Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
-
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world. -
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4] -
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so. -
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5] -
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4] https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
Thanks Anasuya. +1 to all of this!
For the backlog of specific change proposals like this that have been made and not yet addressed/rebutted or implemented: how should these be sorted? (Ditto for the possibility of implied revisions in the recent announcement)
Perhaps we could use more parallel drafts in order to compare specific revisions.
🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Fri., Apr. 8, 2022, 1:38 p.m. Anasuya Sengupta, < anasuya@whoseknowledge.org> wrote:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4] https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
-- *Anasuya Sengupta* +44 7367 868585 *Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us all* http://whoseknowledge.org *We just launched the first ever State of the Internet's Languages report http://internetlanguages.org!*
*There can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.* *(bell hooks)*
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Hello Anasuya,
Thank you for your insightful post. Just for clarification: do you agree that insults based on "race" (social construct) should be prohibited in general? And I mean, regardless of the "race" in question?
And do you propose an alternative wording or do you just want to see the whole part (that you quoted) removed? I mean, in order to prohibit insults or vilifications based on "race" or "ethnicity".
Kind regards Ziko
Am Fr., 8. Apr. 2022 um 19:38 Uhr schrieb Anasuya Sengupta anasuya@whoseknowledge.org:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4] https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
-- Anasuya Sengupta +44 7367 868585 Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us all http://whoseknowledge.org We just launched the first ever State of the Internet's Languages report! There can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. (bell hooks)
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Hello, Anasuya and Whose Knowledge.
(Context for those who don’t know me: I am the Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability, and among others I oversee the team shepherding the UCoC process.)
Thank you very much for raising this issue. Foundation staff have been discussing this as well with the same points that you have raised, and it is something we’ve been thinking about how to address.
As probably many of you know, the plan all along had been to get the UCoC policy, to get the enforcement approach, and then to see how they work together in operation. Our plan has been to review the policy and enforcement approach together a year after the ratification of Phase 2. However, we decided to prioritize a slower approach to Phase 2 to make sure it was functional out the gate especially for the functionaries and volunteers who enforce it, as a result of which the timeline we had imagined for Policy review has been considerably pushed back. If we had made our preliminary time plan, we would have started testing these out months ago. The Policy and Enforcement Guidelines would have been ripe for review sometime around November 2022.
As you all know, the vote has just concluded on the UCoC Phase 2. In the vote, community members were asked if they supported it as written or not, with the ability to provide feedback either way - with the notion that the feedback would help us focus on major blockers to the enforcement approach. I have already spoken to several members of the Board about some of the concerns that have been raised about the enforcement guidelines; we’ve spoken about this passage in the Policy, too. I know from my conversations with the Board that they want to get this done right, not just get it done - and they are very open to understanding these major blockers.
The project team is compiling a report for the Board on the challenging points surfaced during the vote. We think the enforcement guidelines are a very good first draft for the enforcement pathways, but–based on the comments we’ve seen–we are very aware there may be more work ahead before we reach a Board ratified version of those guidelines. As this passage in policy is not necessary to achieve the goal of the UCoC - which is to forbid harassment and attacks based on personal factors including race and ethnicity - our intention has been to recommend to the Board that the passage in question be reviewed simultaneously with any further Phase 2 enforcement workshopping, instead of waiting for the “year in operation” review intended.
I still think it makes sense to review how the enforcement guideline and policy work together to see how they are functioning once they have a trial period. But I ALSO don’t think it makes any sense to hold off on reviewing a passage from policy that community members (including some community members who are Foundation staff) strongly agree may be actively harmful just because Phase 2 is taking longer than anticipated.
I also want to say that I have spoken to some of the individuals who were involved in writing the UCoC and understand fully that the intent of the composers was to avoid any implication that racism and ethnic bias are valid. As you said, Anasuya - honest intentions. I have spoken to many individuals who have felt personally hurt and erased by the phrase in denying their lived reality. I have also spoken to others who have feared that it makes it more difficult to talk about the actual harms of racism and ethnocentrism by implying that such topics are taboo to discuss.
We ourselves are learning from all of these perspectives and concerns to ensure that people feel the representation they deserve. These conversations are hard, and I’m grateful to the people who are willing to have them and doing their best to listen and engage with empathy and respect. <3
Best regards,
Maggie
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 1:38 PM Anasuya Sengupta anasuya@whoseknowledge.org wrote:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4] https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
-- *Anasuya Sengupta* +44 7367 868585 *Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us all* http://whoseknowledge.org *We just launched the first ever State of the Internet's Languages report http://internetlanguages.org!*
*There can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.* *(bell hooks)*
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Hi everyone,
I think there's a misinterpretation here. Saying that race and ethnicity aren't meaningful distinctions among people doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist. That's a lot of negatives, but the way I see it, it's just recognizing that race is in fact a social construct, and thus because of that it isn't truly meaningful. I would suggest using *inherently *meaningful to clear up the confusion here, because I think that more clearly expresses the sentiment.
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 4:23 PM Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello, Anasuya and Whose Knowledge.
(Context for those who don’t know me: I am the Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability, and among others I oversee the team shepherding the UCoC process.)
Thank you very much for raising this issue. Foundation staff have been discussing this as well with the same points that you have raised, and it is something we’ve been thinking about how to address.
As probably many of you know, the plan all along had been to get the UCoC policy, to get the enforcement approach, and then to see how they work together in operation. Our plan has been to review the policy and enforcement approach together a year after the ratification of Phase 2. However, we decided to prioritize a slower approach to Phase 2 to make sure it was functional out the gate especially for the functionaries and volunteers who enforce it, as a result of which the timeline we had imagined for Policy review has been considerably pushed back. If we had made our preliminary time plan, we would have started testing these out months ago. The Policy and Enforcement Guidelines would have been ripe for review sometime around November 2022.
As you all know, the vote has just concluded on the UCoC Phase 2. In the vote, community members were asked if they supported it as written or not, with the ability to provide feedback either way - with the notion that the feedback would help us focus on major blockers to the enforcement approach. I have already spoken to several members of the Board about some of the concerns that have been raised about the enforcement guidelines; we’ve spoken about this passage in the Policy, too. I know from my conversations with the Board that they want to get this done right, not just get it done
- and they are very open to understanding these major blockers.
The project team is compiling a report for the Board on the challenging points surfaced during the vote. We think the enforcement guidelines are a very good first draft for the enforcement pathways, but–based on the comments we’ve seen–we are very aware there may be more work ahead before we reach a Board ratified version of those guidelines. As this passage in policy is not necessary to achieve the goal of the UCoC - which is to forbid harassment and attacks based on personal factors including race and ethnicity - our intention has been to recommend to the Board that the passage in question be reviewed simultaneously with any further Phase 2 enforcement workshopping, instead of waiting for the “year in operation” review intended.
I still think it makes sense to review how the enforcement guideline and policy work together to see how they are functioning once they have a trial period. But I ALSO don’t think it makes any sense to hold off on reviewing a passage from policy that community members (including some community members who are Foundation staff) strongly agree may be actively harmful just because Phase 2 is taking longer than anticipated.
I also want to say that I have spoken to some of the individuals who were involved in writing the UCoC and understand fully that the intent of the composers was to avoid any implication that racism and ethnic bias are valid. As you said, Anasuya - honest intentions. I have spoken to many individuals who have felt personally hurt and erased by the phrase in denying their lived reality. I have also spoken to others who have feared that it makes it more difficult to talk about the actual harms of racism and ethnocentrism by implying that such topics are taboo to discuss.
We ourselves are learning from all of these perspectives and concerns to ensure that people feel the representation they deserve. These conversations are hard, and I’m grateful to the people who are willing to have them and doing their best to listen and engage with empathy and respect. <3
Best regards,
Maggie
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 1:38 PM Anasuya Sengupta < anasuya@whoseknowledge.org> wrote:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4] https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
-- *Anasuya Sengupta* +44 7367 868585 *Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us all* http://whoseknowledge.org *We just launched the first ever State of the Internet's Languages report http://internetlanguages.org!*
*There can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.* *(bell hooks)*
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
-- Maggie Dennis She/her/hers Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
It would make the UCoC easier to understand if there was a glossary on the same page. A chosen definition of "race" or "ethnicity" being used in the context of this policy document may not be the same as exists in the reader's head, how they describe their own identity, or as might be used on their local language Wikipedia. This could then be the place to distinguish the relevance to the policy of race versus racism.
In this thread we see stated as a fact that Jews are an ethnicity but not a race, which could cause a big argument in its own right. See the "Whoopi Goldberg" incident.
Lane
On Sat, 9 Apr 2022 at 01:19, Zachary T. zach.ryan.tur@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everyone,
I think there's a misinterpretation here. Saying that race and ethnicity aren't meaningful distinctions among people doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist. That's a lot of negatives, but the way I see it, it's just recognizing that race is in fact a social construct, and thus because of that it isn't truly meaningful. I would suggest using inherently meaningful to clear up the confusion here, because I think that more clearly expresses the sentiment.
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 4:23 PM Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello, Anasuya and Whose Knowledge.
(Context for those who don’t know me: I am the Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability, and among others I oversee the team shepherding the UCoC process.)
Thank you very much for raising this issue. Foundation staff have been discussing this as well with the same points that you have raised, and it is something we’ve been thinking about how to address.
As probably many of you know, the plan all along had been to get the UCoC policy, to get the enforcement approach, and then to see how they work together in operation. Our plan has been to review the policy and enforcement approach together a year after the ratification of Phase 2. However, we decided to prioritize a slower approach to Phase 2 to make sure it was functional out the gate especially for the functionaries and volunteers who enforce it, as a result of which the timeline we had imagined for Policy review has been considerably pushed back. If we had made our preliminary time plan, we would have started testing these out months ago. The Policy and Enforcement Guidelines would have been ripe for review sometime around November 2022.
As you all know, the vote has just concluded on the UCoC Phase 2. In the vote, community members were asked if they supported it as written or not, with the ability to provide feedback either way - with the notion that the feedback would help us focus on major blockers to the enforcement approach. I have already spoken to several members of the Board about some of the concerns that have been raised about the enforcement guidelines; we’ve spoken about this passage in the Policy, too. I know from my conversations with the Board that they want to get this done right, not just get it done - and they are very open to understanding these major blockers.
The project team is compiling a report for the Board on the challenging points surfaced during the vote. We think the enforcement guidelines are a very good first draft for the enforcement pathways, but–based on the comments we’ve seen–we are very aware there may be more work ahead before we reach a Board ratified version of those guidelines. As this passage in policy is not necessary to achieve the goal of the UCoC - which is to forbid harassment and attacks based on personal factors including race and ethnicity - our intention has been to recommend to the Board that the passage in question be reviewed simultaneously with any further Phase 2 enforcement workshopping, instead of waiting for the “year in operation” review intended.
