[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Draft Terms of Use for Review

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 03:17, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 8 September 2011 17:28, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As I am speaking as a steward, I have to say that it's very good news
>> for us. Instead of being harassed because not dealing with harassment,
>> since the implementation of ToS that would be WMF's job. That's really
>> good news for stewards!
>
>
> The purpose of the new TOS is to support the community, not to take
> over its work.
>
> Geoff and members of the Community department have been speaking
> recently with community members who are concerned about harassment on
> the wikis, about what kinds of actions we might collectively take to
> help prevent it. Making it clear that harassment is against the rules
> seems like an obvious step, and indeed I've seen research that
> suggests an inverse relationship between sites that have a TOS that
> prohibits harassment, and incidents of harassment on those sites. [1]
>
> Explicitly and publicly forbidding harassment on the wikis is a pretty
> basic and straightforward thing to do.

Sue, someone has to investigate and decide about harassment. Stewards
are able to block, but don't judge; especially in the cases where it
would be probably needed to analyze personal emails.

With or without that ToS, any sane ArbCom would block persons who
harass others. But, we don't have a body which is able to do that
globally. The first step is to get that body, then to make some things
explicit.