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT%2B/Portal
[3] I’m borrowing the language of the UN, here: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Pla... .
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review
-- Maggie Dennis Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Hi Maggie,
Thanks for publishing this nice and clear restatement of WMF's commitment to a safe and non-hostile environment for Wikimedia LGBT+ volunteers and those of our community who are a part of minority groups that we see unfairly targeted with harassment, hounding and aggression across our projects. This positive response was impressively fast after working together to share and discuss better responses to the feedback from members of our WM-LGBT+ user group, which benefits from a highly varied global membership.
There will be many readers of this email list that have no direct experience of the problematic behaviours or the systematic "unwelcoming" environment that can be experienced across our projects by minority groups. Here are two illustrative examples that should raise an eyebrow. These samples are easy to understand and show this is not a question of folks being too "thin-skinned":
* Userboxes and user pages may include unwelcoming statements in the guise of open discrimination through to unpleasant "jokes". Many users are under the impression that user pages and user talk pages are semi-private and fair game for free speech and is tolerated even to the extent of being direct hate speech. Examples include using swastika or fascist images and claiming membership of hate groups. This is "tolerated" and some are embedded in templates used for years as well as on specific user pages. When a LGBT+ Wikimedia contributor is faced with user pages that openly and proudly are against LGBT+ people to exist or have a family life, the project in total has to be judged unsafe and hostile. Within our User Group, it is not uncommon to find LGBT+ contributors are scared to even try editing LGBT+ related topics on these Wikipedias.[1]
* Articles in multiple languages exist that promote nonsensical and defamatory race theories, such as claiming that Nenets (an ethnic group native of arctic Russia) are part of a "neo-Mongoloid" race of humans. These articles appear to deliberately misuse modern genetic research and several have relied on user-created unverifiable and anti-science "genetic maps" hosted on Commons. Some volunteers have been persistently and politely raising these many cases using local Wikipedia discussion, and externally with the WMF with the facts about these defamatory Wikipedias for over a decade. The most common experience is to be dismissed as a fringe lobbyist through to administrators warning you from continuing to try to correct these issues. There has been no systemic response to correct this damaging misinformation, and the Wikipedias the misinformation is hosted on remain corrupted with hostile and racist minority views.[2]
Links: 1. * https://fa.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D9%88%DB%8C%DA%A9%DB%8C%E2%80%8C... User interest templates, including a userbox with Hitler portrait, translates to "This user likes Adolf Hitler". * https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Matt_Paletto User page on Spanish Wikipedia which uses an anti-LGBT rainbow flag for showing they are against same-sex marriage. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Matt_Paletto Same user displays the anti-LGBT flag on the Polish Wikipedia stating they are against same-sex couples adopting children. There are at least 11 users on the Polish Wikipedia that use the anti-LGBT flag on their user pages, not as a "joke". * On the English Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Barumbarumba displays a different anti-LGBT symbol to state they are against the "LGBT movement". There are 17 users that have this symbol on their user pages across different Wikipedias.
2. * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T256115 Tracking task for systemic promotion of scientific racism, raised 6 months ago. There has been no non-volunteer action to date. * https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E3%83%A2%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B4%E3%83%AD%... Japanese Wikipedia with a "neo-Mongoloid" article.
I hope this is helpful for those not normally involved in these issues to wonder how we might better show respect and avoid defamation of minorities, whilst never having to censor our coverage of all (verifiable) human knowledge.
Cheers, Fae
Hello, I just want to mention that the userbox was created twenty days ago and is now being discussed for deletion.
On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 8:23 PM Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Maggie,
Thanks for publishing this nice and clear restatement of WMF's commitment to a safe and non-hostile environment for Wikimedia LGBT+ volunteers and those of our community who are a part of minority groups that we see unfairly targeted with harassment, hounding and aggression across our projects. This positive response was impressively fast after working together to share and discuss better responses to the feedback from members of our WM-LGBT+ user group, which benefits from a highly varied global membership.
There will be many readers of this email list that have no direct experience of the problematic behaviours or the systematic "unwelcoming" environment that can be experienced across our projects by minority groups. Here are two illustrative examples that should raise an eyebrow. These samples are easy to understand and show this is not a question of folks being too "thin-skinned":
- Userboxes and user pages may include unwelcoming statements in the
guise of open discrimination through to unpleasant "jokes". Many users are under the impression that user pages and user talk pages are semi-private and fair game for free speech and is tolerated even to the extent of being direct hate speech. Examples include using swastika or fascist images and claiming membership of hate groups. This is "tolerated" and some are embedded in templates used for years as well as on specific user pages. When a LGBT+ Wikimedia contributor is faced with user pages that openly and proudly are against LGBT+ people to exist or have a family life, the project in total has to be judged unsafe and hostile. Within our User Group, it is not uncommon to find LGBT+ contributors are scared to even try editing LGBT+ related topics on these Wikipedias.[1]
- Articles in multiple languages exist that promote nonsensical and
defamatory race theories, such as claiming that Nenets (an ethnic group native of arctic Russia) are part of a "neo-Mongoloid" race of humans. These articles appear to deliberately misuse modern genetic research and several have relied on user-created unverifiable and anti-science "genetic maps" hosted on Commons. Some volunteers have been persistently and politely raising these many cases using local Wikipedia discussion, and externally with the WMF with the facts about these defamatory Wikipedias for over a decade. The most common experience is to be dismissed as a fringe lobbyist through to administrators warning you from continuing to try to correct these issues. There has been no systemic response to correct this damaging misinformation, and the Wikipedias the misinformation is hosted on remain corrupted with hostile and racist minority views.[2]
Links:
https://fa.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D9%88%DB%8C%DA%A9%DB%8C%E2%80%8C... User interest templates, including a userbox with Hitler portrait, translates to "This user likes Adolf Hitler".
- https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Matt_Paletto User page on
Spanish Wikipedia which uses an anti-LGBT rainbow flag for showing they are against same-sex marriage. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Matt_Paletto Same user displays the anti-LGBT flag on the Polish Wikipedia stating they are against same-sex couples adopting children. There are at least 11 users on the Polish Wikipedia that use the anti-LGBT flag on their user pages, not as a "joke".
- On the English Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Barumbarumba displays a different anti-LGBT symbol to state they are against the "LGBT movement". There are 17 users that have this symbol on their user pages across different Wikipedias.
- https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T256115 Tracking task for systemic
promotion of scientific racism, raised 6 months ago. There has been no non-volunteer action to date.
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E3%83%A2%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B4%E3%83%AD%... Japanese Wikipedia with a "neo-Mongoloid" article.
I hope this is helpful for those not normally involved in these issues to wonder how we might better show respect and avoid defamation of minorities, whilst never having to censor our coverage of all (verifiable) human knowledge.
Cheers, Fae -- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group
On Tue, 8 Dec 2020 at 15:24, Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello.
My name is Maggie Dennis. I’m the Vice President of Community Resilience
and Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation.[1] I oversee the Foundation’s Trust and Safety teams (operations and policy), the Community Development team, and the upcoming Foundation Human Rights lead.
On December 2nd, I met with representatives of the Wikimedia LGBT+ User
Group along with several Trust and Safety personnel, including Global Head Jan Eißfeldt, to understand some of the challenges faced by the members of the group as volunteers in our international movement.[2] It is apparent that many volunteers openly identifying as LGBTQIA+ are targeted and attacked for their identities, with transgender, non-binary, queer, and queer feminist editors in particular at higher risk for such abuse. The members of the group who met with us voiced concerns about the safety and wellbeing of other marginalized communities and groups as well.
In my role, and speaking for the Foundation, I am writing today to
restate, reinforce, and firmly assert our commitment to supporting the LGBTQIA+ volunteers in our movement, as well as others who face exclusion and hostility on the basis of identity factors.[3]
The Wikimedia movement is based on the value of inclusivity, that anyone
may play a part in not only receiving but curating and sharing knowledge. What volunteers have been able to accomplish in Wikimedia projects is extraordinary, but the movement will never reach its full potential if we do not close the diversity gap which our communities defined so ably in the Movement Strategy process.[4] There continue to be barriers in our movement for LGBTQIA+, women, indigenous communities, and other underrepresented groups. We as a movement have been called upon by a broad and diverse group of our own movement members to promote inclusivity and reduce harms to our participants.
In light of this, one of my teams has been directed by the Board of
Trustees to (among other requests) facilitate the drafting of the Universal Code of Conduct called for in the Movement Strategy recommendations.[5] This collaboratively drafted document underwent significant community review in September and October and is currently under review by the Board. We will next be launching a second phase of that work in January, meant to result in enforcement pathways that will make our projects safe spaces for all volunteers.
Following the LGBT+ User Group meeting, we are also building into our
plans facilitated support for the LGBT+ User Group and other Wikimedia affiliate organizations focused on marginalized communities to come together to discuss better mechanisms for supporting volunteers who are targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, ethnicity or other identify factors. We expect to solidify plans and launch conversations in January and will be putting out information on how to participate.