I still think it makes sense to review how the enforcement guideline and policy work together to see how they are functioning once they have a trial period. But I ALSO don’t think it makes any sense to hold off on reviewing a passage from policy that community members (including some community members who are Foundation staff) strongly agree may be actively harmful just because Phase 2 is taking longer than anticipated.
I also want to say that I have spoken to some of the individuals who were involved in writing the UCoC and understand fully that the intent of the composers was to avoid any implication that racism and ethnic bias are valid. As you said, Anasuya - honest intentions. I have spoken to many individuals who have felt personally hurt and erased by the phrase in denying their lived reality. I have also spoken to others who have feared that it makes it more difficult to talk about the actual harms of racism and ethnocentrism by implying that such topics are taboo to discuss.
We ourselves are learning from all of these perspectives and concerns to ensure that people feel the representation they deserve. These conversations are hard, and I’m grateful to the people who are willing to have them and doing their best to listen and engage with empathy and respect. <3
Best regards,
Maggie
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 1:38 PM Anasuya Sengupta anasuya@whoseknowledge.org wrote:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4] https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
-- Anasuya Sengupta +44 7367 868585 Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us all http://whoseknowledge.org We just launched the first ever State of the Internet's Languages report! There can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. (bell hooks)
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
-- Maggie Dennis She/her/hers Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Definitions of terminology makes sense in any document that is intended as an enforceable guide to behavior. Without them, whose definition applies? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Lane Chance [mailto:zinkloss@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, April 9, 2022 11:17 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Open letter on negating race and ethnicity as "meaningful distinctions" in the UCoC
It would make the UCoC easier to understand if there was a glossary on the same page. A chosen definition of "race" or "ethnicity" being used in the context of this policy document may not be the same as exists in the reader's head, how they describe their own identity, or as might be used on their local language Wikipedia. This could then be the place to distinguish the relevance to the policy of race versus racism.
In this thread we see stated as a fact that Jews are an ethnicity but not a race, which could cause a big argument in its own right. See the "Whoopi Goldberg" incident.
Lane
On Sat, 9 Apr 2022 at 01:19, Zachary T. zach.ryan.tur@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everyone,
I think there's a misinterpretation here. Saying that race and ethnicity aren't meaningful distinctions among people doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist. That's a lot of negatives, but the way I see it, it's just recognizing that race is in fact a social construct, and thus because of that it isn't truly meaningful. I would suggest using inherently meaningful to clear up the confusion here, because I think that more clearly expresses the sentiment.
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 4:23 PM Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello, Anasuya and Whose Knowledge.
(Context for those who don’t know me: I am the Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability, and among others I oversee the team shepherding the UCoC process.)
Thank you very much for raising this issue. Foundation staff have been discussing this as well with the same points that you have raised, and it is something we’ve been thinking about how to address.
As probably many of you know, the plan all along had been to get the UCoC policy, to get the enforcement approach, and then to see how they work together in operation. Our plan has been to review the policy and enforcement approach together a year after the ratification of Phase 2. However, we decided to prioritize a slower approach to Phase 2 to make sure it was functional out the gate especially for the functionaries and volunteers who enforce it, as a result of which the timeline we had imagined for Policy review has been considerably pushed back. If we had made our preliminary time plan, we would have started testing these out months ago. The Policy and Enforcement Guidelines would have been ripe for review sometime around November 2022.
As you all know, the vote has just concluded on the UCoC Phase 2. In the vote, community members were asked if they supported it as written or not, with the ability to provide feedback either way - with the notion that the feedback would help us focus on major blockers to the enforcement approach. I have already spoken to several members of the Board about some of the concerns that have been raised about the enforcement guidelines; we’ve spoken about this passage in the Policy, too. I know from my conversations with the Board that they want to get this done right, not just get it done - and they are very open to understanding these major blockers.
The project team is compiling a report for the Board on the challenging points surfaced during the vote. We think the enforcement guidelines are a very good first draft for the enforcement pathways, but–based on the comments we’ve seen–we are very aware there may be more work ahead before we reach a Board ratified version of those guidelines. As this passage in policy is not necessary to achieve the goal of the UCoC - which is to forbid harassment and attacks based on personal factors including race and ethnicity - our intention has been to recommend to the Board that the passage in question be reviewed simultaneously with any further Phase 2 enforcement workshopping, instead of waiting for the “year in operation” review intended.
I still think it makes sense to review how the enforcement guideline and policy work together to see how they are functioning once they have a trial period. But I ALSO don’t think it makes any sense to hold off on reviewing a passage from policy that community members (including some community members who are Foundation staff) strongly agree may be actively harmful just because Phase 2 is taking longer than anticipated.
I also want to say that I have spoken to some of the individuals who were involved in writing the UCoC and understand fully that the intent of the composers was to avoid any implication that racism and ethnic bias are valid. As you said, Anasuya - honest intentions. I have spoken to many individuals who have felt personally hurt and erased by the phrase in denying their lived reality. I have also spoken to others who have feared that it makes it more difficult to talk about the actual harms of racism and ethnocentrism by implying that such topics are taboo to discuss.
We ourselves are learning from all of these perspectives and concerns to ensure that people feel the representation they deserve. These conversations are hard, and I’m grateful to the people who are willing to have them and doing their best to listen and engage with empathy and respect. <3
Best regards,
Maggie
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 1:38 PM Anasuya Sengupta anasuya@whoseknowledge.org wrote:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4] https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
-- Anasuya Sengupta +44 7367 868585 Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us all http://whoseknowledge.org We just launched the first ever State of the Internet's Languages report! There can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. (bell hooks)
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
-- Maggie Dennis She/her/hers Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
It's almost as if ratifying an incomplete document based on vague framework and future changes is a terrible idea.
