[WikiEN-l] Proposal: Harassment victim support fund

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting William Pietri <william at scissor.com>:

> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>
> Some options:
>
>    * The community at large, in the same way we determine other things
>    * ArbCom (sorry, guys)
>    * The WMF legal counsel
>    * Jimbo

Involving the Foundation in this is not likely a good idea.


>
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> That's partly true. We certainly can't undo the damage. (Although
> perhaps adding a home security service or support from a counsellor
> could help a little.)
>
> But the cash to request a restraining order could make a real
> difference. Ditto for assistance in getting the police involved. Trying
> to get cops or a DA to do anything involving the Internet is a giant
> pain in the as. Paying for an experienced lawyer to lean on them or a
> real PI to gather proof could also make a huge difference.
>
> But I intend this partly to have a deterrent effect. If we have 10k in
> the bank plus the promise for more when it's needed, that will make the
> more crafty type of abuser think twice. Even more so if we get a couple
> of civil judgments, restraining orders, or arrests and make some noise
> about it.
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Good point.
>
> The reason to gather the money now would again be a deterrent effect.
> Plus making it clear to editors that they will be supported if it comes
> to that.
>

I suspect that the main thing this would actually be useful for is PR 
issues. If
someone learns that trying to harrasse Wikipedia admins leads to newspaper
articles of the form "Notable X harasses Wikipedia" they'll be less likely to
do so. (There have been at least two cases that come to mind of people whose
reputation could have been severely damaged if there were such stories).