[WikiEN-l] London calling, etc.

[Earle Martin]

On 02/10/2007, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Phoning a non-local police force (esp. a foreign one) isn't that easy.
> I've just spent 5 minutes looking, and couldn't find any way of
> contacting the london police in an emergency other than "dial 999".

Given the spectacular size of the Wikipedia project, we can be assured
that people of all kinds will join us and this situation will
inevitably happen again. As a consequence, we should have a mechanism
in place to deal with it. However, as Durova writes,

> These situations are beyond Wikipedia's scope, period.  Hand them over to
> the professionals who have training and experience and access to social
> services.

Exactly. The absolute limit of our involvement should be to pass such
a situation on to the relevant persons, which may often be a local
police force. So the chain looks like this:

User -> Wikipedia -> [mechanism] -> local professionals.

This mailing list has demonstrated a wide geographical distribution
and a low response time, faster even on occasion than the IRC channel
(and more reliable in terms of reach). However, as a
publically-archived resource[1], it may not be suitable for responding
to difficult personal incidents. I'd like to suggest therefore that we
set up a private "alerts" mailing list, with the following rules:

1) Membership by application to list moderators.
2) No rubbernecking. Those who subscribe are volunteering to actively
monitor the list and, in reported cases, attempt to contact local
authorities.
3) No discussion, /except/ in response to a reported incident,
/specifically/ for the purpose of locating appropriate help.
4) No Samaritans. List users /must not/ attempt to personally help
those reported in incidents.

There should be a private list of volunteers' locations and contact numbers.

I know this seems like a lot of work, but the list would be virtually
invisible 99% of the time, but it will prove its worth in the 1% when
it happens again (and it will; this is the second suicide note I've
seen on Wikipedia in the last year).

Thoughts, flames?



[1] Blocking search engines from the official list archive has
evidently not prevented someone from subscribing it to a third-party
archiving service, so bear that in mind if you're discussing sensitive
topics: http://www.nabble.com/English-Wikipedia-f14021.html

-- 
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/