That this is coming up now is not the least bit surprising. It was brought up, along with many things, during one of the arbitrarily endpointed "discussion" periods that involved people in the Wiki movement asking questions and receiving next to no substantive communication from people who were writing the document. You'd have better luck asking the wishing well what it did with your penny.
Dan
On Mon, Apr 11, 2022 at 1:06 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Definitions of terminology makes sense in any document that is intended as an enforceable guide to behavior. Without them, whose definition applies? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Lane Chance [mailto:zinkloss@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, April 9, 2022 11:17 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Open letter on negating race and ethnicity as "meaningful distinctions" in the UCoC
It would make the UCoC easier to understand if there was a glossary on the same page. A chosen definition of "race" or "ethnicity" being used in the context of this policy document may not be the same as exists in the reader's head, how they describe their own identity, or as might be used on their local language Wikipedia. This could then be the place to distinguish the relevance to the policy of race versus racism.
In this thread we see stated as a fact that Jews are an ethnicity but not a race, which could cause a big argument in its own right. See the "Whoopi Goldberg" incident.
Lane
On Sat, 9 Apr 2022 at 01:19, Zachary T. zach.ryan.tur@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everyone,
I think there's a misinterpretation here. Saying that race and ethnicity
aren't meaningful distinctions among people doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist. That's a lot of negatives, but the way I see it, it's just recognizing that race is in fact a social construct, and thus because of that it isn't truly meaningful. I would suggest using inherently meaningful to clear up the confusion here, because I think that more clearly expresses the sentiment.
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 4:23 PM Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Hello, Anasuya and Whose Knowledge.
(Context for those who don’t know me: I am the Vice President of
Community Resilience & Sustainability, and among others I oversee the team shepherding the UCoC process.)
Thank you very much for raising this issue. Foundation staff have been
discussing this as well with the same points that you have raised, and it is something we’ve been thinking about how to address.
As probably many of you know, the plan all along had been to get the
UCoC policy, to get the enforcement approach, and then to see how they work together in operation. Our plan has been to review the policy and enforcement approach together a year after the ratification of Phase 2. However, we decided to prioritize a slower approach to Phase 2 to make sure it was functional out the gate especially for the functionaries and volunteers who enforce it, as a result of which the timeline we had imagined for Policy review has been considerably pushed back. If we had made our preliminary time plan, we would have started testing these out months ago. The Policy and Enforcement Guidelines would have been ripe for review sometime around November 2022.
As you all know, the vote has just concluded on the UCoC Phase 2. In
the vote, community members were asked if they supported it as written or not, with the ability to provide feedback either way - with the notion that the feedback would help us focus on major blockers to the enforcement approach. I have already spoken to several members of the Board about some of the concerns that have been raised about the enforcement guidelines; we’ve spoken about this passage in the Policy, too. I know from my conversations with the Board that they want to get this done right, not just get it done - and they are very open to understanding these major blockers.
The project team is compiling a report for the Board on the challenging
points surfaced during the vote. We think the enforcement guidelines are a very good first draft for the enforcement pathways, but–based on the comments we’ve seen–we are very aware there may be more work ahead before we reach a Board ratified version of those guidelines. As this passage in policy is not necessary to achieve the goal of the UCoC - which is to forbid harassment and attacks based on personal factors including race and ethnicity - our intention has been to recommend to the Board that the passage in question be reviewed simultaneously with any further Phase 2 enforcement workshopping, instead of waiting for the “year in operation” review intended.
I still think it makes sense to review how the enforcement guideline
and policy work together to see how they are functioning once they have a trial period. But I ALSO don’t think it makes any sense to hold off on reviewing a passage from policy that community members (including some community members who are Foundation staff) strongly agree may be actively harmful just because Phase 2 is taking longer than anticipated.
I also want to say that I have spoken to some of the individuals who
were involved in writing the UCoC and understand fully that the intent of the composers was to avoid any implication that racism and ethnic bias are valid. As you said, Anasuya - honest intentions. I have spoken to many individuals who have felt personally hurt and erased by the phrase in denying their lived reality. I have also spoken to others who have feared that it makes it more difficult to talk about the actual harms of racism and ethnocentrism by implying that such topics are taboo to discuss.
We ourselves are learning from all of these perspectives and concerns
to ensure that people feel the representation they deserve. These conversations are hard, and I’m grateful to the people who are willing to have them and doing their best to listen and engage with empathy and respect. <3
Best regards,
Maggie
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 1:38 PM Anasuya Sengupta <
anasuya@whoseknowledge.org> wrote:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as
“meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to
Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording
of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe
to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and
"ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been
refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful
distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the
ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the
movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by
individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and
recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and
intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4]
https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
-- Anasuya Sengupta +44 7367 868585 Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us all http://whoseknowledge.org We just launched the first ever State of the Internet's Languages
report!
There can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love
we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.
(bell hooks)
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org,
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Hello,
What does the incriminated sentence actually mean?
"The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people."
Does this mean that * the WM is against; or * that the WM is neutral on the topic?
And, after reading the English Wikipedia article about [[Ethnic group]] (redirect from "ethnicity"), it seems that "ethnicity" can mean many things. Personally, I am very sure, if I asked e.g. the [[Sorbs]] in Eastern Germany, that most of them are quite convinced that they form an ethnic group.