In addition, we see the urgency and the opportunity to do more to
address the needs of the LGBT+ User Group and others. The Foundation’s Community Resilience & Sustainability function will be connecting more closely with the LGBT+ User Group going forward to ensure that the Foundation’s staff better understand the needs of this community, especially but not solely in our professional Trust & Safety work.
We are committed to supporting volunteers in participating safely in our
movement and want to be sure that we do not, through lack of understanding, ourselves do harm. This includes:
adopting and disseminating to staff best-practice terminology when
conducting community surveys,
ensuring that volunteers have easier access to existing reporting
structures now, even as we build other enforcement pathways in the UCoC,
being vigilant that incidents where individuals are targeted for
identity factors are properly recognized and addressed in our Trust & Safety systems, and
exploring peer support options.
I thank the members of the user group for inviting us to join them. I’m
excited and energized by that conversation and looking forward to finding ways to improve. I hope others in the community will join in the publicly hosted UCoC discussions starting early in the new year to improve the safety of all community members. It will help to ensure that volunteers across the movement, and in all movement spaces online and off, have an opportunity to contribute safely. People should feel welcomed to contribute to our collective and important mission of delivering the sum of all knowledge to everyone.
Warm regards,
Maggie Dennis
P.S. This statement is also on Meta, at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability/2020..., where translation is being enabled today. If you are interested in helping translate, please do!
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT%2B/Portal
[3] I’m borrowing the language of the UN, here:
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Pla... .
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen...
[5]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review
-- Maggie Dennis Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
And it got deleted, in total it lived under a month and it would have been deleted sooner if someone saw it sooner. Instead of using this as an argument to say "this wiki is totally bad" assume good faith.
On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 8:33 PM Amir Sarabadani ladsgroup@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, I just want to mention that the userbox was created twenty days ago and is now being discussed for deletion.
On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 8:23 PM Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Maggie,
Thanks for publishing this nice and clear restatement of WMF's commitment to a safe and non-hostile environment for Wikimedia LGBT+ volunteers and those of our community who are a part of minority groups that we see unfairly targeted with harassment, hounding and aggression across our projects. This positive response was impressively fast after working together to share and discuss better responses to the feedback from members of our WM-LGBT+ user group, which benefits from a highly varied global membership.
There will be many readers of this email list that have no direct experience of the problematic behaviours or the systematic "unwelcoming" environment that can be experienced across our projects by minority groups. Here are two illustrative examples that should raise an eyebrow. These samples are easy to understand and show this is not a question of folks being too "thin-skinned":
- Userboxes and user pages may include unwelcoming statements in the
guise of open discrimination through to unpleasant "jokes". Many users are under the impression that user pages and user talk pages are semi-private and fair game for free speech and is tolerated even to the extent of being direct hate speech. Examples include using swastika or fascist images and claiming membership of hate groups. This is "tolerated" and some are embedded in templates used for years as well as on specific user pages. When a LGBT+ Wikimedia contributor is faced with user pages that openly and proudly are against LGBT+ people to exist or have a family life, the project in total has to be judged unsafe and hostile. Within our User Group, it is not uncommon to find LGBT+ contributors are scared to even try editing LGBT+ related topics on these Wikipedias.[1]
- Articles in multiple languages exist that promote nonsensical and
defamatory race theories, such as claiming that Nenets (an ethnic group native of arctic Russia) are part of a "neo-Mongoloid" race of humans. These articles appear to deliberately misuse modern genetic research and several have relied on user-created unverifiable and anti-science "genetic maps" hosted on Commons. Some volunteers have been persistently and politely raising these many cases using local Wikipedia discussion, and externally with the WMF with the facts about these defamatory Wikipedias for over a decade. The most common experience is to be dismissed as a fringe lobbyist through to administrators warning you from continuing to try to correct these issues. There has been no systemic response to correct this damaging misinformation, and the Wikipedias the misinformation is hosted on remain corrupted with hostile and racist minority views.[2]
Links:
https://fa.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D9%88%DB%8C%DA%A9%DB%8C%E2%80%8C... User interest templates, including a userbox with Hitler portrait, translates to "This user likes Adolf Hitler".
- https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Matt_Paletto User page on
Spanish Wikipedia which uses an anti-LGBT rainbow flag for showing they are against same-sex marriage. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Matt_Paletto Same user displays the anti-LGBT flag on the Polish Wikipedia stating they are against same-sex couples adopting children. There are at least 11 users on the Polish Wikipedia that use the anti-LGBT flag on their user pages, not as a "joke".
