I think that I understand the GamerGate reference. A decentralized swarm of
harassment can be a major problem, and in this case I am concerned (I
haven't attempted to review the evidence) that at least one person is being
hounded off-wiki regarding their alleged involvement in this matter in a
way that would receive a firm response by ENWP administrators if the same
hounding was happening on ENWP.
Fear of being hounded can discourage people from reporting problems.
On English Wikipedia we have some administrators who are willing to make
politically difficult blocks, and we have an arbitration committee that has
been willing to review alleged misconduct by high profile people including
administrators, but I'm not sure that all wikis have a sufficient number of
competent and good faith administrators to address allegations of
misconduct, especially misconduct by people who have relatively high levels
of local political support.
Even more challenging to moderate are off-wiki activities in places which
do not honor ENWP norms. I do not know of a robust solution to this
problem, and my guess is that there is no robust solution unless we want
governments to have more ability to proactively filter and to suppress
Internet content that does not meet with their approval.
I think that ENWP is more like a busy, diverse, and loud public square than
a quiet office with tight control of what everyone does and a central
authority that quickly gets rid of people who make statements that are not
acceptable within narrow parameters. I worry that the concept of "safe
spaces" may come to mean something like: "People are only allowed to
participate on Wikimedia sites if they act according to WMF's opinions
regarding politically correct behavior and create content that does not
offend WMF". Political correctness and safety are not characteristics that
I would associate with Wikimedia sites, for better and for worse, and I
think that attempting to create more political correctness and safety can
come at too much expense of honesty, due process, freedom of expression,
and editorial independence. As mentioned by others, WMF’s recent power grab
calls into question the editorial independence of the Wikimedia communities.
This does not mean that I would give a free pass to Fram or that I am OK
with someone hounding a person who makes a complaint, whether on wiki or
off wiki.
I think that a good conversation for the ENWP community to have would be
regarding how we can increase confidence by victims of harassment in the
integrity of ENWP's investigation and enforcement systems. Courage is
sometimes necessary to speak up in public, as many of us are doing in this
thread and on wiki with various degrees of personal risk. I am concerned
about community members possibly deciding not to report problems because
they lack confidence that their reports will be taken seriously by ENWP's
community authorities and lack confidence that they will be protected from
further harm to the extent that the ENWP community can protect them.
(Protecting people from off wiki hounding is, unfortunately, probably
impossible if aggressors are determined to hound someone.)
I have concerns regarding a system for anonymous complaints because I
generally support transparent enforcement and due process. However, if
victims are not reporting problems due to fear and if there is a way that
we can provide due process protections for the accused while increasing the
confidence of victims in ENWP's investigations and enforcement systems then
I think that we should consider making modifications. This does not require
any involvement from WMF, although we might want to ask WMF for technical
support if needed for a system that we design or agree to implement.
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
P.S. I need to stop posting in this thread so that I do not exceed my limit
of Wikimedia-l posts for the month, but my silence does not indicate lack
of interest.
On Thu, Jun 13, 2019, 16:24 Paulo Santos Perneta <paulosperneta(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
No idea what could be the relation with GamerGate and
the current issue
onwiki at wiki en. Would you care to elaborate?
Paulo
A quinta, 13 de jun de 2019, 19:53, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
escreveu:
I think the problem is that the pathological
people, having been
called out on being pathological, decided to double down on the
original complainant. See also: Gamergate, a clearly apt and apposite
comparison.
On Thu, 13 Jun 2019 at 19:48, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm sad to hear that. I would not want a victim to go with a request
for
help to
WMF, local functionaries, an arbitration committee, or anyone
else,
> and have the situation end up worse rather than better. I don't know
what
> to recommend. Perhaps you could ask the
stewards what they think.
>
> I am also sad to hear about the difficulties regarding the situation in
> which you think that someone was at risk of self-harm. I think that the
> situation you described is probably appropriate for review by the
> management of WMF Trust and Safety so that they can take a second
look. I
encourage
you to contact them.
I am finding this conversation to be rather depressing, but I am glad
that
we are having it, because this is one way of
developing solutions.
Pine
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