Talk:Code of Conduct/Archive 4

Body size
We don't have anything related to body size, or this falls under physical appearance? It is important to me since I was born with a medical condition that makes me super skinny and I was called names a lot in school and people told me horrible things that continues today, It never happened in mediawiki space but I can imagine the possibility Ladsgroup (talk) 08:22, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
 * There are only examples in this CoC. Harassment may be alleged for whatever someone believes is harassment which easily includes appearance, medical conditions or the perception of these (this is how the police explained their approach to me in the UK, i.e. it's not their job to interpret what is or is not harassment, they take seriously any complaint and document it for further action). --Fæ (talk) 11:06, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, there's a reason it says, "Examples of harassment include but are not limited to"; it's meant to cover the most common issues, but it recognizes it might miss something. Let's go ahead and add body size, though, just for clarity. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 23:36, 17 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I changed "personal appearance, body size" to "physical appearance" as this seemed less awkward. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:43, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

this edit removed the explicit mention of body size, instead amalgamating it into "physical appearance".

While I understand the tendency towards brevity and efficiency, I think this is worth calling out. Body size makes a regular appearance in both tropes about engineers and harassment of people within technical spaces, with a frequency that most forms of "physical appearance"-based harassment do not. One of the things we are trying to do with this document is recognise that vagueness and catch-all terms in codes of conduct or behavioural guidelines tend to serve to provide wiggle-room when there is a violation, and that specificity is key to ensuring both that users are aware of what they are not permitted to do, and that community groups have a clear guideline to enforce that they can move on with confidence. With that in mind, and given the prominence of physical size as a trope and tool for harassment, calling it out seems perfectly sensible to me. Ironholds (talk) 19:30, 19 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree, especially given that Ladsgroup brought this up as well. I've put it back. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 21:29, 19 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I guess this makes at least the third case of attempting to address an unproven problem. Ladsgroup specifically stated that body size-related harassment had never happened in Wikimedia technical spaces to him. Similarly, there's no evidence of people encouraging other people to harass (Kaldari's suggestion above) or unwarranted rejection of patches (also discussed above). There seems to be a worrying amount of tilting at windmills here. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:12, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
 * If it didn't happen before that doesn't mean it won't happen and it doesn't mean it is not worth addressing in the CoC Ladsgroup (talk) 19:33, 20 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Would you tell a country where there had never been a bank robbery that there shouldn't be a law against it, since it's an "unproven problem"? Of course not, since everyone knows it happens in other places.  Similarly, we know these problems happen in other similar places. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 23:43, 20 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Are you able to name such a country? --Nemo 06:42, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Sure. Any new country, like South Sudan, on day 1.  Sane countries don't wait for a well-known crime to occur, then pass a law against it.  That would be silly. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 20:47, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I asked an example and you're providing an axiom. The axiom is easily refuted, for instance the Kingdom of Italy adopted all laws of the Kingdom of Sardinia from day 0. The example is not substantiated and is highly dubious, given article 198 "Continuity of Laws and Institutions

" of the South Sudan 2011 constitution. Nemo 16:45, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * As I said, "Sane countries don't wait for a well-known crime to occur, then pass a law against it." You just proved my point.  South Sudan adopted Southern Sudan's (region that was previously part of Sudan) laws exactly to avoid having to start from scratch.  Waiting for South Sudan's first bank robbery to ban bank robberies would have been foolish, so they didn't do that.  Why should we wait for a kind of harassment to occur to ban it, when we know it's happened elsewhere? Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 21:13, 16 September 2015 (UTC)


 * As a general principle, I think it is better to be more explicit than implicit describing the types of harassment we want to address in this CoC. The first goal of this document is to prevent problems, and a good measure to prevent problems is to spell them out. Let's not get stuck in these details, a good enough list is a good enough list. If these lists need one item more or one item less, having this discussion will be a lot simpler when the CoC is approved rather than now that we have many fronts open.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 08:54, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
 * "body size" is mentioned in the original Contributor Covenant. Someone's body size can be hardly a relevant factor in any discussion at Wikimedia tech, and therefore it is reasonable to think that if it ever comes across, it will be off-topic. I see no strong reasons to remove it, and I would recommend it to keep it for now, and see whether it is strongly contested when we ask for wider community feedback.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:34, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

COI
How the committee is formed interests me little, as I don't think we should have a committee (see above). As someone who has shared the responsibility of approving a code of ethics in an organisation way larger than our technical community, I recall that the main concern is generally conflict of interest, which must be avoided at any rate to prevent complete discredit of the policy.

Whoever decides on forceful enforcement (e.g. a block of a contributor) is disposing of movement resources (e.g. volunteer developer time), which also reminds us of Guidelines on potential conflicts of interest. For instance I would be uncomfortable if a WMIT (Wikimedia Italia) employee or contractor happened to "judge" a case involving another WMIT employee or contractor, as any outcome clearly implies (financial) interest: promoting the employer's interest affects renewal of a contract, vacating a job currently taken by an involved party affects employment opportunities in the organisation. --Nemo 07:28, 21 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Conflicts of interest are usual in community affairs, and there are ways to deal with it. Committee members have the same chances to have COI than stewards, sysops, WMF employees, and just any humans involved. Promoting diversity of affiliations in the committee and allowing committee members to disclose COI and step aside in specific cases should be enough to control this problem reasonably. Nothing new.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 09:51, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
 * This is a good suggestion. I've added a point about that. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 22:24, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks. "Members of the committee must not participate in a decision if doing so would place them in a conflict of interest." This is quite generic; I'd prefer the example I provided to be explicitly forbidden: «a WMIT (Wikimedia Italia) employee or contractor happened to "judge" a case involving another WMIT employee or contractor». Nemo 16:45, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * That seems like a highly specific example to use. Ironholds (talk) 20:31, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I note that the quoted guideline says "The WMF staff and committees are required to serve the same mission, ultimately report to the WMF Board, and do not have competing interests." Presumably this applies equally to WMIT. Even though in this case they don't report to the same board (the committee would probably not report to any board at all), they still serve the same mission, so their goals are aligned. Derailing a legitimate misconduct claim against a member of a Wikimedia organization would hardly be in the best interest of that organization.
 * That said, I don't think a restrictive COI policy would do any harm, either. Worst case the committee could just defer to the ECT if too many members have recused. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 01:26, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Nemo: by analogy, would this prevent committee members who work or contract for the WMF from being involved with cases that involve other WMF employees/contractors? If so, I don't think that's practical. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 20:42, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Does anyone think that Committee members with a conflict of interest should be free to act? If not, what is wrong an explicit statement prohibiting it? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:05, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Nothing is wrong with such a prohibition. In fact, there already is an explicit prohibition.  The questions are whether to provide an example (remembering that that example would only cover one of many possible issues), and what exactly constitutes a conflict of interest. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 06:09, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The strong point of wmf:Resolution:Guidelines on potential conflicts of interest is to "disclose actively" conflicts of interest. The first step is that if any Committee or any Developer Relations member think they have a COI, they should disclose it. Common affiliation doesn't presume automatically a COI, just like different affiliation doesn't presume automatically lack of COI. As a Developer Relations member, I would definitely think to have a COI if a report is made by or against another DevRel member, but the same is not true for the +200 employees of the WMF. Following Nemo's argument, if a WMF specializing on PHP development is fired because of a resolution, I will hardly benefit from that since I'm not a candidate for their position. However, if that PHP developer happens to be a close friend, then I will declare COI because I might be emotionally biased. The same can happen if certain non-WMF people who are close friends end up involved in a report. It is relative, and the first step is to disclose the COI. Once disclosed, the Committee or DevRel (depending on who needs to handle the report) can decide what to do, most probably keep that person out of the process to play safe.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 22:46, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Creeping bureaucracy
Stop it, just stop it. Everyone has been complaining for years of the ever-expanding bureaucracy and mass of rules in Wikipedia(s), which frighten new contributors. Yet new policies and side-processes keep being proposed everywhere, as in this example. I don't see any benefit in this document and I hope the proposal will be withdrawn as soon as possible to save us the burden of discussing it. --Nemo 16:17, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I have no intention of withdrawing the policy. The Wikimedia technical community is not part of Wikipedia.  It's true that English Wikipedia has Wikipedia:Civility and No personal attacks, but we don't.  There is no binding policy in this area for any online Wikimedia technical space.  So far from having a "mass of rules" in this area, we have essentially none. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 05:09, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Agree. This policy guarantees WMF control of volunteer discussion spaces (including spaces that are not operated by the WMF). This gives arbitrary control and is a potential censorship tool for employees or contractors to the WMF. There is no protection for a volunteer who might have fair cause to be raising critical or "non-positive" issues in a "technical space", there is no protection for whistle-blowers, there is no appropriate system of appeal, natural justice or governance for arbitrary actions taken under this code of conduct which may well be taken for debatable reasons of tone, misjudged jokes or confusion about who happens to be an employee using a non-employee account and is being mistaken for an unpaid volunteer (which happens all the time).

My reading of this policy is that it makes it possible for a WMF employee to choose to ban me forever from all the projects I am committed to as an unpaid volunteer, overruling community created project policies, for unknown reasons that may not even be provided to me so that I can correct any error, challenge them as a Joe Job attack, or ask for fair independent review. That makes it completely set against our values of putting the volunteer at the center of our projects. The idea that all Wikimedians should start officially reporting anyone "not being productive" I honestly find scary.

There is a need to do more about real harassment, this CoC confuses arbitrary allegations of "disruption" or being "non-positive" with harassment, and seems to make no attempt to ensure volunteers can appeal to elected volunteer peers for fair assessment of complex allegations of being thought by some to be disruptive, but not a criminal case that should be taken to the police if there is evidence to present, rather than unprovable allegations. --Fæ (talk) 19:33, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
 * My reading of this policy is that it makes it possible for a WMF employee to choose to ban me forever from all the projects I am committed to as an unpaid volunteer - If we're talking about you personally, I'm not sure I see what you mean. Most of your activity is on commons, which unless I misunderstand severely, is quite out of scope of this policy. Maybe this policy applies to tool labs (Does it? Its not entirely clear on that point), which would probably affect you more significantly. It would apply to in-person events, but people could already be banned without much appeal from such events anyways, so this is not much new on that front. (On the more general point though, I agree, fairness in enforcement is an important issue that is being hand-waved). Bawolff (talk) 21:31, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
 * And I just re-read the policy. Since my last reading the line "The Community Advocacy team also has the authority to investigate behavioral issues and recommend WMF global bans for individuals." has been added. So I guess I see where your coming from more. Bawolff (talk) 21:33, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
 * You may need to read the policy again. The CA team has always had that power - this policy does nothing about that. What it does is set out behavioural guidelines for technical spaces. Your objection to the policy around it chilling volunteers ignores an important line from the actual policy; "a healthy amount of constructive criticism and vibrant debate helps to improve our software and is encouraged". This is nothing to do with critiquing software changes in the sense of the community giving feedback on new extensions or features; this is to do with how people behave on phabricator, on gerrit, on wikitech-l, and making sure we have a welcoming community. I agree, for what it's worth, that "not being productive" is a bit vague, and probably needs fixing up. Ironholds (talk) 17:15, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
 * The CA team does not have the power to ban users from #mediawiki, #pywikibot, etc. Legoktm (talk) 23:40, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Wctaiwan} has removed "not being productive". I think they're right we don't need it.  It is from Bug management/Phabricator etiquette and I think the intention was/is to refer to cases where interpersonal problems or edit-warring were negatively affecting productivity, but it's true there are a lot of other causes of non-productivity, so it doesn't fit the policy as well as I would like. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 05:40, 11 August 2015 (UTC)


 * There is no protection for a volunteer who might have fair cause to be raising critical or "non-positive" issues in a "technical space", there is no protection for whistle-blowers. The policy doesn't do anything to threaten these forms of contribution.  If you have ideas about an explicit appeal process, please make suggestions.  Ultimately, though, any WMF employee is responsible to their manager and eventually the board.  I doubt managers and the board would allow the kind of abuse by employees you're hypothesizing.  The part about "seek to make our technical spaces a respectful and positive" is a preamble.  As Bawolff noted, this policy does not apply to Commons (except maybe software development there, e.g. Common.js and gadget development). Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 05:09, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Hang on, so this Code does apply to Commons then as you have listed examples? Specifically as I have published some of my bot code on Commons, and I use commons to discuss technical issues of batch uploads, then those discussions are now retrospectively controlled by this Code. If this is the case then there needs to be a Commons policy proposal. --Fæ (talk) 06:15, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I said 'maybe'. This is still just a draft, and the draft does not mention Commons.  I'll let other people weigh in on whether they would like to explicitly cover on-wiki code workspaces (like gadgets, etc.) (outside of MediaWiki.org)  Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 06:20, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I hope the scope of the Code can be made completely unambiguous. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 07:23, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I am strongly opposed to this applying to individual wiki Common.js. I don't think we legitimately have the authority to make policy for non-tech wikis or any of their pages. If someone from a content wiki comes to mw.org asking for help, or a channel like #wikimedia-dev, then this policy should apply, but pages on individual wikis should be the province of that wiki (Or something agreed upon at meta). Bawolff (talk) 08:12, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Consensus seems to be against it, and the current document already reflects that the virtual list is complete (there is no 'including but not limited' in the list of virtual spaces), so Common.js on other wikis (and similar things) is not included. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 21:31, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
 * It's utterly ridiculous that its inclusion was ever considered even remotely possible by anyone. --Nemo 07:32, 21 August 2015 (UTC)