- On the English Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Barumbarumba displays a different anti-LGBT symbol to state they are against the "LGBT movement". There are 17 users that have this symbol on their user pages across different Wikipedias.
- https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T256115 Tracking task for systemic
promotion of scientific racism, raised 6 months ago. There has been no non-volunteer action to date.
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E3%83%A2%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B4%E3%83%AD%... Japanese Wikipedia with a "neo-Mongoloid" article.
I hope this is helpful for those not normally involved in these issues to wonder how we might better show respect and avoid defamation of minorities, whilst never having to censor our coverage of all (verifiable) human knowledge.
Cheers, Fae -- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group
On Tue, 8 Dec 2020 at 15:24, Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello.
My name is Maggie Dennis. I’m the Vice President of Community
Resilience and Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation.[1] I oversee the Foundation’s Trust and Safety teams (operations and policy), the Community Development team, and the upcoming Foundation Human Rights lead.
On December 2nd, I met with representatives of the Wikimedia LGBT+ User
Group along with several Trust and Safety personnel, including Global Head Jan Eißfeldt, to understand some of the challenges faced by the members of the group as volunteers in our international movement.[2] It is apparent that many volunteers openly identifying as LGBTQIA+ are targeted and attacked for their identities, with transgender, non-binary, queer, and queer feminist editors in particular at higher risk for such abuse. The members of the group who met with us voiced concerns about the safety and wellbeing of other marginalized communities and groups as well.
In my role, and speaking for the Foundation, I am writing today to
restate, reinforce, and firmly assert our commitment to supporting the LGBTQIA+ volunteers in our movement, as well as others who face exclusion and hostility on the basis of identity factors.[3]
The Wikimedia movement is based on the value of inclusivity, that
anyone may play a part in not only receiving but curating and sharing knowledge. What volunteers have been able to accomplish in Wikimedia projects is extraordinary, but the movement will never reach its full potential if we do not close the diversity gap which our communities defined so ably in the Movement Strategy process.[4] There continue to be barriers in our movement for LGBTQIA+, women, indigenous communities, and other underrepresented groups. We as a movement have been called upon by a broad and diverse group of our own movement members to promote inclusivity and reduce harms to our participants.
In light of this, one of my teams has been directed by the Board of
Trustees to (among other requests) facilitate the drafting of the Universal Code of Conduct called for in the Movement Strategy recommendations.[5] This collaboratively drafted document underwent significant community review in September and October and is currently under review by the Board. We will next be launching a second phase of that work in January, meant to result in enforcement pathways that will make our projects safe spaces for all volunteers.
Following the LGBT+ User Group meeting, we are also building into our
plans facilitated support for the LGBT+ User Group and other Wikimedia affiliate organizations focused on marginalized communities to come together to discuss better mechanisms for supporting volunteers who are targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, ethnicity or other identify factors. We expect to solidify plans and launch conversations in January and will be putting out information on how to participate.
In addition, we see the urgency and the opportunity to do more to
address the needs of the LGBT+ User Group and others. The Foundation’s Community Resilience & Sustainability function will be connecting more closely with the LGBT+ User Group going forward to ensure that the Foundation’s staff better understand the needs of this community, especially but not solely in our professional Trust & Safety work.
We are committed to supporting volunteers in participating safely in
our movement and want to be sure that we do not, through lack of understanding, ourselves do harm. This includes:
adopting and disseminating to staff best-practice terminology when
conducting community surveys,
ensuring that volunteers have easier access to existing reporting
structures now, even as we build other enforcement pathways in the UCoC,
being vigilant that incidents where individuals are targeted for
identity factors are properly recognized and addressed in our Trust & Safety systems, and
exploring peer support options.
I thank the members of the user group for inviting us to join them. I’m
excited and energized by that conversation and looking forward to finding ways to improve. I hope others in the community will join in the publicly hosted UCoC discussions starting early in the new year to improve the safety of all community members. It will help to ensure that volunteers across the movement, and in all movement spaces online and off, have an opportunity to contribute safely. People should feel welcomed to contribute to our collective and important mission of delivering the sum of all knowledge to everyone.
Warm regards,
Maggie Dennis
P.S. This statement is also on Meta, at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability/2020..., where translation is being enabled today. If you are interested in helping translate, please do!
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT%2B/Portal
[3] I’m borrowing the language of the UN, here:
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Pla... .
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen...
