WMF T&S will not do anything about off-wiki harassment either, apart from banning on-wiki users or offering to block your account as the target of harassment.
There's a lot that can be improved around harassment and civility, but honestly, the WMF has no special answers or powers, they do not claim to be experts. As someone who has had blackmail and death threats, advice from the WMF was a lot worse than advice I had from the either the police or victim support.
Though my experience is mostly dated, the WMF gave me bad advice which significantly delayed me from contacting the police, and I cannot recommend that a target of harassment put their faith in the WMF if they are targeted with harassment. The only reason I reported some nasty transphobic threats targeting me earlier this year was to ensure that the WMF had them logged, in case there was a wider pattern of abuse against other LGBT+ Wikipedians. WMF T&S have given me no useful feedback or updates on my own case in the months since.
I am very sorry to say this so bluntly, but from personal experience though WMF senior management write a lot of nice soft words about harassment and safe spaces, in practice a user being targeted is better off having private chats on IRC with volunteer stewards and checkusers that they trust, rather than WMF employees.
P.S. I encourage the use of the words "target of harassment". Being labelled as a "victim" which puts the focus on you just because you made a complaint, rather than the troll harassing others, is not helpful.
Thanks, Fae
On Fri, 14 Jun 2019 at 13:29, Isaac Olatunde reachout2isaac@gmail.com wrote:
I have seen a known user attacking me on one of Wikipedia's criticism site during my ArbCom case on the English Wikipedia but when it was report, they said there is nothing they can do about off-wiki attacks/harassment. That event alone gives me an impression that the English Wikipedia community cannot protect anyone from off-wiki harassment. Why would people feel comfortable to report a case of harassment to a community or group that can not protect them?
Isaac
On Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 8:33 AM Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
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@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@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@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.
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