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

[Michael Bimmler]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Chris Howie" <cdhowie at gmail.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 18:08:15 -0400
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] School shooting threats
On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 5:44 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> The question, then, is what if any moral imperative does this impose on us?
> And if some of us feel compelled to report such instances to the police, and
> others do not, what if any should the extent of policy be on this issue?
> Personally I can't agree to any Wikipedia policy that mandates or punishes
> behavior off-wiki. On the other hand, I do think a policy that encourages
> all editors to report specific school threats to AN and (when willing and
> possible) to the police is workable and a good idea. Frankly, I'm surprised
> and I'm sure many others would be as well to learn that there isn't already
> such a Wikipedia policy. At a minimum, we should have a policy of forwarding
> all such threats to the Wikimedia Foundation for "official" action if
> necessary.

If it only encourages people to do something then it's not a policy,
it's an essay, which is more than appropriate in this case.  Even a
guideline would be better than policy.

IMO any threat with the slightest hint of seriousness should be
immediately reported.  But making it a blockable offense to not report
would not only be very bad for the project, it would be unenforceable
in just about every case.  Which would in turn make it generally a
useless policy.

On another note, a noticeboard where things like this can be posted
would be helpful.  People who know how to go about reporting something
like this could monitor the page.  (Law enforcement could even
subscribe to an RSS feed of the page history, if they wanted to be
proactive about it.)

--
Chris Howie
http://www.chrishowie.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Crazycomputers