[5]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review
-- Maggie Dennis Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Amir (he/him)
user or userbox got deleted? if it was only userbox gone... ...anyway. think assuming good faith is not easy when you have to report these things often and hope that those in power take action. croatian wikipedia still has pro-nazi admin (one is banned finnaly after 7years) and at least 3 maybe 5 on spectrum from right-wing nationalist to clerical-conservatives (that is majority)
hope you all have a good weekend! (love that meetings are not as dense)
On Fri, 18 Dec 2020 at 18:29, Amir Sarabadani ladsgroup@gmail.com wrote:
And it got deleted, in total it lived under a month and it would have been deleted sooner if someone saw it sooner. Instead of using this as an argument to say "this wiki is totally bad" assume good faith.
On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 8:33 PM Amir Sarabadani ladsgroup@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, I just want to mention that the userbox was created twenty days ago and is now being discussed for deletion.
On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 8:23 PM Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Maggie,
Thanks for publishing this nice and clear restatement of WMF's commitment to a safe and non-hostile environment for Wikimedia LGBT+ volunteers and those of our community who are a part of minority groups that we see unfairly targeted with harassment, hounding and aggression across our projects. This positive response was impressively fast after working together to share and discuss better responses to the feedback from members of our WM-LGBT+ user group, which benefits from a highly varied global membership.
There will be many readers of this email list that have no direct experience of the problematic behaviours or the systematic "unwelcoming" environment that can be experienced across our projects by minority groups. Here are two illustrative examples that should raise an eyebrow. These samples are easy to understand and show this is not a question of folks being too "thin-skinned":
- Userboxes and user pages may include unwelcoming statements in the
guise of open discrimination through to unpleasant "jokes". Many users are under the impression that user pages and user talk pages are semi-private and fair game for free speech and is tolerated even to the extent of being direct hate speech. Examples include using swastika or fascist images and claiming membership of hate groups. This is "tolerated" and some are embedded in templates used for years as well as on specific user pages. When a LGBT+ Wikimedia contributor is faced with user pages that openly and proudly are against LGBT+ people to exist or have a family life, the project in total has to be judged unsafe and hostile. Within our User Group, it is not uncommon to find LGBT+ contributors are scared to even try editing LGBT+ related topics on these Wikipedias.[1]
- Articles in multiple languages exist that promote nonsensical and
defamatory race theories, such as claiming that Nenets (an ethnic group native of arctic Russia) are part of a "neo-Mongoloid" race of humans. These articles appear to deliberately misuse modern genetic research and several have relied on user-created unverifiable and anti-science "genetic maps" hosted on Commons. Some volunteers have been persistently and politely raising these many cases using local Wikipedia discussion, and externally with the WMF with the facts about these defamatory Wikipedias for over a decade. The most common experience is to be dismissed as a fringe lobbyist through to administrators warning you from continuing to try to correct these issues. There has been no systemic response to correct this damaging misinformation, and the Wikipedias the misinformation is hosted on remain corrupted with hostile and racist minority views.[2]
Links:
https://fa.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D9%88%DB%8C%DA%A9%DB%8C%E2%80%8C... User interest templates, including a userbox with Hitler portrait, translates to "This user likes Adolf Hitler".
- https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Matt_Paletto User page on
Spanish Wikipedia which uses an anti-LGBT rainbow flag for showing they are against same-sex marriage. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Matt_Paletto Same user displays the anti-LGBT flag on the Polish Wikipedia stating they are against same-sex couples adopting children. There are at least 11 users on the Polish Wikipedia that use the anti-LGBT flag on their user pages, not as a "joke".
- On the English Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Barumbarumba displays a different anti-LGBT symbol to state they are against the "LGBT movement". There are 17 users that have this symbol on their user pages across different Wikipedias.
- https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T256115 Tracking task for systemic
promotion of scientific racism, raised 6 months ago. There has been no non-volunteer action to date.
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E3%83%A2%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B4%E3%83%AD%... Japanese Wikipedia with a "neo-Mongoloid" article.
I hope this is helpful for those not normally involved in these issues to wonder how we might better show respect and avoid defamation of minorities, whilst never having to censor our coverage of all (verifiable) human knowledge.
Cheers, Fae -- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group
On Tue, 8 Dec 2020 at 15:24, Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello.
My name is Maggie Dennis. I’m the Vice President of Community
Resilience and Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation.[1] I oversee the Foundation’s Trust and Safety teams (operations and policy), the Community Development team, and the upcoming Foundation Human Rights lead.
