Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-09-30/From the editors

Wikipedia’s constitutional crisis may have come to an end.

The Wikimedia Foundation agreed that the English-language Arbitration Committee would have full power to review the one-year ban against administrator Fram. Three months later ArbCom unbanned Fram and removed his admin status while allowing him to apply for its reinstatement. The RfA failed and Fram withdrew. The details of the Fram case are covered in this month’s Special report. This article explores how we can address the underlying issues of the case moving forward.

At first glance, Wikipedia’s multilevel decision making process has shown that the en:Wiki community can protect its independence from the WMF, can make nuanced decisions about admin incivility and harassment, and protect editors against harassment once they file a complaint.

But on closer inspection, none of that was accomplished. The process was agonizingly slow, confused, and just ugly. The community did not come up with a method to minimize harassment in everyday practice. The difficulty of giving accused harassers enough information to defend themselves while protecting their accusers against potential further harassment was underlined. And any cooperation between the WMF and ArbCom or the community to prevent harassment was trashed as the WMF was routinely derided as the cause of the whole affair.

A proposal that ignores one of the issues will ultimately fail on all three counts.

Voices from the community
ArbCom will soon start a request for comment on these and similar issues. The Signpost asked over a dozen well-respected editors how we can move forward rather than dwelling on the wounds of the recent past. Perhaps because the wounds are still fresh only 6 agreed to comment using their usernames. Another allowed their comments to be used without their username. All responses were edited for length.

Levivich wrote, "The project will not succeed if we ignore or outsource maintenance of the pillars. Each of us can see harassment when it happens on-wiki; each of us has an obligation to not tolerate it. If bystanders spoke up more often, victims wouldn’t need to report."

Levivich's proposal appears to be very difficult to implement. He is suggesting a complete change in Wikipedia’s culture. Perhaps this is the only way forward.

One editor who preferred that his username not be used was skeptical that progress could be made "because one person's harassment is another's defending the encyclopedia." It would be easy to swamp ArbCom, “but if it were possible to filter out … misguided claims of harassment, a complainant might email ArbCom. The remedy might be to separate the people involved along the lines of ‘if the edits need attention, let someone else deal with it’…. There might be volunteer mentors who would act as intermediaries.”

Guy felt the WMF was to blame. His suggestions included:
 * WMF needs to write a policy for interventions on projects that details the amount of autonomy those projects have and offers office escalation as an option where a project has no ArbCom equivalent...
 * WMF needs to enact and document an internal review process, such that we can be confident that a ban is not enacted without fully independent review.
 * WMF needs to set up an appeals process for bans, and allow third party appeals from functionaries / ArbComs of projects...

What's next
There are some areas of agreement in all these views. Everybody recognizes that there's a problem with harassment or with the WMF's approach to it. Some respondents believe that we have a system in place to deal with harassment, but perhaps it can be improved. Others think that for Wikipedia's approach to harassment to change, our editors' attitudes must change. Nobody praised the WMF's approach to the problem. The RfC to be run by ArbCom will be interesting.

As always, your opinion, politely expressed in the Comments section below, is appreciated.