[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] School shooting threats

[George Herbert]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 5:03 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm familiar with the three failed attempts, and actually helped to fail
> WP:TOV myself. What sets a policy specifically related to school threats
> apart is that it, well, specifically addresses a significant element of
> threats that has a much higher public profile than any other sort of threat
> we might encounter. If I remember, WP:SUICIDE does not mention school
> threats at all - even in passing along with other sorts of threats. It seems
> mostly, as its shortcut suggests, related to threats of suicide. The most
> recently proposed policy (at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_threats) does not attempt to
> require action, only encourage it.
>
> If an essay is the most that will ever be achievable, so be it. I for one
> would not like to be the one being interviewed when someone from the Times
> or USA Today says "Can you explain why Wikipedia editors don't think
> reporting threats against schools to the police is a good idea?"
> At the least WP:SUICIDE should also be shortcutted by WP:THREATS and it
> should deal more specifically with the various types of threats, including
> threats of violence at schools.

I think WP:THREAT goes to the No Legal Threats policy now.  It's
conceivable that it's more important to point it to the physical
threats essay - you might float that on AN.

If you were to go add school violence threats explicitly to the essay,
right now, I'd encourage it.  I'm headed off now for several hours of
meetings and so forth, or I'd just go do it right now.  If I have
bandwidth later tonight, after the meetings and interview I have to
do, then I'll try to.  But this is a fine case where bold would be
good.

We should think about this a bit- It's possible to go overboard and
enumerate all the possible threat types (school violence, workplace
violence, spousal abuse, etc) we might want to list, in a too big too
clunky list.

I think that we see enough incidents of kids making school threats,
and it's particularly sensitive, where it is clearly useful to add it.
 But we should probably think about overdoing it and adding others
(not saying we shouldn't, but let's stop after this and think about it
a bit).


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com