Thank you, Pax/Funcrunch, for bringing this topic to the broad wikimedia
community. I'm sorry that you've had a bad experience contributing to
Wikipedia. And I'm glad that you are staying around to add and improve
content, and also to offer your ideas about how to address harassment.
I appreciate that the WMF staff is working on keeping the Inspire Campaign
pages a safe and friendly place to contribute ideas. I hope that some
people with admin, oversight, and checkuser privileges on meta are helping
out, too, because it will be better if it is a shared job.
I too am disappointed that so many of the options getting broad support are
suggesting that the target of harassment needs to be fixed or that they
should leave or reduce their participation in the wikimedia movement in
order to reduce disruption on wiki.
I know that there are many oversighter, checkusers, and stewards all across
the movement who are working hard to fight disruption from trolls and
harassers. But right now we are stuck without outdated tools and processes
to combat harassment.
I know that if we put our minds to finding better solutions, we will! :-)
I look forward to reading more ideas!
Warm regards,
Sydney
Sydney Poore
User:FloNight
Wiki Project Med Foundation
WikiWomen's User Group
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/sydney.e.poore
On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 9:56 PM, Pax Ahimsa Gethen <
list-wikimedia(a)funcrunch.org> wrote:
Hi all, I'm Pax aka Funcrunch [1]. I've been a
Wikipedian since 2008, but
this is my first post to this mailing list. (I've been reading list
messages on the archives page occasionally for the last several months.)
I'm writing because of a concern I have about the community's attitude
toward harassment on Wikipedia. I got a Wikinotice about this month's
Inspire Campaign, which specifically asks: "What ideas do you have that can
help prevent and generally address cases of harassment?" [2] As a victim of
several of the harassing behaviors mentioned as examples - " name calling,
threats, discrimination, stalking, and impersonation" - I was encouraged to
see that this problem was (hopefully) being taken seriously by the
Foundation, and submitted a proposal.
Looking at the other proposals submitted, I soon noticed that the most
popular "ideas" on the list included complaints of "political
correctness"
and suggesting we shouldn't be so sensitive [3], and that we should just
get some sleep and exercise and reconsider why we're so offended. [4] (That
first "idea" has since been recategorized by a WMF staffer to remove it
from the current campaign.)
It really bothers me that a campaign specifically designed to combat
harassment - which is a very serious and real problem for people of
marginalized identities like myself [5]- is being co-opted by people saying
things like " Harassment doesn't cause actual damage," " The existence
of
harassment is an opportunity to improve ourselves further through
self-discipline," and " Harassment on Wikimedia has been exaggerated." I
suggest that people who honestly believe this, but are willing to accept
that they might be wrong, read a recent essay about online harassment by
Anil Dash: "The Immortal Myths About Online Abuse." [6]
I'm not "looking to be offended," and I'm not trying to
"censor" people
who simply disagree with me. I'm trying to help build an encyclopedia,
without being harassed by block-evading stalkers hurling hate speech my
way. The existing tools and policies are *not* sufficient to deal with
this. That's (what I thought was) the point of this Inspire campaign, not
complaining about censorship and " crybullying."
I've posted a much shorter version of this concern on the Inspire Campaign
talk page [7], so feel free to weigh in there instead of here on the list
if that's more appropriate. Thank you for reading.
- Pax, aka Funcrunch
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Funcrunch
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Stop_%22Political_Correctnes…
!
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Don't_feed_the_trolls
[5] Queer, trans, and black, in my case.
[6]
https://medium.com/humane-tech/the-immortal-myths-about-online-abuse-a156e3…
[7]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IdeaLab/Inspire/Meta#Blaming_th…
--
Pax Ahimsa Gethen | pax(a)funcrunch.org |
http://funcrunch.org
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