 * i agree with nemo on the first sentence: stop it. why? the terms of use require clearly: "civility" elaborating it, including measures "We reserve the right to exercise our enforcement discretion with respect to the above terms." the discussion above shows imo only one thing: we have so many rules that even employees of the WMF have difficulties to know and understand them. the best is, the rules are nowadays written using so complicated language that we need a "human readable summary". if not humans, i am asking myself who else it could apply to and who else would read then the "real text". monkeys? computers? trees? --ThurnerRupert (talk) 01:55, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
 * This draft is far more specific than just saying "Be civil" or "Don't harass". There are many reasons we still need a Code of Conduct for technical spaces despite the Terms of Use, including:
 * The TOU do not define 'harassment' at all (even as a 'including but not limited to'), which means people may be unclear what constitutes harassment.
 * The TOU only addresses very specific kinds of disruption, while allowing other kinds.
 * The TOU is missing several specific provisions applicable to in-person events (of which there are now a fair number in the technical space), for instance regarding unwanted photography and unwanted attention.
 * The TOU does not address issues like offensive comments and personal attacks. It actually doesn't even require you to be civil.  Both the summary and the in-text part about civility ("We encourage you to be civil") are not binding.
 * It has only narrow provisions about privacy (only forbidding violating the law, or soliciting information). There is nothing forbidding doxxing people in unethical but legal ways.


 * But perhaps most importantly, the TOU can only be enforced by the WMF, and only in very limited ways (mostly limited to bans and legal action). The Code of Conduct can address cases where action needs to be taken, but it either doesn't violate the TOU, doesn't require a ban, or doesn't rise to the level where the TOU would be enforced in practice.
 * This is actually explicitly what the TOU intends to happen: "The Wikimedia community and its members may also take action when so allowed by the community or Foundation policies applicable to the specific Project edition, including but not limited to warning, investigating, blocking, or banning users who violate those policies." You'll note the TOU also makes clear that warning/reprimanding (an important way of dealing with misconduct that doesn't require a ban) is primarily meant to be handled by local communities. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 23:11, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

I have re-read this section, and it seems that all concerns have been addressed in new versions of the draft except perhaps one: "Everyone has been complaining for years of the ever-expanding bureaucracy and mass of rules in Wikipedia(s), which frighten new contributors." -- says Nemo. Why a new contributor would be frightened by this Code of Conduct? New contributors agreeing with our notion of unacceptable behavior don't even need to bother about this CoC, unless they become victims of unacceptable behavior, in which case it will be use for them to know that this CoC exists. About "creeping bureaucracy", from the point of view of a Wikimedia technical contributor it is actually the opposite: follow this CoC and you will be fine with whatever terms, policies and guidelines exist about contributors conduct.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 12:59, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Per en:Wikipedia:List_of_policies there are currently 57 policies on English Wikipedia, plus a bunch of global policies like the privacy policy and the terms of use. In contrast, the much more diverse tech space is governed by the privacy policiy, the friendly space policy, the Phabricator terms of use, the Labs terms of use, the development policy and the +2 policy. A comparison hardly seems reasonable.
 * (Also, it is a convenient and somewhat populist position to hate bureaucracy, just like hating politicians or big corporations or taxation. Yet for all of those things history repeatedly show that attempts to remove them end up very badly. (Common sense shows that, too. Imagine that we strike out all Wikipedia policies overnight. Can you see that being an improvement?) They can be done well or badly, but they all perform legitimate and vital functions.)
 * That said, it would be nice to see plans for the CoC eventually replacing the friendly space policy as there is a lot of overlap. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 01:52, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Reports involving WMF employees
This is a spin-off of the discussion of #Conduct Committee v Legal Counsel related to Wikimedia Foundation employees and the discussed requirement to report to WMF bodies such as the Human Resources or the Legal team (or the managers of the employees affected, let me add).

It is a fact that the Wikimedia Foundation must follow the law of the State of California. If a WMF employee is involved in harassment or other illegal type of conduct, the WMF might start accruing liabilities since the moment such event happens or is reported. Other considerations alien to this CoC and Wikimedia tech such as whether the employee has a management role or not do have clear legal implications. As a WMF employee, being a witness of a harassment case involving another WMF employee and failing to report this to your manager or HR might also have implications that fall beyond this CoC. We need to consider these factors when defining how reporting works and how the committee works. Employees of chapters i.e. Wikimedia Germany might be in similar/different situations based on the similar/different laws they need to follow.

The point being questioned is that private reports are expected to keep their privacy, and reporting to WMF HR or Legal would hamper such privacy. Let's try to dissect the problem: A point of flexibility here is the moment between the report to the committee and the decision of the committee to involve WMF Legal / HR or not. There is a risk for false accusations seeking escalation and trouble for an innocent employee, a form of harassment in itself. The committee could have a buffer to analyze reports before reporting them directly to the WMF. In fact, the process of escalation to the ECT already contemplated in the draft could be the step to follow: committee tells to ECT that this case involves WMF employees or might have legal consequences for the WMF, and ECT proceeds with the escalation.
 * Not all reports will have a strict requirement for privacy. In many cases the potential abuse is logged in URLs publicly available, so there is not much secret around them.
 * Not all private reports will refer to behavior legally classified as harassment or another type of conduct with legal implications.
 * Not all private reports with legal implications will affect WMF employees, although it is unclear whether these cases should still be reported to WMF Legal, because they would be happening in WMF infrastructure or activities...
 * About private reports that might have legal implications, the committee should recommend to the reporter to share this case with WMF Legal (and HR if it involves WMF employees). The reporter wants a solution to this problem, this is why they are reporting, and these bodies have experience and tools to support the committee and deal with the problem beyond it. Needless to say, members of these teams (just like the managers of allegedly offending/offended WMF employees) have signed a work contract and an NDA that ties them to stricter rules about privacy than the own committee members.
 * While theoretically there might be situations where the reporter will want to share a problem with the committee but not with the WMF even if a WMF employee is involved, I believe in most cases reporters will be comforted by the fact that their reports involving WMF employees will be properly reported and escalated to the WMF when needed.

Although this post is very long and the discussion might get a lot longer, when it comes to the draft I think we would only need to add something like


 * Reports involving employees of a Wikimedia organization as well as reports with potential legal implications to the Wikimedia Foundation must be shared with the Engineering Community team, who will consider the escalation to the WMF Legal or Human Resources teams.

--Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:36, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Why can't we just ask the victim whether they are OK with it? See Geek Feminism: Responding to reports and 'Why didn't you report it'. If the report is always sent to HR, it is very likely it will dissuade people from responding -- WMF HR is not generally seen as a neutral entity, and many people will assume HR and Legal will act to reduce liabilities for the Foundation rather than trying to solve the issue at hand, which triggers all the fears listed in the 'Why didn't you report it' post. Valhallasw (talk) 14:39, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Valhallasw, I agree. HR and Legal's jobs are, fundamentally, to protect the interests of the WMF. In many cases this should align with protecting the interests of vulnerable individuals, but I've heard from enough people who've learned the hard way not to trust their own HR departments that it is simply not reasonable to expect that all people who experience unacceptable behavior will be ok with that information being shared. The scenarios likely to be most concerning are when information is shared with HR, and retaliation occurs, or when information is shared with HR, HR acts, and the vulnerable person is blamed for HR's actions ("You got him/me fired!") and is now open to retaliation from that person or their friends/allies. There have been high-profile cases of both of these in tech within the last couple of years and it's not reasonable for people to blindly trust that the WMF will do better.


 * To be clear: I am not saying that I expect these to happen, or that WMF HR is incompetent or malicious. I do not expect coverups of major misconduct. I trust them considerably more than I've trusted HR at other orgs I've worked for. All that said, I still expect that if there is a situation where they have to choose between what's best for the WMF and what's best for me, there's a good chance they won't choose me.


 * At the same time, I see the arguments for having some way to involve HR: legal liability, and the question of what should happen if sanctions on an employee affect their ability to do their job. If a WMF engineer is banned from Phabricator for a week, that will affect their ability to carry out their work. If someone on Community Tech is permanently banned from Labs spaces, they won't be able to work on bots and tools and the scope of work available to them is suddenly much smaller. I think it's reasonable for HR to know about things that affect an employee's ability to do the work they are hired to do. I don't know how to balance that with targets' wishes and risk analyses.


 * I suspect there isn't a good answer here. I'd like to talk with someone from HR and Legal and hear what sorts of things they really need to know about, and see if there are existing confidentiality policies that can perhaps be adapted. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 17:39, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
 * It's already theoretically possible to be banned from Phabricator/Gerrit/Labs/wherever permanently, and therefore lose the ability to do your job. I don't see why we need a policy stating that WMF HR needs to be informed now. Particularly, we should be careful to leave the actual decision to the committee (never their company), with just a notification of the outcome going to the affected person's HR department (whether that be at WMF or WMDE or some random other contributor's company). -- Krenair (talk &bull; contribs) 18:08, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree that HR should not be able to influence the Committee's outcome in any way. But of course HR can take their own additional actions. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 20:10, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
 * +1. Ironholds (talk) 20:34, 3 September 2015 (UTC)


 * So are we happy with the fact that the Code may conflict with the laws of the jurisdiction where the incident complained of took place? For example, in the UK it is a crime to publish the name of the complainant in a serious sexual offence, yet this is arguably mandated by the code.  Whether or not there is a conflict in this specific case -- IANAL -- has WMF Legal explicitly considered what the effect may of conflict of laws and are they explicitly satisfied that their requirements are sound on this point?  Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:31, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
 * That's not true. IASOAL and what you're referring to is Section 5 of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992. You might note, if you've read that section, that it provides a complete defence of anyone accused of violating it if the complainant has given written permission for the name to be published. Ironholds (talk) 21:50, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Excuse me, it is true, and Malcolm Blackman was fined £400 for doing so as reported in the London Evening Standard on Thursday 3rd September. As you point out there is a statutory defence to the charge which is not relevant here since the Code does not require the complainant to give written permission for the complaint to be made public, and I doubt that anyone would suggest that was a reasonable requirement.  My question was addressed to the WMF Legal and unless "IASOAL" means "I am answering on behalf of the WMF Legal department" your response is somewhat irrelevant.  The question is, have the actual lawyers in WMF Legal explicitly considered what the implications are for their requirements when incidents take place in other jurisdictions especially when the law of the state of California is in conflict?  What we want here is a Code that encourages victims of harassment to speak up and protects their interests while not exposing the Committee to unncessary legal risks themselves.  That requires careful consideration by Legal. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 07:58, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Malcolm Blackman was fined for publicly identifying the person who said he raped her. That is not a remotely sensible comparison to make. Anyway, nowhere deos the CoC mandate identifying the complainant; in fact it states in quite clear terms that " All reports will be kept confidential. In some cases we may determine that a public statement will need to be made. If that is the case, the identities of all victims and reporters will remain confidential unless those individuals instruct us otherwise." This discussion has somehow become completely detached from the reality of the text. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 02:12, 13 September2015 (UTC)
 * My question was addressed to WMF Legal and asked for explicit consideration of the question as to whether their requirements for reporting incidents to them might be in conflict with the legal requirements of the jurisdictions in which events of harassment might take place (bearing in mind that this Code covers in-person as well as on-line harassment). I gave as an example the legal situation in one country for one sort of crime: a serious example to illustrate the possible difficulties in a serious situation.  The Code is already somewhat unsatisfactory in that the statement of strict confidentiality which you cite conflicts with the requirement to report to WMF HR in a range of cases.  Your opinion of one specific case is somewhat irrelevant.  In the absence of an answer from an qualified lawyer who has given careful attention to the implications of this requirement in the situation of conflict of laws, I think that it would be better for non-lawyers to refrain from giving their unqualified opinions on whether this part of the Code is legally sound. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:49, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I'll take no response in a fortnight as indicating that WMF Legal do not care about this issue. It would have been slightly more courteous to post a message here saying that they did not think it worth addressing, but I suppose their time is too valuable.  More surprisingly, the word they "require" has gone again.  Does this indicate that this requirement is no longer required?  If so, it really would help if they were to say so. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:23, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
 * No, what happened is that we decided to discuss by sections, and the "Report an issue" discussions have been left after solving Committee. I asked WMF Legal to wait until we discuss this section. This discussion will be reopened and eventually resolved when we get back to it.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 11:30, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
 * You may have thought that this question did not need answering just yet: I was not consulted in the matter. I find that discourteous, and the result has been to waste both your and my time.  The next time you contemplate telling one of your colleagues not to answer a question that I have asked, I would prefer to be consulted beforehand if at all possible and, at the very least, informed afterwards. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 16:29, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Rogol Domedonfors, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. When I proposed the "Next steps" I thought that pausing discussions like this one was implicitly understood. Now, re-reading, I realize that there was no clear relation other than the coincidence in time. Again, I'm sorry. How to handle the requirement for privacy with the requirement to report cases related to WMF employees to WMF HR or Legal needs discussion indeed. The other sections seem to be consolidating progressively, let's resume this discussion.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 19:40, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you for that. I am concerned that you seem to regard yourself as authorised to determine which parts of these discussions should be allowed to proceed, and which should not.  From where do you believe you acquired that authority? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:44, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
 * No authority. I just proposed Next steps, nobody objected, and I acted in consequence.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 05:35, 21 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Again thanks for clarifying that. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:42, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Remaining catch-all
"Other unethical or unprofessional conduct."

I thought Quim and others had worked to reduce the ambiguity in some of the language from this section. This last bullet seems to be an open-ended catch-all. Should it be included? --MZMcBride (talk) 04:49, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
 * This sentence comes from the original Contributor covenant this CoC is based upon. I think it is fine to keep it. If a report is filed about other unethical or unprofessional conduct, then the committee will evaluate it anyway.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 17:51, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't think we should really care about where it comes from, this needs to reflect exactly what we as a technical community believe is an appropriate rule, not what other people believe is an appropriate rule. I agree that it's too open to interpretation. @Qgil-WMF: Are you suggesting that the committee would deal with complaints outside the scope of the code of conduct? -- Krenair (talk &bull; contribs) 19:24, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
 * What if it was "other harassing or inappropriate conduct" to link it in more tightly with the narrative around that section as a whole? That way it makes clear that it's designed to cover behaviour in the same vein as what is explicitly laid out, even if the behaviour that occurs isn't - but also makes clear that the intent is not to ban someone from gerrit because they stole all the t-shirts at a hackathon (which would be unprofessional but probably isn't the Conduct Committee's business) I don't particularly think the conduct committee would ever lay claim to that kind of behaviour but I understand why people get apprehensive at catch-alls and this might tighten it up a bit . Ironholds (talk) 20:29, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
 * That's better, but I suspect it's already covered by "Examples include but are not limited to". -- Krenair (talk &bull; contribs) 20:33, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree that "Harassment and other types of inappropriate behavior are unacceptable" plus "Examples include but are not limited to" already cover the scope of the CoC. Removing the reiterative bullet point contributes to give a small percentage of relevance to the remaining bullet points, so I went ahead and did it. I think the result is slightly better, with no loss.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 06:33, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I read this as imparting some flexibility and space for discretion on the committee's part. Rigid policies invite rules lawyers. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 00:48, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * How is "Examples include but are not limited to" rigid? --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 02:41, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

The "inappropriate" and "unwanted" lines are still catch-all phrases that are not really helpful. "Unwanted" is meaningless unless we expect contributors to have the ability to read minds, and anyone willing to engage in conduct they deem to be inappropriate will not be deterred from it by a CoC asking them.

If "unwanted" is meant as doing something after you have been told it's unwanted, we should say so. Something like "Engaging in personal communication, following, physical contact (sexual or otherwise), photography or other recording that the offender has been made aware is not wanted"?

As for inappropriate: --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 02:41, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * is there appropriate use of sexual language/imagery? All the high-profile cases I can think of involved completely innocent use of sexual imagery, such as showing a girl in a bikini as a transition between slides; but most involved seemed to agree that it was inappropriate. The safe approach is probably to not use such things at all, unless it is necessitated by the subject of the discussion (e.g. when talking about a profanity filter or an explicit content warning feature). So maybe replace it with "unnecessary use of sexual language/imagery"?
 * I have changed "inappropriate" for "gratuitous or off-topic", which is clearer and more precise, borrowed from http://todogroup.org/opencodeofconduct/ --Qgil-WMF (talk) 11:01, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I support the change insofar it is more clear, but - Tgr, there is no situation in which using a girl in a bikini as a slide transition is anywhere near innocent. It is inherently and immediately something that creates a hostile environment. If what you mean is that the person who did it didn't realise it's a problem, that's a totally different class of issue. Ironholds (talk) 20:15, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree (although that blog post is terrible). The point I was trying to make is that in the objective sense of inappropriate = people protest when it happens, any avoidable use of sexual content seems to be inappropriate, so we can as well as drop the attributive (thanks Quim!). --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 07:00, 21 September 2015 (UTC)
 * A sideswipe at the resourcing isn't really useful or conducive to this conversation. I'm glad we're in agreement. Ironholds (talk) 15:50, 21 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't think there is such a thing as inappropriate but wanted following/phyisical contact/etc. so just saying unwanted should be good enough there.
 * Inappropriate communication is probably already covered by the other points; if not, those points should be expanded instead.
 * I disagree that we need the ability to read minds to know what is unwanted, even before being explicitly told. Social conventions define defaults for wanted/unwanted. These defaults can be definitely fuzzy and different across cultures etc, but they exist and are quite common in many situations related to i.e. sexual contact or stalking. I would also simplify "Inappropriate or unwanted" in simply "Unwanted" to make the point stronger. "Unwanted communication" can be me keeping sending you private emails about personal topics after you have requested me repeatedly to stop doing that. The content of each email might be formally correct and not a violation of the CoC but the act of persevering in an unwanted personal communication becomes harassment.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 11:16, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Unwanted and inappropriate conduct are surely different things. Certain acts when performed in public may well be inappropriate even if consensual. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 13:12, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Mmm true. Then it looks like the current wording is correct after all.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 14:25, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree with Quim. In many cases, the social cues and conventions show that something will certainly or most likely be unwanted.  We do not want to allow "they didn't explicitly tell me it was unwanted" as a guaranteed free pass.  It's true there may be good-faith borderline situations caused by genuine culture differences and/or misread social cues.  But that's why the committee can ask all sides and come up with an appropriate penalty, which might only be a private warning in a minor case caused by a genuine misunderstanding. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 04:26, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The list of unacceptable behaviors begins with "Examples include but are not limited to" which makes it clear that a behavior can be considered unacceptable despite not being explicitly listed there. That is sufficient to prevent rules lawyering. All other points should serve the purpose of preventing misbehavior (or encouraging its reporting) by telling someone who otherwise would not have realized that a certain thing is unacceptable. Handwavy stuff like "do not engage in communication in a way that violates cultural conventions or social cues" does not do that. If someone does not know what said cues and conventions are, the CoC does nothing whatsoever to help them. If someone does know, they don't really need the list of unacceptable things at all; they just need to know that there are consequences for behaving unacceptably.
 * So vague claims do not make the CoC more effective, but they can be actively harmful. Conventions are fuzzy across cultures and also across different levels of social skill. Saying "don't do inappropriate things" implies that you should know what those are, and if you don't know (or don't know what's inappropriate in the US, or at a conference attended by rich industry types you don't normally meet, etc), you are at the wrong place. (Also worth noting that about 1 in 20 adults in the US are estimated to have social anxiety disorder; anecdotally, it is even more frequent in online and technical communities. WebMD describes it as fear that someone "will make mistakes, look bad, and be embarrassed or humiliated in front of others. The fear may be made worse by a lack of social skills or experience in social situations. ... As a result of the fear, the person endures certain social situations in extreme distress or may avoid them altogether." Warnings about horrible consequences of ill-defined bad behavior can easily prevent such persons from joining a community.)
 * Again quoting the Open CoC, "continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease" is an actually useful way of putting what "unwanted communication" was probably intended to mean. The other "unwanted"/"inappropriate" points can probably be rewritten along those lines. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 10:01, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * "Continued one-on-one communication, following, or stalking after requests to cease."? --Qgil-WMF (talk) 12:08, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that would be a clear and helpful warning of what not to do. I would maybe replace "requests" with "a request" just to make it entirely clear that you are supposed to stop bothering others as soon as they first ask you. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 08:11, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * This explanation of social anxiety is an excellent explanation of what it feels like from the perspective of people who feel they are at risk of getting things wrong and being in violation of behavioural standards, but it is just that - one-sided. It is not the only way social anxiety can appear and present in this sort of space, much less the world as a whole.
 * Here's another example for you; someone suffers from social anxiety and they witness (or are subject to) the violation of the code of conduct. Now they have to report it. That means talking to a load of total strangers about something that happened to them, or that they saw, with those strangers making a judgment of how important that thing is. It means having to rock the boat, sometimes in front of absolutely everyone. It definitely means rocking the boat in front of the person who was misbehaving. Those are all socially anxious situations, and they are all situations people can run into as the victims of misbehaviour not the potential perpetrators of it.
 * We seem to be doing a lot of work to make sure that everyone is comfortable being subject to this policy, and putting ourselves in that mindset, and I see nowhere near as much prose on the other side - making sure that this is comfortable for the people who might need this policy. That needs to change. Part of it is that people discomforted with a policy includes a subset of people who are worried they violate (or would violate) it, and those people show up, and because by definition people who find the existing space uncomfortable are far less likely to appear in the discussion. But part of it is us being fairly selective with what we spend our time empathising about. Let's please stop doing that. If we're going to start waxing lyrical on the costs to the people this would be enforced against we should be just as empathetic to and spend just as much, if not far more, time, on the people who need this. Ironholds (talk) 20:01, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't think an equal-time rule for discussion topics would work well nor that this design process should be presented as a trade-off between making the code of conduct friendly to the people who are harassed or for those who are not harassed - let's try and do both.
 * I think the best way to address reporter anxiety is anonymity - if full anonymity is not viable, than at least for the initial step of asking whether a given incident is something the committee would consider as an issue. Not sure if there is a technical measure for making that easy (if nothing else, a reporter could register a throwaway email address). Plus word the CoC in such a way that it invites reports when in doubt. And make it clear that the identity of the people involved is a private issue and publishing it falls under "Disclosure of a person's identity or other private information without their consent". --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 06:52, 21 September 2015 (UTC)
 * per above, maybe change the Confidentiality section of the committee page to include all participants, not just the members? --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 07:09, 21 September 2015 (UTC)
 * the details about confidentiality of reports should be clear and specific in the Reporting page. I think it is fine to leave the Committee page withing the scope of the Committee.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 08:12, 21 September 2015 (UTC)
 * That section works too, but I don't think the current section is as clear as it could be. It focuses on the committee treating information confidentially; it gives no guarantee of the (alleged) offender doing so. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 08:33, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

I have received a private comment uncomfortable with the change to "Gratuitous or off-topic use of sexual language or imagery". Since I did that edit based on the Open Code of Conduct, let me explain. "Sexual language or imagery" is a vague topic with multiple (and frequently incompatible) expectations across cultures, social backgrounds, etc. Note that "sexual" and "sexist" are different words, and we are choosing to use the first one here. In Spanish, names of male and female sexual parts of the body can be used frequently by both men and women. If during a presentation in a conference I say "coño" or "joder", this will hardly be considered "inappropriate", although nobody would argue that in the context of a public communication they are definitely "gratuitous or off-topic".

On sexual imagery, different people and cultures have different opinions about how much exposure of the body you need to become sexual, and how much sexually explicit an image needs to be to become "sexual". In Spain any beach is good for top-less by people of any age, while seeing pre-teen boys and girls playing naked is not unfrequent, and nudist beaches are everywhere, frequently constituting just a segment of a regular public beach. With very different temperatures, Scandinavia has a similar concept of freedom to show your own body. In Spain or Scandinavia, if I would start my presentation humorously showing a picture of myself naked at the beach when I was 10 or 30 years, that would be hardly considered inappropriate (as long as the picture is family style and not obscene), but nobody would argue that this is "gratuitous or off-topic".

This is why I think "gratuitous or off-topic" is better than "inappropriate", because the first option actually is more effective on preventing the use of any sexual language and imagery at all, regardless of how "inappropriate" it is considered by the different parties involved. You could say, so why not simply saying "Any use of sexual language or imagery"? My opinion here is that such type of sentences may carry a connotation of 'all sexual language and imagery is intrinsically bad' that I personally disagree with, and I don't even think that is a debate we need to start here. This is a Code of Conduct for technical spaces, where sexual language and imagery will be hardly necessary and on-topic ever. "Gratuitous or off-topic" allows for consensus across a wide range of socially valid sexual perceptions that don't fall in the category of sexist, and is equally effective at catching any sexist language and imagery.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 07:11, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I'll chip in here mostly due to my background with Wikimedia LGBT and interest in the history of sexuality, though I have materially stepped away from discussing this CoC as a mediawiki volunteer.
 * There should be a distinction between an intent to create a hostile environment or upset a specific contributor, and casually referencing material that some might find offensive or choose to take offence from. This can easily be part of a technical issue under discussion, as for Commons some of the most "noticed" or complained about files are those with nude figures, erotic artwork, or linked with sex education. My uploads this week have several hundred images of nude adults and children, as our book plates project covers 19th century medical and surgical images (including photographs that some may find distressing or not safe for work). Personally, I would take care to avoid inserting images like this into any technical discussion in a surprising way, however a technical issue is actually more likely to be noticed by reusers and reported as examples, rather than more mundane or specialized ones. It may also be the case that some of our projects focus on sexuality or LGBT culture (a couple of mine have), and whatever our policies on individual conduct, we should not make good faith volunteers who are helping with these projects worried about being accidentally being caught up in official complaints, or put at risk of ending up publicly sanctioned (even if in practice I hope we all expect this an unrealistic concern). Anyway, whatever the final wording, I would hope that if there is no intent to cause distress, that this would be quickly identified as a communication or cultural gap issue, rather than one that would ever necessitate formal harassment procedures and sanctions. --Fæ (talk) 13:49, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Is there anything we could alter about the scope of the policy that would make people feel more comfortable about the projects it covers? By that I mean that if we're applying this policy directly to any content projects, sexuality/LGBT culture or no, we've messed it up somewhere, and that's evidently a concern. I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean by "a technical issue is..." - the scenario in which someone from one of these projects notices a bug and the bug report contains potentially offensive materials? Or am I reading it wrong? Ironholds (talk) 15:30, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Own page for the Committee
There have been several mentions about the usefulness to move all the details about functioning and membership of the committee to an own page. I think this is a good idea for several reasons: It is still worth keeping the text in the CoC page while we are drafting in order to keep the discussions in one place at this point. However, that text should be clearly marked to go to its own page. This separation has been seen positive by several people before, so I went ahead proposing the change in the draft.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 07:17, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * it simplifies the CoC document
 * we will need a page for the committee anyway, to identify its members, post announcements, etc
 * details about the functioning of the committee can be discussed and agreed without having to touch the CoC, which should be a quite stable document.
 * It is fine for the CoC to be composed of multiple pages. However, we should separate what is the CoC policy, and what is adjacent administrative stuff (e.g. list of committee members, procedural details the committee comes up with).  Obviously the list of people and announcements are not part of the CoC.  But also, the procedural details are not; they can clarify details of CoC enforcement, but not be inconsistent with it.  Amending the CoC is different from adding a procedural element.
 * I suggest we compose the whole Code of Conduct (i.e. the policy-level parts) of everything under Code of conduct for technical spaces/Policy. So this main CoC document would be moved to Code of conduct for technical spaces/Policy, and subpages that are still parts of the CoC proper would go to e.g. Code of conduct for technical spaces/Policy/Committee.  The list of committee members and user-friendly non-binding explanation could go to Code of conduct for technical spaces/Committee.  Procedure the committee comes up with itself could go to e.g. Code of conduct for technical spaces/Committee/Meeting procedure. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 14:58, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I got lost. From the current Committee section, what would you keep together with Principles and Unacceptable behavior, and what would you move to own pages? I think we can recreate these pages here using "=" headers, so we have the real division of pages but still everything in one place for better discussion.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 02:01, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I would approach this from a usability point of view. There are going to be a lot of readers who want to learn what they shouldn't do / what they should call out others for doing, and (hopefully) a very few number of readers who need to know how to report violations or otherwise get involved in the enforcement process. So separate the description of what people should not do and the description of what happens when someone does it anyway. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 02:46, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I have started by separating the CoC page from the Committee page. We could have a "Report an issue" section after "Unacceptable behavior" with the minimum information, linking to Code of conduct for technical spaces/Report an issue where the full process of reporting, enforcing, and appealing would be described. This would leaves us with three pages: CoC, Report and Issue, and Committee.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 22:27, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * ... and I have moved the Reporting/Enforcement part to an own page as well. The draft now reflects a structure of three pages that looks usable and solid. What do you think?--Qgil-WMF (talk) 14:24, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I disagree with this change (and Tgr's initial rationale that very few people will hopefully need the enforcement mechanisms).
 * Yes, in an ideal universe enforcement is rarely or never needed, but UX design is not just about prioritising the most common use cases, it is about prioritising the most important use cases. Sometimes these are the most common, but sometimes they aren't - for example, removing the "edit" button from Wikipedia would marginally improve the UX for 99% of users but totally cripple site usage for the remaining 1%, and as that site usage is essential to our functioning, we don't do it.
 * This is a code of conduct. It's designed primarily to act as a shield and conduit for people who are badly treated. Yes, one part of that is the presence and enforcement of the policy hopefully encouraging people to behave better, but there is no situation where someone needs enforcement and doesn't really need enforcement. Making finding how to contact the committee and how all of that works easy is of primary importance. Putting it on a sub-page from the actual behavioural guidelines undermines that primacy. It should be on the same page as the rules we expect people to adhere to. Ironholds (talk) 19:54, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I actually would say that stressing the details on reporting and enforcement (as they are stressed when they occupy 2/3 of the whole page) undermines the essence of the code of conduct, which is the definition of expectations and unacceptable behavior. The codes of conduct we got the inspiration from and we are referring to as good examples don't get into the details of reporting and enforcement, they are solid and sound. If the problem is that users of the CoC need to see clearly that they can report the problem, I'm sure we can find a design solution to that. If your concern is that by separating procedures from CoC we make them more fragile or something, all of them will be tagged and treated as policies.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 15:45, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I thought I'd been pretty clear, but; my concern is that when people need to know where to go for enforcement they really need to know. Separating out the enforcement mechanism undermines this use case. I'm not saying all the enforcement process needs listing on the main page, but it needs a clear and prominent reference to who to contact if there is a problem. Ironholds (talk) 15:57, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Now we have a section "Report a problem" describing the expected escalation process (contact the person or contact the admins or report to the committee), offering a link to "report a problem", and the email address. If someone who really need to know landed in the CoC page, sending an email right away to techconduct@ should be enough, otherwise the rest is just one click away. If we are considering really urgent cases here, then we should add the note about emergency@, which is entirely a different thing.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 06:01, 21 September 2015 (UTC)
 * My concern is to separate policy-level pages and other pages (as an analogy, Wikipedia:Verifiability is a policy, while w:Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth is just a wiki page). It's takes more consensus to change a policy-level page than an ordinary page (even one summarizing a policy).  I don't think we need essays about the CoC (but people could put them in userspace), but we do need supplementary pages (e.g. list of committee members at Code of conduct for technical spaces/Committee, meeting procedure devised by each committee at Code of conduct for technical spaces/Committee/Meeting procedure) that are not policy-level.  I've shown my proposal using the system you've made on the main page (= sections).  The separation already there made sense, so I just changed the titles.  Only the policy-level ones need to be decided now. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 04:13, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree with you that we need to identify policy pages as such and we need to follow a more careful process to update those. However, I think naming the pages with "/Policy" is superfluous and adds an unnecessary bureaucratic flair to the CoC. A Template:Policy should be enough to achieve that. This doesn't stop the Committee creating the non-policy pages they need.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 05:44, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Okay, I don't feel strongly about it, so I've undid my edit. Template:Development policy (that's what Template:Policy redirects to) is not suitable, though, since it is meant for a different type of policy with a different approval and update process.  That can be addressed with a new template, e.g. Template:Conduct policy or Template:Community policy. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 06:39, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Consensus discussion on intro, "Principles", and "Unacceptable behavior" sections
Do we have consensus that the current text of the intro (lead section before "Principles"), "Principles", and "Unacceptable behavior" should be considered done?

This does not mean these sections would yet become binding. There will be separate procedure later to decide whether to approve the Code of Conduct.

This is just about whether we can mark these sections as done, and move on to the remaining sections. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 15:18, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Reminder. The consensus discussion is solely about the linked version, not changes made after that.  I am thinking if this version has consensus, we could look at the changes made after that and maybe have a brief discussion (1 week) about whether to approve further changes that happened during the first discussion. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 21:01, 16 September 2015 (UTC)


 * I think we've done a good job addressing issues and coming up with consensus text for this. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 15:18, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I still think that, in the "Principles" section, the "we" sentences -- "we pledge", "we are committed" -- should be rewritten. As currently stated, I would think these are meaningless at best, false claims at worst. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:40, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * discussion: 
 * . Looks pretty good to me. I understand Yaron's concerns but I don't have a problem with aspirational prologues, as it were. Ironholds (talk) 15:50, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * No. The intro is incorrect (claims "we" have control of things "we" don't control, contains undefined phrases such as "representing the project"); principles are either empty babble or dubious (freedom of religion is mentioned, but not freedom of opinion, thought or expression?!); "Unacceptable behavior" is either redundant (compared to the terms of use) or tautological ("prohibited things are prohibited"). --Nemo 16:22, 10 September 2015 (UTC) P.s.: This comment is not an endorsement of the validity of this section as tool to determine consensus on this matter.
 * discussion: 
 * Given the 21:01, 16 September 2015 comment above, I confirm that the same problems are present in the current version. --Nemo 11:05, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * This is solid, and has been modified to address most of the points that have been raised in the discussion. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * It looks pretty solid to me and discussion on those sections seems to have died down. Kaldari (talk) 23:35, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I think these sections are simple and clear, the result of a very fruitful discussion. There might be still little details to polish while we draft the rest of the CoC, but I think the draft is already very good as it is now.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 23:49, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * These sections look pretty solid and I agree with everything said in them. I wonder if it would make sense to name 'prolonged staring' as an example of "inappropriate or unwanted attention" to avoid potential "well how was I supposed to know that's what it meant too" issues? --MPopov (WMF) (talk) 21:22, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I would still like to see the changes as discussed here. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 23:38, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
 * , persons employed discussing something applicable to developers, a nogo. besides this, there is no agreement beforehand to "do we need a code of conduct". additionally, there is no cultural awareness here, only anglo-saxon persons or persons employed there discuss for the world. there is no consideration of alternative models which might have a much higher impact, as eg "positive code of conduct" / "exemplary" / "living principled behaviour". the goal is not defined: is it to get more devs to write software? then the proposal is a miss. is it because the space is unfriendly? then the example cases are missing. for how many persons is this? if it is only for 10 persons, than it is overkill. should the code be short and easy? then it is a miss as alone the introduction is longer as other examples. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 07:05, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
 * discussion: 
 * . I'm not WMF, nor anglosaxon, nor employed in an anglo-saxon country, yet I fully support having a code of conduct to set an absolute minimum on how people act in our community. I feel these sections clearly set this minimum. Valhallasw (talk) 10:48, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
 * As a person who is still dubious about the effectiveness of a CoC, I nevertheless feel the need to bring some concerns here. As in the Contributor Covenant, terms such as "project administrators" and "maintainers" are not clearly defined; the definition of "unacceptable" as "inappropriate" is indeed tautological; and there is no reason why resolutions lasting less than 3 months may not be appealed. -- Ricordi  samoa  14:19, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
 * discussion: 
 * I've seen harassment on-wiki and off-wiki for a very long time and it made me thick-skinned but I hope this CoC helps creating a foster place for newbies. It seems these sections can set the minimum of a foster environment. Ladsgroup (talk) 18:39, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
 * It is regrettable that this discussion has been very largely conducted by WMF staff and that the support gained comes very largely from that group. Until there is a significant level of support from the volunteer community, the code will lack legitimacy.  Indeed, at present it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to an imposition on the community by the WMF, in tht the code has been largely drafted by WMF staff, is angled at the specific constraints of WMF staff, and assigns the ultimate enforcement authority to WMF staff.  This is not a comfortable position.  Why is there so little input at this stage from the wider community?  In the matter of legitimisation, the widest possible degree of involvement is desirable. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 18:59, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
 * discussion: 
 * I approve of the language and organization of content in this draft. Code of Conducts are not for me. Or you. They are for the underrepresented people who don't have the privilege we have. Those who don't feel comfortable attending our events - or if they do attend, speaking up when someone acts against members of the community. It's telling the the opposers to this are mainly made up of young men - not the group of individuals that would most benefit from a Code of Conduct.


 * We can't speak to the experiences of individuals that would most benefit a Code of Conduct. But we can use our position of privilege to give them a larger voice. I think it's important to publicly state that events are dedicated to providing a inviting and supportive environment that does not tolerate discrimination or harassment. Equally important is having a strong process for event organizers on what to do if something does happen. They should be empowered to act if an unfortunate event occurs without hesitation. Far smarter individuals have said it better than I. I encourage you to learn more.


 * https://medium.com/@bmanning/the-code-of-conduct-conundrum-ceb3693af7d3
 * http://republicofquality.com/lessons-from-a-code-of-conduct/
 * http://rachelnabors.com/2015/09/01/code-of-conduct/

Ckoerner (talk) 15:01, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
 * All of my concerns with these sections have been resolved. John Vandenberg (talk) 21:01, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

"We pledge"
I still think that, in the "Principles" section, the "we" sentences -- "we pledge", "we are committed" -- should be rewritten. As currently stated, I would think these are meaningless at best, false claims at worst. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:40, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I thought this had been addressed in this discussion. By approving this CoC, we as a community would be pledging and committing. If you think a different wording is needed, please create a section with your proposal. Meanwhile, that paragraph has gone through a good deal of review.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 23:47, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
 * It was addressed before, but without resolution, just like now. Yaron Koren (talk) 00:35, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Yaron Koren, I have tried to think of a different wording trying to guess your thoughts and I'm incapable of getting anywhere keeping consistency. "We" is identified as "contributors and maintainers of Wikimedia technical projects". Pledge and commit are the basis of any Code of Conduct aiming to be an actual guarantee for anyone being harassed or disrespected. What decent alternatives are there? Not to pledge, not to commit? Provide a list of contributors that explicitly checked a box to pledge and commit, wishing you good luck not to get in trouble with the rest? :) Ideas welcome.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 02:17, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for asking. Here's my proposed rewrite of the first two sentences:
 * "In order to make the Wikimedia community an open and welcoming one, it is important that we respect all people..."
 * "Participation in Wikimedia technical projects should be a respectful and..." Yaron Koren (talk) 15:37, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Please check the new version I'm proposing. I think it covers your concerns, and I simplified the wording altogether, keeping the meaning of the sentence. I have kept the verb "commit", because I think it is essential for any Code of Conduct (and the ones I checked all contain that word or equivalent). Committing means that we take seriously the "it is important that we respect" and the "should be respectful".--Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:06, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * It's definitely better, in my opinion, though I'm still not a fan of the "We are committed" line - it's a statement that can't be possibly be true. (And by the way, if every single person in the community were truly committed, there presumably wouldn't be much of a need for a code of conduct in the first place.) Yaron Koren (talk) 13:35, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * "We are committed" is used consistently in this Code of Conduct. If the CoC is approved by the community, then as a community we are committed. Like in any plural community, members are free to have their own opinions, and some will care more than others about this CoC. However, if someone is not committed to the extent of disrespecting or harassing others, then we as community commit to take action. Anyway, I think I see your point and I certainly see yours. I think we have approached positions compared with some editions back, and I hope the current wording is good enough to focus on other potential improvements.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 20:48, 15 September 2015 (UTC)


 * "It was addressed before, but without resolution, just like now." I don't agree with that.  It was resolved as a compromise.  You summed up as "It feels like this whole section could just be removed".  Other people didn't want to remove it.  After a couple changes, you acknowledged that some of your concerns with the Principles section had been met.  In other places, the draft stayed closer to the Contributor Covenant. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 21:33, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I expressed a concern, and it was half-alleviated. Is that a resolution? That's a matter of opinion. Yaron Koren (talk) 23:35, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
 * From my perspective, this is how consensus and negotiation with the rest of the community goes. The current draft--which I am supporting--is certainly not my ideal draft. I don't agree with all the changes that have been made, but not enough for me to not support it overall. Is your remaining disagreement something that means you would oppose this generally, or is it something that you don't like but can live with? --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 19:27, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I actually don't have a strong opinion about the document overall, one way or the other. Yaron Koren (talk) 01:26, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't have a strong opinion either way but We the People-style pledges are pretty standard (the Open CoC has a good list at the end and every one of those has language like "we commit to" or "project X is committed to") and generally understood to express a common consensus and not literally the agreement of every single participant. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) HH:MM, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

Redundance and freedom of opinion
No. The intro is incorrect (claims "we" have control of things "we" don't control, contains undefined phrases such as "representing the project"); principles are either empty babble or dubious (freedom of religion is mentioned, but not freedom of opinion, thought or expression?!); "Unacceptable behavior" is either redundant (compared to the terms of use) or tautological ("prohibited things are prohibited"). --Nemo 16:22, 10 September 2015 (UTC) P.s.: This comment is not an endorsement of the validity of this section as tool to determine consensus on this matter.
 * Nothing wrong with being redundant. Would you seriously inflict reading the 40.000 character terms of use on everyone who wishes to learn about etiquette? :)
 * Freedom of religion is actually not mentioned. What is mentioned is "making participation respectful and harassment-free for everyone regardless of religion". People certainly should not be harassed for holding unpopular opinions, whether religious or not; do you have any specific suggestion on how to amend the text? --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 03:26, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The Terms of Use apply to everyone who uses the sites, so the answer to your question has to be "Yes". Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:45, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
 * It applies to everyone, but no one actually reads it. WMF Legal made epic efforts to make that document readable and it's better than most ToUs; even so, it's a dozen pages, most of which is legalese. With the CoC we should be aiming at a document that we can refer people to and they will actually read it.
 * In any case, there is a single sentence in the ToU about unacceptable behavior that overlaps with the CoC ("Engaging in harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism"); Nemo is exaggerating there a bit. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Laughable. WMF Legal made epic efforts to replace long-standing terms of use with a document three times as long. Now, you are making epic efforts to impose additional walls of text in front of new contributors: the current draft is longer than the entire terms of use were. Maybe this is https://xkcd.com/927/ striking again. --Nemo 10:41, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The full page is now 13K; without the reporting and committee parts (which would be on separate pages and uninteresting to the average contributor) it is 4K. In contrast, the terms of use is 40K; the old version was 7K. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 10:54, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for confirming. Note that, if this becomes a policy, then per the terms of use everyone is forced to agree to it (and hence having read it, of course). It doesn't matter on how many pages you scatter it. --Nemo 11:10, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * If it becomes a board policy, yes, which isn't something I've seen the people driving this discussion pushing or asking for (although individual contributors, all volunteers iirc, have). Ironholds (talk) 11:29, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * By way of comparison, the English Wikipedia has (per Wikipedia:List of policies) 58 policies with a combined source length of 1.1M, which is about 250 times longer. Not meant as a positive example, but new contributors are apparently not crushed by the sheer weight of policies even there. If we are doing 250x better than English Wikipedia, we are doing okay, in my opinion. (Only 80x if you insist that all subdocuments need to be read by everyone... even that I could live with.)
 * Legal fictions of how people interact with site policies aside, what's actually going to happen is that the handful of people who actually read policies for fun will find a nice, short text that will hopefully inspire them to be at their best when communicating with others (or maybe not, in which case they will have wasted about three minutes of their time). And when someone is actually behaving in an abusive way, those who suffer from it (which can include the target, bystanders, and maintainers in whose territory it happens) can easily find this document, and know that they are empowered to act against the misbehavior and in really severe cases have clear escalation steps. (And the wast majority of the users can happily ignore it, just like they ignore the terms of use or the text of the GPL.)
 * I'm straining my imagination to see what kind of negative outcome you expect from that, but I can't come up with anything. I can understand being skeptical about the effectiveness of a code of conduct, but I can't grasp why someone would actively oppose it as harmful. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 07:37, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * This CoC is not "yet another policy" for any new or old contributor who behaves normally. Contributors don't need to read it or even be aware of it to be good community members. It is a tool to be used when someone consciously or not is allegedly crossing the line. Therefore, I think that the argument of this CoC contributing to a burden for newcomers or creeping bureaucracy doesn't stand in reality.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:03, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Apart from the general principle that anyone engaging in discussion in a physical or virtual forum has both a right and a duty to know the norms and expectations of the community they are joining, there are also some very cogent specific arguments against this point towards the end of the section . Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:49, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Paid vs. unpaid; complexity
persons employed discussing something applicable to developers, a nogo. besides this, there is no agreement beforehand to "do we need a code of conduct". additionally, there is no cultural awareness here, only anglo-saxon persons or persons employed there discuss for the world. there is no consideration of alternative models which might have a much higher impact, as eg "positive code of conduct" / "exemplary" / "living principled behaviour". the goal is not defined: is it to get more devs to write software? then the proposal is a miss. is it because the space is unfriendly? then the example cases are missing. for how many persons is this? if it is only for 10 persons, than it is overkill. should the code be short and easy? then it is a miss as alone the introduction is longer as other examples. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 07:05, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
 * You oppose this proposal simply because paid developers are involved in discussing it? Ironholds (talk) 18:45, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
 * On the demographic front: that's a fairly specific example of intersectionality you're interested in right there. Yes, a lot of the supporters are staff, and a lot of them Anglo-Saxon staff - although not all, see Valhallasw's comment below. The support group does include a lot of British and American people - I also count people from Continental Europe, Russia and India in the support column. That's a pretty wide geographic distribution. It's not perfect, but it's important to remember that our technical community itself is biased towards Western Europe and North America, so I wouldn't expect to see a distribution of perspectives that encompassed the whole gamut of the human condition (indeed, creating a safe space hopefully moves us closer towards that being possible). Ironholds (talk) 20:14, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The rule "persons employed discussing something applicable to developers, a nogo." would mean that no WMF staff, or WMDE staff, or staff of MediaWiki consulting companies, could ever participate in crafting anything relevant to developers, from a security RFC, to a coding convention, to a conduct policy. I don't think anyone is willing to adopt that.  Your statement that all of the people discussing were Anglo-Saxons, or persons working out of Anglo-Saxon countries is false (even when you made it).  It's also a divisive and unproductive approach to the issue.  If we're serious about diversity, we should honestly acknowledge the current state of our community.  Our community is not in any way a cross-section of the world.  However, looking at this discussion, I see a much better (though imperfect) cross-section of our existing technical contributors.  Increasing our community's diversity will be a lot of work.  A code of conduct is just one part of it, but it's a part we can't neglect.
 * It is not true that "there is no consideration of alternative models which might have a much higher impact, as eg "positive code of conduct" / "exemplary" / "living principled behaviour"." See Code of conduct policy.  It doesn't specify penalties, and is only binding for staff and board members.  For everyone else, it is "intended to provide guidance".  That is precisely a by-example (exemplary) approach, and it has failed to shape the overall technical community.  You say the proposal will not "get more devs to write software", but are unable to explain why, when it's quite clear many successful communities like Django and jQuery think exactly the opposite.  There are many examples of problem cases available on the Internet, and it is not appropriate to include them in the actual draft.  "if it is only for 10 persons, than it is overkill." basically expresses the idea that 10 toxic people is acceptable.  I fundamentally disagree with this, and where toxicity begins, more will develop.  You have not cited any working code of conduct that is shorter than ours and meets our needs.  It is quite clear that the Linux Code of Conflict (which you've cited elsewhere) would not meet our needs for many reasons, and it's very questionable whether it meets the needs of that community.  Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 07:23, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Definition of maintainers
As a person who is still dubious about the effectiveness of a CoC, I nevertheless feel the need to bring some concerns here. As in the Contributor Covenant, terms such as "project administrators" and "maintainers" are not clearly defined; the definition of "unacceptable" as "inappropriate" is indeed tautological; and there is no reason why resolutions lasting less than 3 months may not be appealed. -- Ricordi samoa  14:19, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
 * What is unclear about the definition of admins and maintainers? What wording would you prefer in reference to unacceptable/inappropriate? Appeal process is out of scope in this section; we will get there and I'm not convinced about that limitation either.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 02:08, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * For MediaWiki, I don't think we really have "maintainers" in the way that many open source projects use that term. Now that Ricordisamoa mentions it, if someone asked me to enumerate the "maintainers" of mediawiki/core (or a section there-of), I'm not sure what I would answer. Perhaps the people with +2 rights, but that's not really the same as being responsible for a section of MW. Bawolff (talk) 05:39, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Sure, but maintainers is a term that we already use. Same with i.e. mediawiki.org administrators. Maybe not perfect but clear enough. What is the actual problem that these 'not clearly defined' terms would cause? Someone not sure whether they are a maintainer or an admin? Well, no problem, at the very least you can report the problem to the committee, and they will find out who is responsible in that context. Bottom line: I think the current wording of administrators and maintainers has a good foundation.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:49, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Lack of volunteer involvement
It is regrettable that this discussion has been very largely conducted by WMF staff and that the support gained comes very largely from that group. Until there is a significant level of support from the volunteer community, the code will lack legitimacy. Indeed, at present it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to an imposition on the community by the WMF, in tht the code has been largely drafted by WMF staff, is angled at the specific constraints of WMF staff, and assigns the ultimate enforcement authority to WMF staff. This is not a comfortable position. Why is there so little input at this stage from the wider community? In the matter of legitimisation, the widest possible degree of involvement is desirable. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 18:59, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree that the widest amount of involvement is desireable, but I disagree that it looks like any form of imposition. The discussion has been advertised on wikitech-l (the mailing list used by the entire tech community, not just WMF developers) and publicly listed on phabricator (the bugtracker used by the entire tech community) and started off in a discussion at a conference (which overwhelmingly had non-WMF attendees). I'm not sure what more there is to do to advertise it to MediaWiki developers once it's been repeatedly advertised on the venues they use. If you have ideas, I would really appreciate hearing them.
 * I don't agree that it needs a vast amount of volunteer support to gain legitimacy, for the same reason I'd also hypothesise is why we're seeing many WMF comments; the MediaWiki development space is the one space where it's fair to say that WMF staff make up a significant percentage of the community, and a significant space of the most active community members. In that regard the process is actually a success - it's succeeded in attracting a lot of very active members of the developer community - and while I would love for more volunteers to participate (if you are thinking of participating, and are reading this, please do) the fact that support includes a lot of staff is not shocking given the demographics of the developer community.
 * I don't see where this is "angled at the specific constraints of WMF staff" (can you point to examples where that is the case?) and while ultimate enforcement rests with the WMF, absent appeals it is (according to discussion on this very talkpage) the Committee's decision whether to refer cases over. Ultimately resting with WMF staff is probably where we want to be on this too, in the sense that (as you yourself has noted) there can be fairly serious legal implications around some of the stuff people could report. Ironholds (talk) 20:08, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The "specific constraints" point you ask about is this. As to the legitimacy issue, we clearly disagree, perhaps unsurprisingly. Rogol Domedonfors (talk)
 * Well, "it's a constraint on WMF staff" is not why I personally do not agree with including your request in the Code of Conduct, for what it's worth; I do not agree because it is totally cross-wise with the sort of behaviour the code of conduct is designed to prohibit. It doesn't fit in with any of the examples or explicitly called out forms of behaviour. And (aside from that) I wouldn't describe it as "a constraint on WMF staff" I would describe it as "impossible to do without a vast increase in WMF resources". If you want to go argue for an increase in that resourcing I invite you to do so but this is not the place for that, and absent those resources, not including something that is literally impossible (respond to all community comments, however they scale, promptly and in a way satisfactory to the person commenting, with a ratio of 1:400 between respondents and commenters) isn't really a deficiency. We should stick to the possible and practical. Ironholds (talk) 22:46, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Do you have an example of a discussion with high volunteer involvement that can be used as a baseline for comparison? It would help avoid unrealistic expectations on what fraction of people participate in discussions in general. (English Wikipedia, for example, has tens of thousands of editors but an RfC with a hundred commenters counts as decent turnout.) --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 04:12, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * One word: Superprotect. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 13:08, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Let me reword: do you have an example of a discussion with high volunteer involvement that can be used as a baseline for a meaningful comparison? :) Thus, a discussion concerning the MediaWiki technical community and not something that involved all of the Wikimedia movement which is about two orders of magnitude larger? (Also, preferably something that's not basically outrage porn; negative discussions tend to have very different dynamics from constructive ones.)
 * The best comparison I can think of is Requests for comment/Phabricator (which affected the average contributor *way* more than a CoC) which had 91 users involved. (The SVN + CodeReview -> Git + Gerrit migration was the other change with huge impact, but I couldn't find a similar discussion for that.) With half the user count for a way more modest change, I think we are doing OK. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 20:59, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * As far as I can tell there are 6 volunteer and 7 staff votes here: it's a bit confusing as some staff have chosen to vote under their non-staff handles. The 6 volunteers are opposed 4:2 and the 7 staff are supporting 7:0.  This does not look like a mandate from the volunteer community. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:45, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The average volunteer doesn't have the time or motivation to follow lengthy and dense discussions like this one, regardless of the topic and their agreement. In every round of feedback we are getting interesting new ideas from previous and new contributors, supportive or reticent about the CoC, and we are improving the draft almost on a daily basis. I'm sure we will get a higher number of participants and a more balanced ratio of WMF/non-WMF as we move forward.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 07:14, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Just for clarity, I disengaged away from this discussion after repeatedly seeing every point I raised for change being beaten back by WMF employees and concluding that as I do not enjoy long and petty wikilawyering arguments with the same old names, I would be better off using my time elsewhere. The WMF employee point of view dominates this discussion. The outcome will be a policy that employees approve of, but there is no consensus here from unpaid volunteers, nor in reality does it seem needed or wanted. You are in control, it's your call. --Fæ (talk) 09:13, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I have re-read all your comments here and in the Archive page. You had a lot of feedback on vagueness and wording in the draft that (as far as I can see) has been addressed. You have complained about the appeal process, and we haven't agreed anything there yet because we have decided to go step by step. You have made references to the existence of a bunch of policies that potentially overlap with this CoC, to which we promoters of this CoC say that this CoC offers a simple, compatible, and enforceable gateway to all of them -- we can discuss further in an own section. You have been questioning ECT as appealing / delegation body, which is being discussed and I'm asking for better alternatives. You also say this CoC has a potential to become a censorship tool for the WMF, allowing the WMF to global ban someone for minor faults in conduct not constituting harassment (the wording is mine), but I wonder how a potentially evil WMF could do that bypassing admins, maintainers, and the Committee. I think these arguments are reasonable from a volunteer point of view, not WMF specific. Discussing is taking a lot of time indeed, but because the questions raised are good and valid, and deserve attention. A community without a Foundation could be discussing a CoC in very similar terms.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 09:41, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for summarising my thoughts on long and difficult governance issues so quickly. I feel I have burnt my fingers taking part and I'm just not welcome around here regardless of the printed word. I'll go focus on more rewarding stuff with my unpaid free time. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 10:12, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * "every point I raised for change being beaten back by WMF employees" This is not accurate.  For example, you wrote "As "technical spaces" could be almost anything, for example bug requests are discussed on email lists, main noticeboards on Wikipedia and Commons, etc. this is a potential bear trap."  In response, I made sure "included but not limited to" was removed from the "virtual" part, and made sure it stayed that way (I had to change it back again at one point).  The part referencing global bans was removed partly due to your feedback. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 05:52, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The average volunteer doesn't have the time or motivation to follow lengthy and dense discussions and outrage porn -- these suggest an unhealthy attitude on the part of paid staff towards volunteers. Why not just come right out and say that volunteers' comments are not worth considering? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 19:41, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * could you point to a single comment in this entire CoC discussion not considered by myself or any of the promoters of this proposal? If you think we have more than a few dozens of volunteers that can afford investing the time you and me have been investing in this CoC draft, I beg to disagree. Please don't distort my words.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 20:29, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Both phrases are direct quotations, one from you, one from a colleague. Each suggests that the author, you and your colleague, feels that comments by people who are not WMF staff members are of lower value than those of staff members.  If that is not your view, it would be good to hear it. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:00, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I think the opinions of people who are not WMF staff are highly valuable, because most of them are volunteers that contribute their time altruistically, because their opinions can cover a wide range of diversity, and because it is my responsibility to listen to them and provide them what they need. I also care about the volunteers that are not participating here for various reasons, trying to cover their needs as well. I also care about WMF employees, and I'm aware of those that have a long experience as volunteers themselves (like the majority of the WMF employees you see around). My track is fully public and it extends to almost three years serving volunteers at the WMF, plus some more before. If I keep replying to your comments as diligently as I can is because I'm treating you as a volunteer.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 22:07, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Stereotype threat is not going to make this conversation more inclusive :( I'm sure more meaningful discussions can be had without constantly attributing single people's perceived attitudes to "the staff" or "the volunteer community" (which are not disjoint anyway, as Quim points out).
 * What I meant (and I didn't even mention staff or volunteers; I don't know how you arrived to your interpretation) was that discussions that are framed to be about fighting an enemy tend to draw a significantly wider audience than those about collaborating for a shared goal. That doesn't necessarily mean they are more successful (at least for values of success which are aligned with the Wikimedia mission); a demonstration might be more popular than a barn raising, but barns last longer. So if you are looking for a comparison to decide whether the people drafting a document are diverse enough, you should pick a constructive discussion, not a controversy. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 11:40, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The average volunteer doesn't have the time or motivation to follow lengthy and dense discussions. (Isarra said it better: «Imagine if you were doing all of this in your spare time, would you rather be using your limited time making things, or talking about some ephemeral proposed thing that may not ever even affect you even if it does become real?».) So why impose on them some 15 kB of additional text beyond the terms of use, which nobody reads as Tgr kindly noted? Presumably, this additional text will not be read either. So are all your bets on the power of forceful enforcement? --Nemo 10:53, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The actual code of conduct - the preamble and the classes of activity you are not permitted to engage in - is 421 words. Ironholds (talk) 11:22, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Nemo, just like any other policy and guideline, I expect this CoC to be read at least when users link to it when communicating with other users that need to be aware of it. Terms_of_Use actually say "The community has the primary role in creating and enforcing policies applying to the different Project editions. At the Wikimedia Foundation, we rarely intervene in community decisions about policy and its enforcement." The Terms of Use don't offer a community process to report and handle inappropriate behavior. Therefore, what we are doing here is consistent with the Terms of Use and is not redundant.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 11:42, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * WMF being the ultimate enforcement authority seems natural to me as it is the WMF that physically owns most of the architecture, an physical access is usually the ultimate means of enforcement. (Or sanctions by the employer or event organizer, which is also the WMF in most cases.) That said, the actual, everyday enforcement would be done by project administrators and maintainers and would not involve the WMF at all. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 04:12, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Technical enforcement on their servers is certainly going to be implemented by WMF. The fact that the WMF paid staff have been largely responsible for designing a code of conduct that applies to disputes that might involve them and non-staff, and that the suggestion that WMF Engineering Community team act as final arbiters of disputes that might be between members of their own community and others, do not send out a good message about independence. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 13:08, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Without CoC or Committee, Developer Relations (was Engineering Community) is dealing with conduct problems in the Wikimedia tech community already today, and for a long time. The introduction of a CoC and a Committee is an improvement in "independence from WMF", if that concerns you. ECT members have also heard opinions of people that thought we were partial toward volunteers in detriment of WMF employees. I guess this shows that we are trying hard to be impartial, and a CoC will make this work easier for everybody. If the community wants to have a backup for the Committee and they find another group that can do better this job, we will support that.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 14:23, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I would say that the whole technical community is responsible for designing a CoC (as, ultimately, we all are responsible for making sure we are an open and welcoming community), and it has been largely WMF staff that has picked up that work. (Not all that surprising since WMF staff have, on average, way more time to spend on Wikimedia activities in general.) That is maybe unfortunate but it's necessary work that someone had to pick up, and no one is excluded, so I don't think WMF has any extra authority here apart from the usual doocratic authority in which WMF tends to be overrepresented as it does most of the work.
 * It also seems unfair to characterize a situation where the committee is allowed to hand over cases to ECT as ECT having the ultimate authority. Presumably the committee will only exercise that right when they feel they are unable to deal with something, in which case it is not a question of independence but one of necessity. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 20:59, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The ECT/DR team is the appeal body, and hence the final authority. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:45, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Once the project administrators and committee have passed over it, who would you have the appeal body be? Ironholds (talk) 16:54, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
 * That's a fair point, but like Ironholds, I can't think of any good alternative. Maybe some sort of ombudsman system similar to the one checkusers have would make sense? --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 19:32, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Of course, the ombudsmen are appointed by the WMF in a very similar fashion to how we're proposing the Committee be appointed here, so if the goal is "absolutely no WMF involvement ever at the top level" it's still very easy to criticise that. As I think I've made clear I have no problem with the existing way of doing things but *shrugs*. Ironholds (talk) 00:35, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Putting "absolutely no WMF involvement ever at the top level" in quotes suggests that you think that someone, probably me, actually said it. Could you either provide a diff, or, better, strike it and return to the topic under discussion, which is, whether having the EC/DR team as ultimate appeal authority in a putative consensus primarily of WMF staff might suffer from a lack of legitimacy? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 19:41, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * We are still drafting the Committee section and we haven't called for wider consensus about it yet. I keep asking if you or someone else has any alternative proposal to the Developer Relations team. If there is an alternative proposal, then we can discuss which one to choose. While there is no alternative proposal, what exactly are we discussing?--Qgil-WMF (talk) 20:36, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * My proposition is that the current draft lacks independence and community acceptance and that it represents an imposition on the community by a small group of staff who would also be assigned the authority to enforce it. That is what I would hope to discuss.  For some reason, discussion seems to have diverted towards other, possibly less uncomfortable, topics, such as the make up of the Committee and the Appeal body which, as you so rightly point out, is not precisely within the scope of this section. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:00, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Of the formal !votes here, I see one from someone "assigned the authority to enforce it". What would make this an "independent" draft to you? Community comment has been solicited (and incorporated in many cases). It started off in a public meeting at a movement-wide conference. It continued in a phabricator thread open to the general public. It was announced for discussion on the public mailing lists.
 * I've heard very little from you about problems with the draft itself, so I'll ask explicitly; what problems do you see in the draft portions we are discussing in this thread, other than the mandate to respond you'd like to see incorporated? Ironholds (talk) 21:11, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * My proposition is that there is not sufficient participation for this "Consensus discussion" to represent a consensus of the whole community; that the preponderance of !votes from staff represents a lack of independence; and that in the absence of a wider discussion and consensus the Code will lack legitimacy. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:23, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * In other words, you don't have an issue with the proposed text, merely the system in which it is being proposed. I agree that it needs wide-ranging support behind it, but I absolutely disagree that the "preponderance of !votes from staff" represents a lack of independence; I think it represents, well, representation.
 * In August 2015 (the last complete month of data), the technical community dashboards show that WMF employees submitted 3,493 patches; volunteers submitted 615. Those 3.4k patches were submitted by 79 people; the 615, 12. Now, I see 9 supports here in this discussion, 7 WMF and 2 non-WMF, making for 77% WMF overall. When you look at the committer numbers, WMF employees made up 86% of committers. The "preponderance of WMF votes" does not represent some imminent risk to the independence of the technical community, because when it comes to the MediaWiki community that technical community is already mostly staff. Heck, one of the things this code of conduct is attempting to do is create a nicer environment explicitly to broaden the community out and allow for far more people to participate because they genuinely want to.
 * Now, I want to see more community members - I want to see more people - but what we're talking about here is a community of, according to gerrit, around 100 people, 86% staff. And what we're seeing in support is a 10th of that, 77% staff. 10% participation isn't terrible (and it's more than that when you factor in people who haven't expressed an opinion either way, or who have opposed). If you have active suggestions for how we can get more people involved I would love to hear them (and my apologies if you posted them above and I missed them). Ironholds (talk) 22:02, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * That's the second time this week that you have presumed to ascribe to me an opinion with no basis in anything I have written -- please don't do that again. You seem to be saying that 7 WMF staff and 2 volunteers are sufficient to speak for the entire community within physical spaces such as Wikimedia events and Wikimedia-related presentations in other developer events, and virtual (MediaWiki.org, wikitech.wikimedia.org, Phabricator, Gerrit, technical mailing lists, technical IRC channels, and Etherpad).  I don't think that numbers equivalent to 8.9% of the highly active staff and 17% of the highly active volunteers here at this site (taking "highly active" to mean, "submitted a patch in August 2015") constitutes a sufficiently broad set of supporters to give this code legitimacy and for you to claim community acceptance.  If you are indeed concerned about bringing more and wider community activity to this process, then instead of asking me for suggestions now in mid-September, you should already have been calling on the resources of the teams of experienced paid staff of the WMF as soon as the process started in mid-July.  To leave it for two months and then toss it in as a rhetorical question suggests you see it more as a debating tactic rather than an urgent desire for community involvement.  As a thought experiment, I suggest you read over your comment from the point of view of a volunteer contributor anxious about becoming a second-class citizen in this process.  Do you think their concerns will be alleviated by your response that the view of 7 WMF staff and 2 volunteers is representative? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 20:43, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I said it was demographically representative in response to a concern that the WMF involvement was overwhelming; that doesn't mean I don't think we'd do better with more participation full stop. In fact, if you read my comment again you'll see that's explicitly what I stated, and what I have stated several times before in previous threads on this page. As for why I didn't call on "the resources of the teams of experienced paid staff" - well, first, they're already here, and second, as you can see from my account choice I'm participating in this as a volunteer, not as part of my job (which is research and data analysis). You haven't actually answered my question, though; what would you do to involve more of the technical community? Off the top of my head if we're concerned about the number of voices we could do a sitenotice on Wikitech. Ironholds (talk) 11:28, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I do not propose to accept the diversion onto what I would have done, which is rather tangential to this thread, nor do I propose to engage in a squabble about who has answered whose questions. If you feel that wider participation is necessary, or desirable, by all means start a separate thread where suggestions can be made by all and sundry and a constructive discussion can be held, possibly even leading to action.  This thread is about whether or not the Code can be said to have community-wide support or legitimacy when only a rather small proportion of contributors at only one of the many loci to which it applies have participated, and that set of participants are largely drawn from the WMF staff, and the consensus among those participants is to leave the WMF staff in charge.  I think that it does not yet have that wider support.  Your views on that specific point would be of value here. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 19:26, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I shall do so, and look forward to seeing suggestions from you. Ironholds (talk) 19:29, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * While there is not enough quantitative participation and not enough diversity of participation, I find the quality of the participation is very high, and it is helping ironing this CoC draft. Once the usual contributors and whoever else wants to join have finished ironing it, then we can go back to wikitech-l and beyond and present the draft asking for Accept / Neutral / Oppose positionings with optional comments. If at that point we the usual contributors step back and let others speak, there are high chances that we will get more opinions from a more diverse pool of contributors. Meanwhile, I will keep discussing about whatever topics are being brought here, but I will keep focusing on ironing the draft section by section.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 22:13, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't think quantitatively the participation rate is bad (although of course we should always strive for more). In the discussion about the Wikimedia-wide terms of use there were about 200 different users (including the anonymous ones). Per korma, we have somewhere between 2000 and 10000 active contributors a month (depending on how much overlap there is between the various channels). English Wikipedia alone has 120K active users. Scaling down the numbers from the ToU discussion, the par for the course would be around 10 participants here. It is easy to set unrealistic expectations about how everyone should get involved in a discussion, but in reality most people just don't care. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 08:44, 19 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Appeals details are not part of this particular consensus discussion because it's not in one of the discussed sections (they will be part of a later one after more drafting work on those sections). However, it's important to note that the linked version of the draft only allows appeals by the alleged offender, and only if there is a resolution of more than three months.  That may change after later discussions, but with the current draft you're overstating DR's authority. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 05:38, 17 September 2015 (UTC)


 * The technical space is one of the only Wikimedia communities where a large fraction of contributors (if not the majority in some kinds of technical work) work for the WMF. Thus it is not surprising to see a significant amount of staff here.  You ask "Why is there so little input at this stage from the wider community?"  I think the main reason is that most people in the WMF technical community are not interested in this kind of discussion.  At lot of people will be happy with any reasonable Code of Conduct (and may show up for later discussions), but would rather do their normal work then help draft it.  If you notice, even among WMF, only a fraction of WMF staff and contractors have chosen to participate; many of them are busy doing other things too, just like volunteers.  However, this code of conduct will help us all better welcome volunteers if adopted and followed.  Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 03:48, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Nobody is claiming that this CoC has wide community support today. We are drafting it, and once the draft is solid then we will seek wide explicit support. Thank you for starting Talk:Code_of_conduct_for_technical_spaces/Draft, let's discus how to involve more people there.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:08, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

Representing the community in public spaces
Re: this edit, I think it changes the meaning drastically. Think of someone opening an a Twitter account with the name "MediaWiki developer" and then using it abusively. That is not a technical space, but it still represents the project in some way. (This was occasionally a problem for some non-tech projects where unofficial Facebook groups and such were used by people who where banned from the official places as a soapbox.) Also consider the case of a MediaWiki developer participating at a non-technical event where they were invited for being a MediaWiki developer.

I have a weak preference for the old version, but in any case, it's not an insignificant change. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 02:56, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * An unauthorized "MediaWiki developer" Twitter account would infringe the trademark policy in the first place, and in your case would be someone anonymous in any case, so this CoC would be of little practical use. A MediaWiki developer participating in an event out of the scope of "Wikimedia technical spaces" and harassing or disrespecting someone there would be subject to the code of conduct or similar of that event in the first place. If that person would a WMF employee then Code of conduct policy could apply regardless. Probably the most likely scenarios are covered by these cases? If not, someone could still submit a report arguing that such developer was representing the MediaWiki project, and the discussion would be interesting regardless of the sentence I removed being present in the CoC or not. The core mission of this CoC is to assure "making participation in Wikimedia technical projects a respectful and harassment-free experience for everyone", and I think it is better to keep a CoC with clear and concise principles. Trying to cover all scenarios possible with a longer and more complex text does not necessarily accomplish better the mission of the CoC.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 03:25, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I also disagree with this change, and the assertion in the edit summary, "Simplifying sentence without changing meaning (?)". This section is also part of the active consensus discussion.  As to the actual point, the Twitter case would indeed be hard to enforce.  However, say a MediaWiki developer participates in a Foolang conference as a speaker (representing MediaWiki, e.g. because "Senior MediaWiki VP of Advanced Technology" or whatever was next to their name on the conference program).  (This example is not referring in any way to actual people).  They then put something offensive on their presentation slides.  In this example, the MW code of conduct committee should have its own jurisdiction, regardless of whether the Foolang conference has a code of conduct.  Put more simply, we don't want people going out, speaking in public spaces, saying they're "from MediaWiki" and putting us in a bad light through conduct the CoC does not allow. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 04:46, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Alright, back to the original scope. Still my main problem with this sentence is that (being the first sentence and providing the first impression) sounds unclear and repetitive. I have to read it twice to deduce what it means. I have proposed an alternative wording. Please revert if you think it needs further discussion.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 05:59, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Not going to revert for right now, because there's a ton of other stuff bundled up in that edit, but I think "developer event" is too narrow. Presumably we're not down with say, me making an ass of myself representing the community and my technical contributions at a statistical conference, either. How about "Technical, Wikimedia-related presentations at other events"? Ironholds (talk) 19:47, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * ✅--Qgil-WMF (talk) 08:07, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Start with positive guidelines on behavior
One thing I like about the Open Code of Conduct is that it tries to balance the long list of things not to do with a positive and upbeat list of ideals. (It's also highly scannable, in case someone is in a rush.) Our list of donts is considerably shorter, but I would still welcome having a similar list of behaviors to strive for. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 04:52, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I think this is a good idea. The selection of positive points is good, but I would avoid the long explanations, just like we are avoiding getting into lengthy details in general.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:55, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Proposal of a paragraph to be added in Principles between "... or religion." and "Technical skills..."

Our community strives to: --Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:43, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Be friendly and patient.
 * Be welcoming to people of all backgrounds and identities.
 * Be considerate with those affected by decisions and changes.
 * Be aware that English is not everybody's primary language.
 * Be respectful regardless of disagreement.
 * Be kind and careful in the words we choose.
 * Try to understand why we disagree.
 * Focus on being productive, resolving issues and learning from mistakes.


 * I have copied this list at Code_of_conduct_for_technical_spaces/Draft. If you like it, let's keep it. If you want to fine tune it, let's edit the list in the Draft, and let's discuss here if needed.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 14:28, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I feel that the prior Principles section already addressed many of these things. Tone-wise, I also think that version of the principles section is also pretty good (especially "in the interest of fostering an open and welcoming community, we pledge to respect all people" kicking it off).  Adding a large block of text this late in the process is also somewhat problematic, since people commenting on the consensus section (which covers this section) may incorrectly think this text is part of what they are weighing in on.  I tried to clarify this with the link, but some people might not use it.  In some cases, we have to make late-breaking changes, but I'm not sure this is such a case, so I've reverted it.  The TODO code of conduct was first referenced on August 9, so there were earlier opportunities to suggest this text. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 05:06, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree with Tgr (WMF) that the overall impression is that the CoC focuses on the negatives and would benefit from a description of the expected positives. "We pledge to respect" and "a respectful and harassment-free experience" just cover the minimum in terms of positive message and guidelines. In contrast, we offer a full list of negatives. Tgr's proposal of offering a list of positive guidelines is excellent, and the list is specific enough to be used as a reference when someone is starting to cross the line, well before reporting anything formally.
 * "This late in the process" is relative. Although I understand that we were making a call for consensus on these sections, I also don't see why we shouldn't incorporate a very good idea when it is suggested by someone resonding to that call for consensus. There is only a chance to write a first version of a CoC in this community, let's use it to define the best CoC we are capable to write, even if it takes some extra hops in our approval process.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 06:32, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's a good idea to have a deadline for changes that's only announced once it's past. There is going to be a wider discussion of this document (even if announcements are going to be limited to wikitech-l, "here is the proposed CoC" is probably going to result in significantly wider involvement than "come help us write the CoC" did), at which point changes will be made; I don't see what purpose a "feature freeze" between now and then would serve. Especially when it is merely on procedural grounds and no one actually opposes the change.(?) --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 11:47, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * There is the adage about how trumpeting your first amendment rights is kind of admitting that the most compelling thing you can say about your position is that it is not literally illegal. The same way, I would prefer to avoid a CoC in which the most compelling thing said about the way our community behaves is that it is not literally harassment. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 07:43, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

More opinions are welcome. This is the last significant bit of the CoC that needs an agreement.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 09:11, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The last? there isn't even a consensus on the first line. :) --Nemo 11:06, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Nemo, this is off-topic on this section, but it looks like the only way to get your agreement is to delete the CoC entirely... The question here is whether you think the addition of these positive guidelines improves the CoC or not.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 09:07, 19 September 2015 (UTC)


