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

[Ray Saintonge]

Michael Bimmler wrote:
> 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.)
I agree.  Any pronouncement on this must be realistic, but evaluating 
the seriousness of a threat is an art that requires a great deal of 
experience to sort out those who are just talking like an idiot.  I 
think we've all heard the expression, "I'll kill him," used to express 
displeasure in TV comedy, where there is no possibility of it being a 
serious threat.  That evaluation is even more difficult when we are 
dealing with text that does not transmit the tone of voice.

We can recommend HOW a particular kind of threat can be reported, and 
that's a good thing for those who have no idea what to do when they find 
a threat they consider serious by whatever yardstick they use.  But that 
all presupposes that they know on which page to look for those 
instructions, when it's the kind of experience that they do not 
encounter every day.

Requiring people to report these things makes no sense, and even if we 
did we would need some kind of viewing log of the affected page so that 
we could say, "These people looked at the article after the threat was 
posted, and need to be punished."  That strikes me as completely 
unworkable, even to someone that fully supports mandatory reporting.l

Ec