[Foundation-l] Global ban - poetlister?

[phoebe ayers]

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 10:18 AM, Scott MacDonald
<doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-
>> bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav M. Blanter
>> Sent: 03 June 2011 18:05
>> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Global ban - poetlister?
>>
>>
>>
>> > I too would like to see the development of a process for global
>> banning
>> of
>> > users who have created serious problems on either the global or the
>> > multiple-project level.
>> >
>> > Risker/Anne
>>
>> I see your reasoning, but I also see at least two serious deficiencies:
>>
>> 1) Some projects explicitly rejected the community ban after extensive
>> discussion;
>> 2) Any meta-discussion of the community ban would be inevitably
>> dominated
>> by the English Wikipedia users (and thus may be unacceptable for those
>> projects which rejected the community ban).
>>
>> Cheers
>> Yaroslav
>>
>
> These should be surmountable.
>
> First the grounds for a global ban ought to be limited. Where users have
> engaged in activity which goes beyond trolling and disruption towards
> illegality, or the type of harassment that has real-life consequences, or
> endangers vulnerable people, then a global hard ban should be considered -
> which overrides any local agreements to the contrary. In cases where the
> user has simply disrupted two or more projects then a presumptive ban would
> be more appropriate - that is the user cannot participate in any further
> community without specific local consent. (That stops the dumping problem.)
>
> What you need is a mechanism so that one local community, when banning a
> user who meets the criteria, can refer the case to a cross-project review
> group for a global decision. This group needs to be loaded so that en.wp
> cannot dominate - and that other projects can have confidence that this is
> the case. It might simply be a conclave of stewards, or it could be a group
> with each member nominated by a different project.
>
> Scott

I'm glad to see this discussion made more general -- beyond this
particular case, and towards the general process for how and when we
can (and should) globally ban someone. I also think that we need to
have a clear process that can be used -- with care, but also without
requiring debate about *process* for every case. It helps everyone if
there are agreed-upon minimum standards for behavior and a process for
review of problems. More specifically, I think Scott's suggestions
above make a lot of sense.

The stewards do seem like the most obvious global group to enact such
review. There was a lot of discussion about this (and related
mechanisms for dispute resolution) last year among the stewards after
Wikimania, and there's a proposal here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Dispute_resolution_committee;
perhaps people who know more about this idea can weigh in, and we can
build on it.

Also somewhat related, I have been working on and off over the last
few months (with help from a few folks) to collect information about
harassment policies from across the projects, to see if there's any
community consensus about what to do about this kind of bad behavior;
see the list here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Harassment_policies
(I'd love some help with this, too!)

It might also be a useful exercise to collect and analyze other kinds
of "bad actor" guidelines from many projects, to see if there's any
global consensus currently on what our minimum standards for behavior
are. This could have a lot of useful cross-project application,
including perhaps developing grounds for global hard-banning that
would gain consensus.

-- phoebe