Kind regards, Ziko
Am Mo., 11. Apr. 2022 um 18:42 Uhr schrieb Dan Szymborski dszymborski@gmail.com:
It's almost as if ratifying an incomplete document based on vague framework and future changes is a terrible idea.
That this is coming up now is not the least bit surprising. It was brought up, along with many things, during one of the arbitrarily endpointed "discussion" periods that involved people in the Wiki movement asking questions and receiving next to no substantive communication from people who were writing the document. You'd have better luck asking the wishing well what it did with your penny.
Dan
On Mon, Apr 11, 2022 at 1:06 AM Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
Definitions of terminology makes sense in any document that is intended as an enforceable guide to behavior. Without them, whose definition applies? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Lane Chance [mailto:zinkloss@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, April 9, 2022 11:17 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Open letter on negating race and ethnicity as "meaningful distinctions" in the UCoC
It would make the UCoC easier to understand if there was a glossary on the same page. A chosen definition of "race" or "ethnicity" being used in the context of this policy document may not be the same as exists in the reader's head, how they describe their own identity, or as might be used on their local language Wikipedia. This could then be the place to distinguish the relevance to the policy of race versus racism.
In this thread we see stated as a fact that Jews are an ethnicity but not a race, which could cause a big argument in its own right. See the "Whoopi Goldberg" incident.
Lane
On Sat, 9 Apr 2022 at 01:19, Zachary T. zach.ryan.tur@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everyone,
I think there's a misinterpretation here. Saying that race and ethnicity aren't meaningful distinctions among people doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist. That's a lot of negatives, but the way I see it, it's just recognizing that race is in fact a social construct, and thus because of that it isn't truly meaningful. I would suggest using inherently meaningful to clear up the confusion here, because I think that more clearly expresses the sentiment.
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 4:23 PM Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello, Anasuya and Whose Knowledge.
(Context for those who don’t know me: I am the Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability, and among others I oversee the team shepherding the UCoC process.)
Thank you very much for raising this issue. Foundation staff have been discussing this as well with the same points that you have raised, and it is something we’ve been thinking about how to address.
As probably many of you know, the plan all along had been to get the UCoC policy, to get the enforcement approach, and then to see how they work together in operation. Our plan has been to review the policy and enforcement approach together a year after the ratification of Phase 2. However, we decided to prioritize a slower approach to Phase 2 to make sure it was functional out the gate especially for the functionaries and volunteers who enforce it, as a result of which the timeline we had imagined for Policy review has been considerably pushed back. If we had made our preliminary time plan, we would have started testing these out months ago. The Policy and Enforcement Guidelines would have been ripe for review sometime around November 2022.
As you all know, the vote has just concluded on the UCoC Phase 2. In the vote, community members were asked if they supported it as written or not, with the ability to provide feedback either way - with the notion that the feedback would help us focus on major blockers to the enforcement approach. I have already spoken to several members of the Board about some of the concerns that have been raised about the enforcement guidelines; we’ve spoken about this passage in the Policy, too. I know from my conversations with the Board that they want to get this done right, not just get it done - and they are very open to understanding these major blockers.
The project team is compiling a report for the Board on the challenging points surfaced during the vote. We think the enforcement guidelines are a very good first draft for the enforcement pathways, but–based on the comments we’ve seen–we are very aware there may be more work ahead before we reach a Board ratified version of those guidelines. As this passage in policy is not necessary to achieve the goal of the UCoC - which is to forbid harassment and attacks based on personal factors including race and ethnicity - our intention has been to recommend to the Board that the passage in question be reviewed simultaneously with any further Phase 2 enforcement workshopping, instead of waiting for the “year in operation” review intended.
I still think it makes sense to review how the enforcement guideline and policy work together to see how they are functioning once they have a trial period. But I ALSO don’t think it makes any sense to hold off on reviewing a passage from policy that community members (including some community members who are Foundation staff) strongly agree may be actively harmful just because Phase 2 is taking longer than anticipated.
I also want to say that I have spoken to some of the individuals who were involved in writing the UCoC and understand fully that the intent of the composers was to avoid any implication that racism and ethnic bias are valid. As you said, Anasuya - honest intentions. I have spoken to many individuals who have felt personally hurt and erased by the phrase in denying their lived reality. I have also spoken to others who have feared that it makes it more difficult to talk about the actual harms of racism and ethnocentrism by implying that such topics are taboo to discuss.
We ourselves are learning from all of these perspectives and concerns to ensure that people feel the representation they deserve. These conversations are hard, and I’m grateful to the people who are willing to have them and doing their best to listen and engage with empathy and respect. <3
Best regards,
Maggie
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 1:38 PM Anasuya Sengupta anasuya@whoseknowledge.org wrote:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4] https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
-- Anasuya Sengupta +44 7367 868585 Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us all http://whoseknowledge.org We just launched the first ever State of the Internet's Languages report! There can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. (bell hooks)
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
-- Maggie Dennis She/her/hers Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
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On Mon, Apr 11, 2022 at 1:06 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Definitions of terminology makes sense in any document that is intended as an enforceable guide to behavior. Without them, whose definition applies? Cheers, Peter
No document defines all its terms. It's particularly unnecessary to define race and ethnicity in the context of how they're used in the UCoC because the terms are only used in conjunction with other terms that fill in whatever gaps might exist even under narrow definitions. Discussions about [[Who is a Jew?]] are a red herring here.
