On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 9:01 AM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
But I strongly recommend we seek out people who have experience with organizing this sort of thing before we try cobbling together an enforcement committee on our own, just as we seek out people with domain expertise on technical issues that we wish to implement.
Agree completely. Within the WMF, my sense is that Community Advocacy has the most domain expertise around community enforcement mechanisms, although the dynamics in the projects' communities of course don't map perfectly to those in our technical community, and I'd value their input.
More generally:
I think it's pretty well-known within our community (that includes me, that includes you if you're reading this, that includes everyone who works on MediaWiki, MediaWiki extensions, JS gadgets and user scripts, templates and Lua modules for Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and other sites, etc) that we've seen lot of negative interactions between people: anger, put-downs, "not my department", "RTFM", passive-aggressive eye-rolling sarcasm, etc -- these are the sorts of things that poison a community and make it harder to attract and retain people who start out excited about helping.
I believe it's important that we explicitly acknowledge this and improve our community norms -- and especially our enforcement systems -- with it in mind. Among other things, this means that listing out specific offenses has only limited utility; toxic behavior can easily extend itself through "rules-lawyering", as I think we've all seen on Wikipedia.
I agree that lists of specific behaviors aren't enough to produce a genuinely welcoming community, but it's still very important to have them in order to address the "oh, I didn't know that was inappropriate" argument (an unfortunately common one almost no matter what the offense). As they say, "common sense" isn't, especially in as broad a community as Wikimedia contributors.
-Frances