[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Draft Terms of Use forReview

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 7:01 PM, Phil Nash <phnash at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

> Global bans are already available; but disruptive editors on one Wiki
> within
> the WM umbrella have gone on to be constructive editors elsewhere. I seem
> to
> remember Jimbo preaching forgiveness, and I see this proposal, unless I
> have
> misunderstood it completely, as being anathema to that.
>

The terms merely say that you *can* be banned locally or globally for
violating the ToS or community-created policy, not precisely *how* or *when
*that happens in every case. For local matters, they'll function exactly how
they do now, and I hope it's clear that the terms set out to complement and
support how the projects function individually on a day-to-day basis, not
change that at all.

For global issues, I think this will be worked out when there is a clear
policy that lays out how global bans should work. That's why there's a red
link to "Global Ban Policy" in the document.

As usual, the devil is in the details: we could have a policy that says that
anyone with a ban on two or more projects is automatically globally banned
(hypothetical, not desirable at all from my POV). Or we can go the route
that assumes that all governance over bans is completely local to the
individual projects where a user might appear, *until* the community asks
for and comes to a cross-wiki consensus on a particularly bad case that
requires a global ban. Ultimately how this works needs to be decided not by
the Foundation, but by community members who know better than we do about
what harassment, stalking, and the cross-wiki problems look like.

Also, in response to this and Milos' comments, I will say frankly that in
our conversations at the Foundation we have not discussed some kind of team
of staff reviewing/approving/implementing bans based on the Terms of Use as
proposed. We're not Facebook. So while I agree that it's a good thing to
quit making the Stewards deal with any decisions they don't want to make
about global bans, like Sue said, it's not the job of the Terms to hand over
volunteer functions to the Foundation.

Steven

P.S. It's only been a few hours and there is already a ton of useful
feedback on the Talk page. \o/ Thanks to everyone who has jumped on this.
You're awesome.