Race and ethnicity have already proven to be controversial in this context, and will probably continue to be controversial, but maybe less so if appropriately defined. Anyway, those who make the decisions carry the ethical responsibility, even if they can avoid legal responsibility. Cheers, Peter
From: Benjamin Lees [mailto:emufarmers@gmail.com] Sent: 12 April 2022 10:36 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Open letter on negating race and ethnicity as "meaningful distinctions" in the UCoC
On Mon, Apr 11, 2022 at 1:06 AM Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
Definitions of terminology makes sense in any document that is intended as an enforceable guide to behavior. Without them, whose definition applies? Cheers, Peter
No document defines all its terms. It's particularly unnecessary to define race and ethnicity in the context of how they're used in the UCoC because the terms are only used in conjunction with other terms that fill in whatever gaps might exist even under narrow definitions. Discussions about [[Who is a Jew?]] are a red herring here.
Virus-free. http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient www.avg.com
Dear all,
Thanks for reading and responding to our concerns, including with thoughtful questions and comments. We’re writing with a brief response to the different messages, with the two key aspects that have been raised.
What we propose: In case it wasn’t already super clear, we confirm that the change in the UCoC we are suggesting is to remove the note to the Insults section entirely: “(Note: The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks.)”
We believe that this change would not diminish the effectiveness of the UCoC or its further application. On the contrary, it would be in line with its real spirit and honest intentions. As the wording currently stands, it causes (and will cause) more harm than any possible good, and certainly far too much confusion around intention. It particularly makes no sense to pull out race and ethnicity in this fashion.
Timeline and process: Maggie's response is very useful in clarifying that there could be a rapid review process to address this issue. We welcome that, and it would be helpful to have a clear timeline and detailed process for us to understand how this might unfold, and who might be responsible for it.
Thank you to everyone again for your attention and care.
With love, respect, and solidarity, Anasuya and the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors and friends
On Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 10:13 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Race and ethnicity have already proven to be controversial in this context, and will probably continue to be controversial, but maybe less so if appropriately defined. Anyway, those who make the decisions carry the ethical responsibility, even if they can avoid legal responsibility. Cheers, Peter
*From:* Benjamin Lees [mailto:emufarmers@gmail.com] *Sent:* 12 April 2022 10:36 *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Open letter on negating race and ethnicity as "meaningful distinctions" in the UCoC
On Mon, Apr 11, 2022 at 1:06 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Definitions of terminology makes sense in any document that is intended as an enforceable guide to behavior. Without them, whose definition applies? Cheers, Peter
No document defines all its terms. It's particularly unnecessary to define race and ethnicity in the context of how they're used in the UCoC because the terms are only used in conjunction with other terms that fill in whatever gaps might exist even under narrow definitions. Discussions about [[Who is a Jew?]] are a red herring here.
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The comment from WJBScribe in May 2021 that the open letter mentioned is here: < https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Policy_text#C... (he also raised it earlier during the English Wikipedia consultation). Was there a determination at the time that he was incorrect, or was there really no process in place to incorporate feedback into the UCoC text, as opposed to the enforcement guidelines, during the roughly two years following the end of Phase 1 (under the original timeline)?
I won't belabor the process points further, but maybe the mistake was in making this a Board-approved document so early in the process, such that it could no longer be incrementally improved in a reasonable timeframe.
Emufarmers
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 4:23 PM Maggie Dennis mdennis@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello, Anasuya and Whose Knowledge.
(Context for those who don’t know me: I am the Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability, and among others I oversee the team shepherding the UCoC process.)
Thank you very much for raising this issue. Foundation staff have been discussing this as well with the same points that you have raised, and it is something we’ve been thinking about how to address.
As probably many of you know, the plan all along had been to get the UCoC policy, to get the enforcement approach, and then to see how they work together in operation. Our plan has been to review the policy and enforcement approach together a year after the ratification of Phase 2. However, we decided to prioritize a slower approach to Phase 2 to make sure it was functional out the gate especially for the functionaries and volunteers who enforce it, as a result of which the timeline we had imagined for Policy review has been considerably pushed back. If we had made our preliminary time plan, we would have started testing these out months ago. The Policy and Enforcement Guidelines would have been ripe for review sometime around November 2022.
As you all know, the vote has just concluded on the UCoC Phase 2. In the vote, community members were asked if they supported it as written or not, with the ability to provide feedback either way - with the notion that the feedback would help us focus on major blockers to the enforcement approach. I have already spoken to several members of the Board about some of the concerns that have been raised about the enforcement guidelines; we’ve spoken about this passage in the Policy, too. I know from my conversations with the Board that they want to get this done right, not just get it done
- and they are very open to understanding these major blockers.
The project team is compiling a report for the Board on the challenging points surfaced during the vote. We think the enforcement guidelines are a very good first draft for the enforcement pathways, but–based on the comments we’ve seen–we are very aware there may be more work ahead before we reach a Board ratified version of those guidelines. As this passage in policy is not necessary to achieve the goal of the UCoC - which is to forbid harassment and attacks based on personal factors including race and ethnicity - our intention has been to recommend to the Board that the passage in question be reviewed simultaneously with any further Phase 2 enforcement workshopping, instead of waiting for the “year in operation” review intended.
I still think it makes sense to review how the enforcement guideline and policy work together to see how they are functioning once they have a trial period. But I ALSO don’t think it makes any sense to hold off on reviewing a passage from policy that community members (including some community members who are Foundation staff) strongly agree may be actively harmful just because Phase 2 is taking longer than anticipated.
I also want to say that I have spoken to some of the individuals who were involved in writing the UCoC and understand fully that the intent of the composers was to avoid any implication that racism and ethnic bias are valid. As you said, Anasuya - honest intentions. I have spoken to many individuals who have felt personally hurt and erased by the phrase in denying their lived reality. I have also spoken to others who have feared that it makes it more difficult to talk about the actual harms of racism and ethnocentrism by implying that such topics are taboo to discuss.
