New subject: Discussion about proposed Technical Code of Conduct (TCC)

20 Nov 2016

I'm partly in agreement with Pine, this is more about policy than a bug and it should
be being discussed on meta not phabricator.

I disagree with Pine re the IRC channels. If the people running a particular IRC channel
want it to continue as the recommended channel from a particular Wikimedia wiki then it is
reasonable for the community to require that channel to comply with community norms. What
happens on IRC channels that are unconnected with the movement is arguably out of our
control. IRC has been a problem area in the past, I doubt I'm the only person on this
list who has discovered, sometimes long after the event that community IRC channels were
misused either to canvas against them or to say things that you'd be blocked for
saying on wiki. Clearly we can't implement an IRC policy on freenode channels that
conflicts with freenode policy. But I'd be surprised if we couldn't require a
stricter policy than freenode seems to for IRC channels promoted on wiki.

More broadly my concern with the approach is that it misses the main target. The nastiest
trolling, personal attacks and certainly the rape and murder threats will get people
blocked anywhere in the movement except maybe, definitely in the past but hopefully not
today, on IRC. We need to think how to protect members of our community from people who
barely count as members of our community and who may not even consider themselves as
such.

There is an argument for being stricter about incivility amongst the community, I suspect
with the ongoing greying of our communities this will happen regardless. My main concern
is not with shifting the boundary of what is or isn't acceptable but with dealing more
effectively with the worst stuff that is currently happening. That has implications both
technical and for legal/privacy. I'd like to change our privacy and Checkuser policies
to presume in favour of "fishing trips". If members of our community are being
seriously harassed on wiki I think it should be the norm to check the IP address and see
if any good hand accounts are also run by the same person. We all as individuals have
patterns around our editing, it shouldn't be beyond the capabilities of modern
technology to flag up a warning to the check users when a new editor appears with a
similar pattern to a banned troll. Dealing with off wiki harassment is more complex, the
technology and social mores may be outside our control. But some of the nastiest stuff
that happens online such as revenge porn is illegal or at least culturally unacceptable
pretty much everywhere. Tracking down where servers are, whose jurisdiction they are in
and liaising with local law enforcement are big tasks. I'd like to see the movement
and specifically the foundation and chapters as trail blazers in this.

Regards

Jonathan/wereSpielChequers

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  On 20 Nov 2016, at 12:00,
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 Today's Topics:

   1. Discussion about proposed Technical Code of Conduct    (TCC) (Pine W)
   2. Re: Implementing Katherine's Vision: "Discussing    Discussions"
      (Pine W)

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 Message: 1
 Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2016 21:45:42 -0800
 From: Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt;
 To: Wikimedia Mailing List &lt;Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;rg>,  Matthew
    Flaschen &lt;mflaschen(a)wikimedia.org&gt;
 Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Discussion about proposed Technical Code of
    Conduct    (TCC)
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    &lt;CAF=dyJiSgR_5+yTQ7Ynm4WnTDmfC1kwQjHxZ=_TwHs1jfo2vQA(a)mail.gmail.com&gt;
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 I'm forking this discussion from the (no subject) thread.

 I think it might be a good idea to have some sort of guidance, such as a
 TCC, for how incivility is handled in technical spaces beyond reporting
 problems with WMF employees to their WMF managers and/or HR, because not
 everyone works for WMF, so it might be good to have a way to handle
 situations when someone who is not a WMF employee causes problems in
 technical spaces.

 However, I'm not sure that I agree that the TCC is "a (draft) community
 policy, being approved by the community.  The community has already
 approved a large fraction of it.  It's not a (draft) WMF policy."

 A substantial proportion of the comments on the talk page (and the
 archives) are from WMF employees, not community members. I realize, Matt,
 that you have been attempting to recruit broader participation, but it
 looks like the results have been less than one would have hoped.
 Given WMF's history of clashing with the community about subjects such as
 Superprotect, VisualEditor, and ACTRIAL, it seems to me that while WMF
 participation in discussions such as this is good, the high proportion of
 WMF representation on the talk page makes the resulting document more
 likely to reflect the view of WMF and its employees rather than the larger
 community. So, no, I would not consider this draft to be a community
 document at this time. The proportion of participation from WMF staff is
 too high.

 However, there are some paths forward: (1) Proceed with this as a policy
 that applies to WMF staff only, (2) get the WMF Board to approve the
 document as a policy, or (3) get the document to pass a community RFC,
 closed by a community steward.

 My advice, if WMF wants this TCC to hold weight with the community, is to
 put a lot of distance between WMF and this document. WMF can support the
 document's creation, but should not be in a leadership role, and WMF staff
 should be far less prominent on the talk page. That the lower the
 proportion of WMF involvement in the creation of this document, the more
 likely the document is to be viewed in a positive light by the community.

 I don't mean to sound like I intend to halt the entire TCC process, but I
 would advise proceeding with it differently than the talk page suggests has
 been happening so far.

 Regarding the applicability of the proposed policy to IRC, I view the
 proposed TCC as requiring explicit opt-in from IRC channels through their
 own internal governance processes. The TCC's assertion that it applies to
 IRC channels does not, by itself, actually make that happen without
 explicit opt-in from those channels; similarly, my drafting a policy on
 English Wikipedia that claims to apply to #wikipedia-en would have no
 validity without opt-in from #wikipedia-en.

 I need to attend to other matters so I won't participate in further
 discussions on this topic for the near future, but I welcome comments (and
 differing opinions) from others. To reiterate: I think that there could be
 benefits from a TCC, but I would suggest (1) softening the WMF's role in
 the creation of this document and (2) stating that the TCC applies to IRC
 channels on an opt-in basis.

 Pine

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Discussion about proposed Technical Code of Conduct (TCC)