[WikiEN-l] Proposal: Harassment victim support fund

[William Pietri]

joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu wrote:
>> [...]
>> I propose that we create a fund to support editors who are being
>> harassed solely or mainly because of legitimate on-Wikipedia work. We
>> fund this through contributions from the community. No WMF money would
>> be involved, but perhaps they would consent to hold and/or supervise the
>> fund. [...]
> I've discussed this idea with a few editors before including JzG, 
> Slimvirgin and
> KillerChihuaha all who thought it was a good idea. Unfortunately the first two
> of those are no longer active. In both cases they might very well be active if
> we did have such a fund. IANAL but we would need to set it up as a 501c3
> probably and make very sure to keep it very separate from the foundation. The
> foundation is more important than anyone editor and must be well insulated
> against any legal foul ups by editors.
>   

Keeping it separate certainly would keep things clearer, especially 
given that during any actual use of something like this, there would 
probably be drama a-plenty for the Foundation to deal with.

Is there some separate but sympathetic non-profit that would be able to 
give this a home? For the lawsuit defense stuff, we might be able to 
talk the EFF into it, but the rest seems well away from what they do. I 
know the Tides Foundation will occasionally shelter fractional 
non-profits, but this doesn't seem quite up their alley either.

William


-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri