The inapposite and totally inapt intervention of the WMF, a la bull in a
china shop, caused a Streisand effect on the alleged harassment that is
stated to have take place. I do not knew the editor which has been pointed
as the source of the denounce, or if she has made any denounce at all, but
I certainly would not want to be in her shoes right now. She seems to have
become the target of secere harassment off wiki, and at minimum a lot of
pressure on wiki. She completely stopped editing since this case began. If
the idea was to combat and prevent harassment, I must say WMF has failed
completely and miserably, on all accounts. And God save me of being
"protected" this way, if I ever find myself in a situation that I have to
appeal to the WMF for protection.
I absolutely agree that something has to be done to fight onwiki
harassment, including this kind of picking some victim and going after all
their editions tagging, reverting, copyediting, so that the person feels
constantly under vigilance. I personally know of a case very much like this
at the Portuguese Wikipedia happening right now, and going on for years,
also with a woman as a victim of victim . The community systematically
tolerates and protects the harassers (a group of 3 or 4 "umblockables") ,
and stops short of banning the victim. She constantly contacts me and other
editors asking for help, and I sincerely don't know what to do. Last time I
and others requested the intervention of the WMF (T&S) at Wikipedia, in a
rampage of cases of harassment and even blackmail, the result was
absolutely disastrous, with public exposure of the victims, destruction of
the editors involved in denouncing the situation, and an actual empowerment
of the aggressors.
I do not know what the solution is, and I really would like to know to
where one could appeal on such situation. WMF does not seem to be a good
option, as they have a solid record of making the problem way worse than
what it already is.
I also would like to know what means to T&S "risk of harm to himself", as
the last time a fellow editor confidenced to me they were about to kill
themselves, I felt completely lost with the answer I have received from the
official T&S account, and ended up dealing with the situation myself the
best I could. Fortunately the person is alive.
Paulo
A quinta, 13 de jun de 2019, 17:27, Bence Damokos <bdamokos(a)gmail.com>
escreveu:
I think it is important that the WMF is taking the
question of harassment
seriously.
If the community processes are not adequate, it is not an incorrect
response to take direct action to protect the individuals that are being
harassed. Ideally, community processes should be improved and WMF can give
a hint, but it would be too much to expect the victim to continue to be
harassed while the long discussion around changing community processes
takes place.
As I understand, community health is an important element of the on-going
strategy work and WMF has repeatedly drawn attention to solving the issue
of harassment on wiki[1], so it is not like they have not told the
communities that this is an issue that should be dealt with or that the
community discussions needed to empower the communities to do so are not
happening at all.
Best regards,
Bence
[1]
https://blog.wikimedia.org/tag/harassment/
On Thu, 13 Jun 2019 at 17:36, Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This misses the point, as others have highlighted
already.
The WMF can and /should/ globally and permanently ban paedophiles,
terrorists, system hackers and people making multiple cross-wiki death
threats or threats of suicide. There are perfectly good and
understandable reasons as to why the evidence behind these attacks and
threats would be kept unpublished, it's seriously personal or criminal
stuff.
The WMF making topic bans, interaction bans and limited project
specific bans against Wikipedians is a brand new invention, which goes
against the pre-existing understanding that the WMF do not replace
existing and perfectly adequate community agreed procedures for
banning bad behaviour on our projects. Once full time WMF employees
start doing in parallel what volunteer administrators already do, then
we should question why we do not *pay* volunteers administrators the
same hourly rate and we are likely to see a mass exodus of
administrators. After all, would you, say, deliver the post for free
in your area for fun, but thereby take away decent full time
employment with a guaranteed pension for your local postie?
If the reason for the WMF stepping in to ban Fram for a year is
because the WMF do not trust Wikipedia administrators or Wikipedia's
Arbcom to take sensible action in harassment cases, then they should
be raising that honestly and openly with Arbcom. If the English
Wikipedia's policies are not fit for purpose, or implementation of
policy is incompetent, we need a much bigger discussion than whether
Fram did something so terrible it cannot be named, but oddly was not
worth a global ban but only the equivalent of a 12 month block on
Wikipedia while they are free to do whatever they feel like on other
Wikimedia projects.
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
On Thu, 13 Jun 2019 at 15:35, John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com> wrote:
When you bad mouth other users there should be, and will be,
consequences.
> An admin got desysoped and banned after repeated warnings? So what? The
> only ting to be learned is that some people believe they can do
whatever
they want
and it has no consequences, and other people goes ballistic
when
consequences happen.
I would have given desysoped fram and 14 days to cool off, and if that
did
not work out repeated with one month. Banning
someone for one year is
like
telling them to leave and don't come back.
Someone at WMF is clearly
overly
sensitive, but not reacting would also be wrong.
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