On December 2nd, I met with representatives of the Wikimedia LGBT+
User Group along with several Trust and Safety personnel, including Global Head Jan Eißfeldt, to understand some of the challenges faced by the members of the group as volunteers in our international movement.[2] It is apparent that many volunteers openly identifying as LGBTQIA+ are targeted and attacked for their identities, with transgender, non-binary, queer, and queer feminist editors in particular at higher risk for such abuse. The members of the group who met with us voiced concerns about the safety and wellbeing of other marginalized communities and groups as well.
In my role, and speaking for the Foundation, I am writing today to
restate, reinforce, and firmly assert our commitment to supporting the LGBTQIA+ volunteers in our movement, as well as others who face exclusion and hostility on the basis of identity factors.[3]
The Wikimedia movement is based on the value of inclusivity, that
anyone may play a part in not only receiving but curating and sharing knowledge. What volunteers have been able to accomplish in Wikimedia projects is extraordinary, but the movement will never reach its full potential if we do not close the diversity gap which our communities defined so ably in the Movement Strategy process.[4] There continue to be barriers in our movement for LGBTQIA+, women, indigenous communities, and other underrepresented groups. We as a movement have been called upon by a broad and diverse group of our own movement members to promote inclusivity and reduce harms to our participants.
In light of this, one of my teams has been directed by the Board of
Trustees to (among other requests) facilitate the drafting of the Universal Code of Conduct called for in the Movement Strategy recommendations.[5] This collaboratively drafted document underwent significant community review in September and October and is currently under review by the Board. We will next be launching a second phase of that work in January, meant to result in enforcement pathways that will make our projects safe spaces for all volunteers.
Following the LGBT+ User Group meeting, we are also building into our
plans facilitated support for the LGBT+ User Group and other Wikimedia affiliate organizations focused on marginalized communities to come together to discuss better mechanisms for supporting volunteers who are targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, ethnicity or other identify factors. We expect to solidify plans and launch conversations in January and will be putting out information on how to participate.
In addition, we see the urgency and the opportunity to do more to
address the needs of the LGBT+ User Group and others. The Foundation’s Community Resilience & Sustainability function will be connecting more closely with the LGBT+ User Group going forward to ensure that the Foundation’s staff better understand the needs of this community, especially but not solely in our professional Trust & Safety work.
We are committed to supporting volunteers in participating safely in
our movement and want to be sure that we do not, through lack of understanding, ourselves do harm. This includes:
adopting and disseminating to staff best-practice terminology when
conducting community surveys,
ensuring that volunteers have easier access to existing reporting
structures now, even as we build other enforcement pathways in the UCoC,
being vigilant that incidents where individuals are targeted for
identity factors are properly recognized and addressed in our Trust & Safety systems, and
exploring peer support options.
I thank the members of the user group for inviting us to join them.
I’m excited and energized by that conversation and looking forward to finding ways to improve. I hope others in the community will join in the publicly hosted UCoC discussions starting early in the new year to improve the safety of all community members. It will help to ensure that volunteers across the movement, and in all movement spaces online and off, have an opportunity to contribute safely. People should feel welcomed to contribute to our collective and important mission of delivering the sum of all knowledge to everyone.
Warm regards,
Maggie Dennis
P.S. This statement is also on Meta, at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability/2020..., where translation is being enabled today. If you are interested in helping translate, please do!
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT%2B/Portal
[3] I’m borrowing the language of the UN, here:
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Pla... .
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen...
[5]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review
-- Maggie Dennis Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Amir (he/him)
-- Amir (he/him)
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Pages that include "this user likes Hitler" with a portrait of Hitler, pages which proudly declare that users are against LGBT+ rights, the existence of LGBT+ people or the rights of LGBT+ people to have children, do not require anyone to "assume good faith". Those are disturbing and hateful things to publish on any web site, and WMF projects are being misused to host them.
Painting this in such a way that whistle-blowers should not highlight these cases because the complainant looks like they are saying "this wiki is totally bad" misses the point entirely. Claiming that the problem is solved once a userbox is deleted, but no other action was taken by local administrators, or the WMF Office, is sticking a plaster on a broken leg.
The facts are that 28 user accounts were mentioned in this email thread that actively misuse their user pages. Nothing has happened from the perspective of those accounts, and they probably firmly believe they have done nothing wrong. Local editors should be worried that their project remains a hostile environment.
By the way, the "Hitler userbox" was never a userbox. It's still on display, so I'm unsure what actions you refer to.
Thanks, Fae
The list of userboxes was cached and just needed a null edit. The TfD is here: https://w.wiki/r9U
There is no AGF for a user that identifies as a Nazi, the AGF is about the whole wiki. In other words, you can't just say a wiki is hostile against LGBT+ users because someone somewhere in that wiki said he likes Hitler [1]. That's a strawman fallacy. As a CU, 'crat, admin and oversight of that wiki who put a huge picture of two guys kissing in his user page, I can say fawiki is in much better shape than lots of Wikis in matter of supporting LGBT+ volunteers and giving them a safe space.
[1] The weird part is that the same user has another userbox saying "This user believes in equality of rights of gay peopole" (but OTOH, if a person would be properly rational, they have not been a Nazi in the first place).
On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 7:31 PM Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Pages that include "this user likes Hitler" with a portrait of Hitler, pages which proudly declare that users are against LGBT+ rights, the existence of LGBT+ people or the rights of LGBT+ people to have children, do not require anyone to "assume good faith". Those are disturbing and hateful things to publish on any web site, and WMF projects are being misused to host them.
Painting this in such a way that whistle-blowers should not highlight these cases because the complainant looks like they are saying "this wiki is totally bad" misses the point entirely. Claiming that the problem is solved once a userbox is deleted, but no other action was taken by local administrators, or the WMF Office, is sticking a plaster on a broken leg.
The facts are that 28 user accounts were mentioned in this email thread that actively misuse their user pages. Nothing has happened from the perspective of those accounts, and they probably firmly believe they have done nothing wrong. Local editors should be worried that their project remains a hostile environment.
By the way, the "Hitler userbox" was never a userbox. It's still on display, so I'm unsure what actions you refer to.
Thanks, Fae -- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
On Fri, 18 Dec 2020 at 17:28, Amir Sarabadani ladsgroup@gmail.com wrote:
And it got deleted, in total it lived under a month and it would have
been deleted sooner if someone saw it sooner. Instead of using this as an argument to say "this wiki is totally bad" assume good faith.
On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 8:33 PM Amir Sarabadani ladsgroup@gmail.com
wrote:
Hello, I just want to mention that the userbox was created twenty days ago and
is now being discussed for deletion.
On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 8:23 PM Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Maggie,
Thanks for publishing this nice and clear restatement of WMF's commitment to a safe and non-hostile environment for Wikimedia LGBT+ volunteers and those of our community who are a part of minority groups that we see unfairly targeted with harassment, hounding and aggression across our projects. This positive response was impressively fast after working together to share and discuss better responses to the feedback from members of our WM-LGBT+ user group, which benefits from a highly varied global membership.
There will be many readers of this email list that have no direct experience of the problematic behaviours or the systematic "unwelcoming" environment that can be experienced across our projects by minority groups. Here are two illustrative examples that should raise an eyebrow. These samples are easy to understand and show this is not a question of folks being too "thin-skinned":
- Userboxes and user pages may include unwelcoming statements in the
guise of open discrimination through to unpleasant "jokes". Many users are under the impression that user pages and user talk pages are semi-private and fair game for free speech and is tolerated even to the extent of being direct hate speech. Examples include using swastika or fascist images and claiming membership of hate groups. This is "tolerated" and some are embedded in templates used for years as well as on specific user pages. When a LGBT+ Wikimedia contributor is faced with user pages that openly and proudly are against LGBT+ people to exist or have a family life, the project in total has to be judged unsafe and hostile. Within our User Group, it is not uncommon to find LGBT+ contributors are scared to even try editing LGBT+ related topics on these Wikipedias.[1]
- Articles in multiple languages exist that promote nonsensical and
defamatory race theories, such as claiming that Nenets (an ethnic group native of arctic Russia) are part of a "neo-Mongoloid" race of humans. These articles appear to deliberately misuse modern genetic research and several have relied on user-created unverifiable and anti-science "genetic maps" hosted on Commons. Some volunteers have been persistently and politely raising these many cases using local Wikipedia discussion, and externally with the WMF with the facts about these defamatory Wikipedias for over a decade. The most common experience is to be dismissed as a fringe lobbyist through to administrators warning you from continuing to try to correct these issues. There has been no systemic response to correct this damaging misinformation, and the Wikipedias the misinformation is hosted on remain corrupted with hostile and racist minority views.[2]
Links:
https://fa.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D9%88%DB%8C%DA%A9%DB%8C%E2%80%8C...
User interest templates, including a userbox with Hitler portrait, translates to "This user likes Adolf Hitler".
- https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Matt_Paletto User page on
Spanish Wikipedia which uses an anti-LGBT rainbow flag for showing they are against same-sex marriage. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Matt_Paletto Same user displays the anti-LGBT flag on the Polish Wikipedia stating they are against same-sex couples adopting children. There are at least 11 users on the Polish Wikipedia that use the anti-LGBT flag on their user pages, not as a "joke".