We ourselves are learning from all of these perspectives and concerns to ensure that people feel the representation they deserve. These conversations are hard, and I’m grateful to the people who are willing to have them and doing their best to listen and engage with empathy and respect. <3
Best regards,
Maggie
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 1:38 PM Anasuya Sengupta < anasuya@whoseknowledge.org> wrote:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4] https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
-- *Anasuya Sengupta* +44 7367 868585 *Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us all* http://whoseknowledge.org *We just launched the first ever State of the Internet's Languages report http://internetlanguages.org!*
*There can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.* *(bell hooks)*
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
-- Maggie Dennis She/her/hers Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
I think that the statement of UCoC wants somehow consider that the definition of racism and ethnicity has a different meaning in the current time and needs to be updated because the risk is to use outdated models that sometimes can generate more confusions than solutions.
The statement of Whose Knowledge is speaking about colonialism and WWII and genocid of Europeans but not considering that in the current time the biggest genocids or racists activiries happen in other continents done but not Western Europeans.
Do we want to speak about China? Central Africa? Middle East? Russia?
The statement below looks like a historical nemesis that does not help because the risk is to limit the problem to a single and outdated context and to forget most critical and important contexts.
Until racism and ethnicity would be limited to Europeans vs World, I think that it would be complicated to have a "not neutral" statement or a statement that risks to be partial.
Kind regards
On Fri, 8 Apr 2022, 19:38 Anasuya Sengupta, anasuya@whoseknowledge.org wrote:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4] https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
-- *Anasuya Sengupta* +44 7367 868585 *Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us all* http://whoseknowledge.org *We just launched the first ever State of the Internet's Languages report http://internetlanguages.org!*
*There can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.* *(bell hooks)*
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Dear Anasuya,
thank you. Even after reading your text, I still do not understand what the meaningful difference between people (i.e., user accounts) of different races is. Can you provide an example of how the UCoC should take into account the race property of a person to influence a decision?
Maybe there is a better wording that avoids this terminology entirely. I believe for a decision on UCoC matters/violations race should not matter, maybe this is obvious and does not need to be stated explicitly.
Personally, I would love to have the option to not specify my race as a user.
All the best physikerwelt
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 7:39 PM Anasuya Sengupta anasuya@whoseknowledge.org wrote:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4] https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
-- Anasuya Sengupta +44 7367 868585 Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us all http://whoseknowledge.org We just launched the first ever State of the Internet's Languages report! There can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. (bell hooks)
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Thank you Adele and Anasuya, for pointing out how problematic that sentence is. I also find that it subverts the otherwise brilliant work of the Harassment section, and my layperson's +1 is to remove everything between the parentheses. The section would then read:
[We define harassment as] *Insults:* This includes name calling, using
slurs or stereotypes, and any attacks based on personal characteristics. Insults may refer to perceived characteristics like intelligence, appearance, ethnicity, race, religion (or lack thereof), culture, caste, sexual orientation, gender, sex, disability, age, nationality, political affiliation, or other characteristics. In some cases, repeated mockery, sarcasm, or aggression constitute insults collectively, even if individual statements would not.
The statement stands on its own and needs no additional qualifiers.
I believe the "does not endorse" phrase is a symptom of a real cultural phenomenon of so-called color-blindness, which can still be heard echoing in this mailing list thread, and I think we should explore the misunderstanding that makes it possible for reviewers to have passed over the phrase. The concepts might be made more accessible by turning to the parallel (though not equivalent) question for gender: *does it matter what gender a person is?* — Yes! Very much so, as gender is a deep part of our ideas of self, and shapes interactions with other people and life opportunities under patriarchy. As feminists, we (speaking for myself) demand equality of outcome and of opportunity regardless of gender, and reject any suggestion that gender determines an individual. In other words, knowing a person's gender doesn't mean you know anything else about them. I assume this is what was meant by not being a "meaningful distinction" in the UCoC, in which case the same applies to all of the listed personal characteristics, not just race and ethnicity.
Kind regards, [[meta:Adamw]]
On Sat, Apr 9, 2022 at 10:51 PM Physikerwelt wiki@physikerwelt.de wrote:
Dear Anasuya,
thank you. Even after reading your text, I still do not understand what the meaningful difference between people (i.e., user accounts) of different races is. Can you provide an example of how the UCoC should take into account the race property of a person to influence a decision?
Maybe there is a better wording that avoids this terminology entirely. I believe for a decision on UCoC matters/violations race should not matter, maybe this is obvious and does not need to be stated explicitly.
Personally, I would love to have the option to not specify my race as a user.
All the best physikerwelt
On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 7:39 PM Anasuya Sengupta anasuya@whoseknowledge.org wrote:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as
“meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to
Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
However, we continue to be deeply concerned about the current wording of
a specific note in the UCoC: under Section 3.1 about Harassment, the note under Insults states that “The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people. Their inclusion here is to mark that they are prohibited in use against others as the basis for personal attacks." (emphasis ours)[1]
This is both manifestly incorrect and entirely against what we believe
to be the principles and intentions of the UCoC. Other Wikimedians have already pointed out the deeply contradictory nature of this statement, including WJBScribe on the talk page in May 2021,[2] but their comments appear not to have been considered yet.
