User:Josve05a/2017/Progress/Summary

Background

A code of conduct is a set of guidelines that directs the behavior of all community members during their participation in that community.

The Wikimedia community does not currently have a code of conduct. However, Code of Conduct/Draft is a draft document hosted on MediaWiki.org. The goal with this document, as described in phab:T90908, is to create such a document for Wikimedia Foundation's tech spaces, and "once the draft is solid then [WMF] will seek wide explicit support" by the community.

Mattflaschen-WMF started a follow up discussion after a previous discussion that regarding edits made in the draft document, asking if there was consensus for these new changes moving forward in creating this document.

Wikimedia Foundation and the community

Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) maintains multiple projects (mostly wikis), with global and vast communities on each of them. WMF are not content creators on these projects, merely maintainers of the softwares, the servers etc. Each of thee projects has their own policies and rules which they themself make up, maintain and police. There are a few broad global policies created and set by the Wikimedia Foundation, such as the privacy policy and the Term of Use.

In this case, a global policy document is being drafted by employees of the WMF, alongside members of the community, in order to reach a consensus-based policy which all projects and communities can feel they have agreed to, rather than one which the WMF have imposed on their autonomy.

Consensus

Most votes on WMF projects are not votes, but rather consensus seeking discussions, where arguments weigh heavier than a show of support or disapproval.

Main changes in the document

• Slight change to the scope paragraph in intro
• Rephrasing of the principles
• Addition of neuroatypicality
• Addition of positive expected behavior
• Flexibility about how project maintainers can respond
• Slight change to "Unacceptable behavior"
• Addition of explanatory section that explains things the Committee will not consider violations, and how they will take the context of *Incidents into account.

Points

For

• "giving project administrators discretion about how to handle situations while still noting they have a responsibility, and prohibiting the publication of non-harassing private communications"
• The addition of "Expected Behavior and Unexpected Behavior sections"

Against

• "dropping the examples of work"
• "no clear owner"

  Not clear who the word "we" in the document was referring to. "We" as the community, or "we" as the WMF, etc.

  A number of other organization's CoC was mentioned, showing their usage of the word "we".

• "unacceptable behavior section [is a bit] vaguely phrased"

The necessity about the document at all

The editors Fæ and ThurnerRupert brought up (again; see footnote 1) the lack of volunteer editor input, and that 2-5 volunteer editors are not enough to build community consensus, and that almost exclusively all commenters have been paid employees, or otherwise under contract, with the WMF.

Specific points

Some specific wordings and edits made to the document were discussed, such as ""Participate in an authentic and active way", "Refusal to explain or debate social justice concepts" and "Publication of non-harassing private communication".

For the first-mentioned quote, the argument that editors could "get in trouble for not devoting enough of their time to Wikimedia projects" was pointed out by one editor, and later called out for being "contrary to our global assume good faith principle, as it encourages processo alle intenzioni."

Publication of non-harassing private communication

Editors were concerned about the document being turned in to an NDA (non-disclosure agreement), since all re-publication without permission of non-harassing private communication would become not allowed under this document. As a compromise, the wording was changed to "Inappropriate or unwanted publication of private communication".

Summary by discussion creator

Summarizing some issues I noticed come up more than once:

• A couple of people had a problem with how "we" was used; most people did not even mention this, and I pointed out that many CoCs are similar in this regard.
• There was a good amount of support for prohibiting publishing non-harassing private communication, but other people strongly opposed it. * Among the supporters of this provision, some thought it should add 'without permission'.
• There was some support for the Expected behavior/positive guidelines, but they also attracted opposition, particularly to "Participate in an authentic and active way". I suggested moving this out of the CoC to a guidelines page.
• There was an objection to parts of the Unacceptable behavior section, particularly "prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people's comfort" and "Refusal to explain or debate social justice concepts." (both also other sub-points here). However, this was also called out by supporters.
• One person explicitly supported adding 'neuroatypicality' (in addition to the person who actually added it to the document). No one objected to this part in particular, besides a mocking anonymous post from an IP with no history.
• There were a couple of hesitations/objections to approving/disapproving on the whole thing at once, rather than continuing to refine. Since consensus was not reached on the overall change, we do now have the opportunity to refine the specific parts that people had issues with.
• Finally, several of the supporters were in favor of moving on with this draft, despite some hesitations they may have had about parts. Although we don't have the consensus to simply use that whole text intact, there is a discussion about freezing the parts that were not controversial and working on the parts that were.

—Mattflaschen-WMF

Qustions

• "which IRC channels and mailing lists are counted as "technical""

Consensus and outcome

While more volunteer editors added feedback on specific wordings and subsets of the proposed changes, rather than offering their opinion of the change as a whole, a few volunteer editors did choose to participate in the discussions. However, the main !vote was mainly only participated by WMF employees.

More people expressed support than people expressed opposition to the changes, however, those that did express their opposition did so loudly, especially when it came to specific parts of the document. Some compromises were made in order to satisfy those who opposed, but in the end, there was no clear mandate by the editors and community-at-large that the changes were acceptable, and therefore the discussion was closed as not reaching consensus.

Moving forward

A suggestion by myself would be to not start a consensus discussion regarding many changes at once, but rather do individual discussions for each change, since otherwise there will be a lot of discussions going on at the same time about many different parts of the proposed change.

Invite and bring in more outside comments by editors not so active on MediaWiki.org, or employees by the WMF. This will bring legitimacy to proposals like this, and will not be seen as an improvement by the WMF onto projects which may be affected.