- On the English Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Barumbarumba displays a different anti-LGBT symbol to state they are against the "LGBT movement". There are 17 users that have this symbol on their user pages across different Wikipedias.
- https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T256115 Tracking task for systemic
promotion of scientific racism, raised 6 months ago. There has been no non-volunteer action to date.
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E3%83%A2%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B4%E3%83%AD%...
Japanese Wikipedia with a "neo-Mongoloid" article.
I hope this is helpful for those not normally involved in these issues to wonder how we might better show respect and avoid defamation of minorities, whilst never having to censor our coverage of all (verifiable) human knowledge.
Cheers, Fae -- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group
On Tue, 8 Dec 2020 at 15:24, Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Hello.
My name is Maggie Dennis. I’m the Vice President of Community
Resilience and Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation.[1] I oversee the Foundation’s Trust and Safety teams (operations and policy), the Community Development team, and the upcoming Foundation Human Rights lead.
On December 2nd, I met with representatives of the Wikimedia LGBT+
User Group along with several Trust and Safety personnel, including Global Head Jan Eißfeldt, to understand some of the challenges faced by the members of the group as volunteers in our international movement.[2] It is apparent that many volunteers openly identifying as LGBTQIA+ are targeted and attacked for their identities, with transgender, non-binary, queer, and queer feminist editors in particular at higher risk for such abuse. The members of the group who met with us voiced concerns about the safety and wellbeing of other marginalized communities and groups as well.
In my role, and speaking for the Foundation, I am writing today to
restate, reinforce, and firmly assert our commitment to supporting the LGBTQIA+ volunteers in our movement, as well as others who face exclusion and hostility on the basis of identity factors.[3]
The Wikimedia movement is based on the value of inclusivity, that
anyone may play a part in not only receiving but curating and sharing knowledge. What volunteers have been able to accomplish in Wikimedia projects is extraordinary, but the movement will never reach its full potential if we do not close the diversity gap which our communities defined so ably in the Movement Strategy process.[4] There continue to be barriers in our movement for LGBTQIA+, women, indigenous communities, and other underrepresented groups. We as a movement have been called upon by a broad and diverse group of our own movement members to promote inclusivity and reduce harms to our participants.
In light of this, one of my teams has been directed by the Board of
Trustees to (among other requests) facilitate the drafting of the Universal Code of Conduct called for in the Movement Strategy recommendations.[5] This collaboratively drafted document underwent significant community review in September and October and is currently under review by the Board. We will next be launching a second phase of that work in January, meant to result in enforcement pathways that will make our projects safe spaces for all volunteers.
Following the LGBT+ User Group meeting, we are also building into
our plans facilitated support for the LGBT+ User Group and other Wikimedia affiliate organizations focused on marginalized communities to come together to discuss better mechanisms for supporting volunteers who are targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, ethnicity or other identify factors. We expect to solidify plans and launch conversations in January and will be putting out information on how to participate.
In addition, we see the urgency and the opportunity to do more to
address the needs of the LGBT+ User Group and others. The Foundation’s Community Resilience & Sustainability function will be connecting more closely with the LGBT+ User Group going forward to ensure that the Foundation’s staff better understand the needs of this community, especially but not solely in our professional Trust & Safety work.
We are committed to supporting volunteers in participating safely in
our movement and want to be sure that we do not, through lack of understanding, ourselves do harm. This includes:
adopting and disseminating to staff best-practice terminology when
conducting community surveys,
ensuring that volunteers have easier access to existing reporting
structures now, even as we build other enforcement pathways in the UCoC,
being vigilant that incidents where individuals are targeted for
identity factors are properly recognized and addressed in our Trust & Safety systems, and
exploring peer support options.
I thank the members of the user group for inviting us to join them.
I’m excited and energized by that conversation and looking forward to finding ways to improve. I hope others in the community will join in the publicly hosted UCoC discussions starting early in the new year to improve the safety of all community members. It will help to ensure that volunteers across the movement, and in all movement spaces online and off, have an opportunity to contribute safely. People should feel welcomed to contribute to our collective and important mission of delivering the sum of all knowledge to everyone.
Warm regards,
Maggie Dennis
P.S. This statement is also on Meta, at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability/2020..., where translation is being enabled today. If you are interested in helping translate, please do!
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT%2B/Portal
[3] I’m borrowing the language of the UN, here:
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Pla... .
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen...
[5]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review
-- Maggie Dennis Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
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