By stating that "The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and
"ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people," those responsible for this text do not seem to fully grasp that:
Even though the concept of ‘race’ as a biological distinction has been
refuted, ‘race’ as a social construct has been fully accepted by modern scholars.[3] Even more importantly, we know historically that the concept of ‘race’ was created and developed to serve and justify European colonialism in its quest to enslave, marginalize, oppress, dominate and exterminate black, brown and indigenous peoples in the lands they colonized. This form of “racial science” was also responsible for the genocide of Europeans who would otherwise be racialized as white outside of Europe, in particular during World War II. Since then the concept of ‘race’ has been used to develop and create some of the most wide ranging systems of power and privilege that currently marginalize and oppress the majority of the world.
By denying or not ‘endorsing’ the existence of race as a “meaningful
distinction among people”, the Wikimedia movement is not doing non-white people any favors or helping to end racism or racist demonstrations, such as insults based on race. As we’ve said before, being silent about racism doesn’t make it go away. It only creates the perfect environment for the continued existence of the deep structural powers and privileges that created it in the first place.[4]
Additionally, it is equally manifestly important to acknowledge the ways
in which the concept of ‘ethnicity’ is used to create “meaningful” - including violently discriminatory - “distinctions” amongst people, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as two obvious examples. It is equally obvious that the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not equivalent and/or interchangeable, and cannot be used so.
By including such a problematic statement, the UCoC contradicts the
movement’s commitment to knowledge equity, clearly stated and approved as part of our Wikimedia Movement Strategy for 2030. The Universal Code of Conduct of a movement that doesn’t “see” race or ethnicity or acknowledge the historical and current effects of our racialized and ethnically-driven world, cannot and will not be able to “focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.”[5]
Leaving this wording in, also negates the ongoing efforts by individuals
and organizations across the movement who work with passion and commitment towards knowledge equity in different ways, including through challenging racist and ethnically discriminatory behavior in our projects.
As long-time members of our movement, we assume good faith, and
recognize that this current wording may have happened through honest intentions gone badly wrong. As Wikimedians who believe in shared improvements through collective editing, we hope that this mistake too will be immediately acknowledged and removed from the UCoC. We are not entirely sure who is ultimately responsible for this change, but if the Wikimedia Foundation Board is in charge of reviewing the policy, we believe it is incumbent upon the Board to share with us what possible next steps they will take, towards this.
We look forward to a UCoC that lives up to its principles and
intentions, and we commit to its practice as Wikimedians.
With love, respect, and solidarity,
Adele and Anasuya with the Whose Knowledge? team, advisors, and friends
[0]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#Open_Letter_o...
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct#3.1_%E2%80%93_Hara...
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Universal_Code_of_Conduct#%22The_Wikime...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
[4]
https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/creative-commons-global-summit-2019... and https://whoseknowledge.org/media-section/toward-a-wikipedia-for-and-from-us-...
[5]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strateg...
-- Anasuya Sengupta +44 7367 868585 Reimagining and redesigning the internet to be for and from us all http://whoseknowledge.org We just launched the first ever State of the Internet's Languages report! There can be no love without justice... The moment we choose to love we
begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.
(bell hooks)
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines
at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
Public archives at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/...
To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
On Fri, 8 Apr 2022 18:36:12 +0100 Anasuya Sengupta anasuya@whoseknowledge.org wrote:
Tl;dr Urgent need to address the note denying race and ethnicity as “meaningful distinctions among people” in the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The current wording is highly problematic and can result in endorsing systemic and individual discrimination and violence on the basis of race and ethnicity, rather than preventing it.
Dear Wikimedians,
We are writing this letter as the Whose Knowledge? user group, both to Wikimedia-l, as well as adding it to the talk page for the UCoC.[0] We endorsed the UCoC in the community voting process because we are committed to its principles and intentions (indeed, some of us have been expressly working towards it within the movement for a very long time, in multiple ways).
my take on it - https://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/philosophy/putting-cards-on-the-table-...
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Make your own kind of music / Take your qualities to your advantage [ #make-your-own-kind-of-music ] Node Link
Similar to the Mama Cass Elliot song "make your own kind of music" or its Lady Gaga modernisation "Born This Way", I have given an interpretation of Captain Nemo (= "nobody" in Latin, and not to be confused with Nemo from the animated film Finding Nemo) in Jules Verne's novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, whom people keep finding interesting for what he believes are superficial reasons. But these qualities are part of what makes us who we are.
The YouTuber band Cimorelli has used the fact that they are six sisters (who also have five male brothers) in a large Roman Catholic family, a trend which has received a lot of antagonism, from environmentalists, psychologists and the media, to their advantage, and as a gimmick. As a result, they published many videos of them covering hit songs, some original songs, and have been live performing and collaborating with other singers and entertainers.
Naturally, they are not the only YouTube success story. But if you get an opportunity, seize it. Were you invited to give a talk? Go for it. Even if you were invited from the "wrong" reason, you will pave the road for future lecturers. A sociology student invited you to talk to them about your work as an open source / open content creator? Go for it. You thought of a new Chuck Norris/etc. factoid? Write it down and share it on social media and chat. Someone asked you out and you like them and are single? Go for it. You have an idea for a nice video, story, screenplay, song, etc. Execute it.
I used to be jealous of Ayn Rand for writing so lucidly and coherently in The Fountainhead and in Atlas Shrugged, whereas my style of screenplays and stories was what I described as "staccato" where I do not mention any unnecessary details. However, Rand likely felt the same way about Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose overly verbose style is now the terror and hatred of many Literature students.
Similarly, current and future generations will likely appreciate my staccato style more than Ayn Rand’s. Make your own kind of music!
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