Admins? And who are those? Please build a listing of every admin for every possible technical venue relating to Wikimedia.
While you're at it, we're going to need them to have a shared hivemind so enforcement is consistent between venues. They're also going to need to communicate about sanctions so that behaviour spilling over to multiple venues can be factored in. And while you're doing /that/ please make sure they all have an appropriate protocol for appealing things and passing issues upwards.
Or we could have a committee.
I get that this is a technical environment and we are all, myself included, used to being able to chip in anywhere with some utility. But please have some respect for the people coming up with these ideas. The idea of a code of conduct and an associated committee is coming from smart people, and it did not spring fully-formed from their brow like Athena from Zeus. It came from literal decades of work by many, many other smart people in a vast number of communities that have tried a ton of options. And when we say "why don't we just do obvious_thing_x?" we are demonstrating a total failure to respect the expertise other people have in this sort of process, which is generally /not/ our expertise, and failing to do research to boot. If it helps, imagine that instead of talking to this group about behavioural policies, you were explaining to C.Scott or Subbu why their idea for a parser is overly complicated and they /totally/ don't need to be doing $THING.
So my suggestion - and this is something I have tried to follow myself when I don't understand the point of something in the form "bad things are happening, why don't we do X" is to literally google "why isn't [the obviously simple thing I thought of] a good idea?", and see what smart people have already written. It saves from forcing marginalised individuals to repeat, for the fiftieth time in a thread, why X is a good approach here, and I tend to learn something along the way.
On 23 August 2015 at 04:29, Steinsplitter Wiki steinsplitter-wiki@live.com wrote:
Why we need a committee?
I think admins can enforce if necessary.
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2015 00:30:40 -0600 From: bawolff@gmail.com To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] [Engineering] Code of conduct
On 8/22/15, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
David, thanks for this find.
THIS is why the Code of Conduct is needed. I recognized myself in this blog. I remembered avoiding any aspect of socialization at conferences I had to attend for work, and simply didn't even consider attending conferences for any other purpose. I remembered how readily "the guys" assumed that any woman there was there for more than just networking and learning. I remembered having my butt pinched, my breasts "accidentally touched", my questions ignored or laughed at. I remember how the buzz of background conversation is always much louder when the speaker is a woman than when the speaker is a man.
It's changed for me. Not because there's any less of all of this going on. No, it's because my hair is grey and I'm now old enough to be the mom of half the people in the room at any male-dominated conferences I attend; and outside of Wikimedia events, the conferences I go to are usually full of conservative businesswomen, and alcohol is rarely involved.
So yeah...you need a code of conduct. Because if I was even 15 years younger, I'd never go to a Wikimedia conference.
Risker/Anne
Thank you for writing this. I really appreciate you sharing your experiences.
Your comments have convinced me that I should support the proposal, where previously I had mixed feelings. The types of behaviours you describe are absolutely unacceptable.
-- Bawolff
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