 * One problem with this framing of positive expectations is that it can create a situation where we ignore the wider historic and social context within which people engage our community. What I'm specifically worried about is a situation where someone acts in an inappropriate fashion, someone from a marginalised background comes back at them and points this out and expresses their frustration in a sharp manner - and both are then sanctioned, one for acting inappropriately and the other for not following these positive expectations (someone reacting to blatant sexism or racism, having undoubtedly experienced an entire life of such incidents and being assured that this was a good place to be, is unlikely to be overflowing with joy and "friendly and patient" to the person responsible, and no reasonable person would expect them to be).
 * One way of handling this is to have more broad positive principles that also explicitly factor in the need to handle incidents when they occur and have more nuance of language in the expected behaviour - the Stumptown Syndicate's CoC does this pretty well in Section 3. Alternately (or even better, as well!) we could also explicitly build in protection against these kinds of scenarios, The TODO group's open code of conduct does this very well; it explicitly states "Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort" and lists out some very reasonable and plausible situations in which it will not consider complaints or behaviour, including someone complaining about a firm communication of boundaries or request to disengage, or complaining about community members taking issue with sexist/racist/cissexist/so on behaviour. Ironholds (talk) 22:17, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

"Diverse affiliations" at the Committee
I think we can remove the sentence "It is required that at all times, at least one member of the committee is neither a WMF staff member nor a WMF contractor." The first paragraph of the Committee page already says "a team of five trusted individuals with diverse affiliations", which implies that it is not possible not having all of them affiliated to the WMF. The sentence actually brings involuntarily a change of expectation (at least for me): I'm thinking about the Committee as mainly formed by volunteers, maybe with one or two WMF/WMDE professional developers with a strong community background. That sentence brings the image of a Committee with 3-4 WMF members as ok, maybe expected. In practice I think it is better to stress the aspect of "diverse affiliations" and hope that self-nominations and Committee selections will provide that diversity.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 21:17, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I think we should keep it. I am fine with rephrasing (as long as the requirement is still noted), or adding something to express that there is no minimum number of WMF members (zero WMF is permitted, though it would not be very representative of the technical community). Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 02:12, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * What about "Independence and diversity of affiliation among Committee members is encouraged. The Committee cannot have all members affiliated to the same organization." This would set an expectation toward a committee nurtured primarily with independent volunteers and avoids mentioning an exception for the WMF (an hypothetical Committee of five members affiliated to certain chapter or certain company would be equally undesirable).--Qgil-WMF (talk) 06:43, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * That sounds really good. To emphasize that people do not have to be an employee or formal member of an organization, how about, "Independence and diversity of affiliation among Committee members is encouraged. Members need not be formally part of any organization, and the Committee cannot have all members affiliated to the same organization." Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 06:51, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * ✅ Even better, thank you! I have edited the draft accordingly.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 07:42, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * "Same organisation" could refer to the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party, the Freemasons, the Royal Society, San Francisco Film Society,  ... .  I presume you do not really intend to ask for a complete list of the political, religious and spare-time affiliations of potential committee members? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 16:35, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Would "employer" be better?--Qgil-WMF (talk) 19:43, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
 * ✅--Qgil-WMF (talk) 08:01, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Wider participation
A user has mentioned above that they would like to see wider participation in this thread from the technical community, and I think that's definitely something we'll want when it comes to full approval rather than just drafting. So, who has ideas for what we could to do involve people who are part of the technical community, or interested in becoming part of it? Off the top of my head we could do a sitenotice or similar notice on Wikitech (the wiki rather than the mailing list). Ironholds (talk) 19:30, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Since there are whole teams at WMF charged with Communications, Community Engagement, Community Advocacy and Community Tech, I suggest that you may be better placed than I for suggestions. However, I note that there is a list of physical and virtual spaces in the opening paragraph of the code.  For maximal support, th community in each of those spaces should be specifically engaged.  As far as physical spaces are concerned, consider an invitation to past event organisers to share, as far as they are able, their experiences and lessons learned from their events, for example from their feedback and their own internal review discussions.  For events in the near future, consider asking the organisers to schedule a panel, round-table, debate or similar in-person session, and a section in he feedback addressing the question of whether the code in force at the event was adequate and whether this code would have been an improvement.  All this takes time and effort of course, which is why the WMF community engagement teams, broadly considered, should already have been involved from the start. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 19:46, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * We have etherpad (no technical community), mediawiki.org, wikitech, phabricator (the work started there), gerrit, the IRC channels, and the mailing lists (where there has been an extensive thread). So that leaves mediawiki.org, wikitech, gerrit and the IRC channels. We could do something like a sitenotice on wikitech and mediawiki, a /NOTICE on the prominent IRC channels, and for gerrit..I'm not sure short of emailing recent committers, which might lead to flashback (mass-mailing often does).
 * I'm not sure if there are any upcoming events centred around or including a tech component; there's WikiConference USA, of course, but there's no real tech element to it. As I already mentioned, the WMF community engagement teams, broadly considered, have been engaged from the start - we have a community engagement team just for the Engineering community, and Quim leads it. Ironholds (talk) 19:57, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * If there is no technical community associated with Etherpad then perhaps it should not be mentioned at all? As far as events are concerned, I believe there's a Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016 planned, for example.  Whether the members of Community Engagement are engaged here in the discussion is beside the point -- it is whether they are engaged out in other places spreading the message effectively. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:10, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * And as the ticks on the list above indicate, they are - but there's only one Quim ;). Etherpad has users and so should be subject to this but doesn't have a community in the sense of identifiable "etherpad people"; it's a largely anonymous note-taking thing. the Developer Summit is an excellent point. Ironholds (talk) 21:19, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

Etherpad is IMO uninteresting because the people who use etherpad are heavily involved and there are easier ways to reach them. But there are a lot of people who only use Phabricator or only use Gerrit (or neither because they are the maintainers of a MediaWiki extension hosted on GitHub). The possible channels, roughly in descending order by impact (stats are from korma and Special:Statistics): The wikis and mailing lists are easy to notify, Gerrit does not seem worth the effort, a sitenotice-like thing on Phabricator would be worthwhile if at all possible. Also if we are not overly concerned about WMF overrepresentation, a notice to the engineering or wmfall list might be worth it. Also maybe ping the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group if they have any other idea? The wikidata and labs lists also come to mind as mailing lists that are mainly technical but have a very different audience than the usual gerrit-phabricator-wikitech crowd.
 * mediawiki.org - 1000 active users (I will take a wild guess and say that for every active editor there are 5 passive readers so total reach is about 5K)
 * Phabricator (and no, having a task there is not outreach) - 2K users a month
 * wikitech-l - 100-150 posters a month (again with a wild guess of 5 lurkers per poster total reach is 0.5-1K users)
 * wikitech.wikimedia.org - 100 active users (so ~500 reach?)
 * mediawiki-l (50 posters a month)
 * IRC (200-300 users at a time on a large channel like #wikimedia-dev; 500-1000 users a month altogether, but it's synchronous so hard to reach everyone without being very spammy)
 * Gerrit (~200 submitters a month)

On another tangent, do we want to invite participation from people who are not members of the MediaWiki or Wikimedia technical community but knowledgeable about codes of conduct? Say, leave a message on Geek Feminism Wiki? --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 05:48, 19 September 2015 (UTC)


 * If places such as Etherpad or Phabricator have no convenient mechanism for publicising this discussion to their user directly, then those users could be approached indirectly, in other words, at places where those users are likely to be. Pages on Meta related to Community Engagement, Community Tech and Community Advocacy might be a start, as would English Wikipedia Village Pump (technical) and the corresponding pages at the oher projects and languages.  There are numerous teams that should be involved in numerous venues, pointing to what one member of one team has done on this page is beside the point.  Oh, and Wikiconference USA 2015 has a track for technology, it's on their website.
 * In the interests of saving time and effort in this belated discussion, could the owner of the stakeholder list and the communications plans for those stakeholders post links to them, preferably with their current analysis of progress against the plans, please? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 08:11, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * This task suggests there is a broadcast mechanism for Phabricator but Quim probably knows more about that. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 08:21, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * While we need to bring more people to the drafting, we also need to be careful not to make big calls too soon. This is like software testing, some people enjoy trying alphas and betas, some other will be frustrated about so many bumps in the road and stop being interested. I think the current tactics drafting here and pinging wikitech-l is good enough until we have a version of the draft we are happy about. Then we can make the big call, knowing that more ideas will come, more criticism will come, and more edits are likely to come.
 * The big call can be a two-week site notice in mediawiki.org and wikitech-wikimedia.org, a mention in the topic of all IRC tech channels during two weeks, and an email to all the technical mailing lists. As far as I know, Phabricator and Gerrit don't have broadcast mechanism built-in. We can organize an IRC office hour, a Tech Talk... We can go as wide as you think it is useful to go. Socializing the CoC in events is also a good idea. I'm proposing a session at WikiDev16 -- see T90908.
 * An important aspect related to participation is the landing surface here for the new people we want to welcome. We should keep support/neutral/oppose positioning separate from lengthy discussions in order to keep encouraging new participants to leave their positioning in one minute of less, without having to read through lengthy discussions embedded with votes. We (the regular participants here) should make an effort avoiding to capitalize the discussion (yet again), leaving space for other people with other opinions, and we should avoid the confrontational language that sometimes we use. Most contributors won't enjoy entering a room with some veterans arguing. If we want to welcome more people and opinions, we need to be consciously welcoming ourselves.
 * And an FAQ summarizing the main points discussed will be useful as well, since most newcomers to this debate might have very similar questions and thoughts that we have processed already.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 13:15, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Sounds good to me. I think we all need to bear in mind that the initial !vote is just a "are we comfortable moving to discussing the next chunk" not a "okay, the bit we have approved is now in full effect". There will be a wider opportunity to approve the entire thing and that's a good place to expect more people. Ironholds (talk) 18:45, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * A quick look at Tech links to the Tech/News which currently mentions three relevant meetings whose participants might be interested, as well as giving method for disseminating cross-project, and also links to the Tech/Ambassadors. There seems to me no shortage of mechanisms for engaging broadly with those likely to particpate in technical spaces.  But sight of the communications plan would be really helpful at this stage before spending too much time on what might be duplication of effort. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 20:22, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, good point. Tech-ambassadors would be covered by the communication to all mailing lists, but Tech News needs to be included as well.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 11:27, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Appeals
The wording on appeals seems unduly restrictive. Firstly, the phrase "the reported offender" should probably read "any person sanctioned". Secondly, there is no specific right of appeal against non-action or leniency of sanction, although this is arguably covered by the final sentence. Is that omission deliberate? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 19:32, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * These are excellent points, particularly the second one. I'm definitely open to changing "the reported offender" (I guess there could be situations in which someone is reported and an investigation finds other people were participating in the activity). Ironholds (talk) 19:37, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * (((Your feedback on is welcomed; I'm reluctant to get deep into "Report an issue" before settling at least on the CoC main page.)))--Qgil-WMF (talk) 12:35, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * It seems extremely unlikely that other work will lead to a change in the consensus to the effect that there should not be an appeal process, and so there is very little risk that this discussion will prove nugatory. If you do not wish to discuss this point at present, then we look forward to hearing from you at a suitable time. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:53, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Committee procedure
There is little specified about the Committee's procedure. I would suggest additional wording The Committee will determine its own procedures, which may vary from case to case, having regard to the principles of Natural Justice. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 19:36, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree with the idea of explicitly saying that the committee can determine its own procedures within the framework of the code of conduct and associated Committee-establishing policy; I disagree with "having regard to the principles of Natural Justice" which is frankly too legalistic and vague. We are trying to build a system here on specificity; if what you mean is "avoiding bias", let's just say that. We don't need to bring in English procedural rights. Ironholds (talk) 19:40, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * If you prefer something more explicit, I suggest ...subject to the requirement to avoid bias and the appearance of bias, and to allow fair participation to each party. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:14, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * ✅ Thank you, I hope the current version captures the meaning. Natural justice is a very specialized term indeed. Instead of "avoid bias" (a negative statement) I opted to go for the positive statement mentioned in en.wiki: "duty to act fairly", which is descriptive and clear.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 12:28, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

Committee page and new email to wikitech-l
Code_of_conduct_for_technical_spaces/Draft looks good enough for a call for feedback at wikitech-l, don't you think? If you think there are still open ends in that page, let's polish them in the existing or new sections in this Talk page. Seeing how the previous called caused a bit of confusion, this time I would make clear that this is a call for wider feedback, not a vote for consensus and actual approval.

In that email, we could also mention that after the previous call for feedback we have polished many details in Intro + Principles + Unacceptable behavior, and we are proposing a structure of three different pages for simplicity. I would also mention that we welcome more opinion on, since that is the only big addition still open that is visibly stuck.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 06:51, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Legal standing of the Committee
What is the intended standing of the Committee? I presume that it is to be an entirely informal group whose only standing and authority derives from the community? As opposed, say, to a committee of the WMF Board? I preferred the latter solution but consensus seems to be the former. Assuming so it should be made clear. Does the WMF back the Committee in any way, for example, by way of indemnity or advice if there are legal repercussions to its decisions? Or is it intended that Committee members stand completely exposed personally in the event of legal action? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 18:11, 22 September 2015 (UTC)