[WikiEN-l] Proposal: Harassment victim support fund

[Thomas Dalton]

An interesting idea... it could work. Here are the problems I see straight away:

1) Who decides how to dish out the money? Determining if someone is
really being harassed is very difficult (due, in no small part, to the
subjective nature of the term "harassment"), and deciding if their
expenses are true and reasonable is even harder.
2) The main problems with harassment are not financial. It's the
hassle, the fear of what they might do next, and annoyance at what
they are doing, etc. You can sometimes partially solve some of those
problems by throwing money at them, but not to a great extent.

You last type of support - legal costs for someone being sued - is a
different matter really. It's a much more obvious situation, so much
easy to dish out money for. However, I don't think a fund is required
just for that. I'm pretty sure that if I block someone and they sue
me, I can just put the details of a paypal account on AN, VP, this
mailing list, etc. and get plenty of money pretty quickly.