Our conduct policies were carefully crafted by hundreds of brilliant people over the course of twenty years, building upon endless experience and detailed discussions that could fill books upon books.
The UCoC Project ... seems to be built to supersede all that we've built in this area, with an extremely inadequate replacement. It apparently abandoned the idea of being a "minimal baseline" in favor of including every preferred (and even aspirational) point available. The Enforcement Guidelines thoroughly place the UCoC itself front-and-center, requiring extensive linking and pushing it to be read by everyone (we have a hard enough time getting people to read the existing conduct policies; making everything link to UCoC will definitely drastically reduce the reach of existing policies if not eliminate their presence outright), mandatory pledges/affirmations of the UCoC and compulsory UCoC training (both as prerequisites to sysop participation, conditions which will likely strip the ranks). The UCoC is a text that the community did not write. It remains filled with dozens of very serious issues, but volunteers were never invited to edit it. Basic attempts at even cleaning up the document's language were reverted, as the staff are quite clear that it is not a Wikimedia document that community efforts may be directly part of. Larger issues were ignored. Even if we were to grant the idea that we would centralize conduct policies and remove local variation in acceptable practices, it looks to me that this attempt at producing a viable policy did not work. The WMF appointees who wrote the UCoC, while they surely worked hard on the document over the few months given to write the text, were quite reasonably not capable of doing the kind of work we typically expect from the large numbers of experienced volunteers who build core policies over the course of a much longer time period. Even taking into account the WMF's extensive campaign to convince people that the UCoC was good (and to vote accordingly), and their admission that they intended to keep pushing the UCoC indefinitely until a vote passed in the direction they wanted, I am surprised and dismayed at the result of the vote. The 57% support outcome (or 58.6% if one discounts neutral votes, as is often the practice), while well below the amount typically needed to establish consensus for a policy, is above the threshold the WMF determined to use for their own purposes. I don't know where we can go from here, or what the Board will do with this situation. Numerous contributors have already pointed out that these numbers fall clearly under "no consensus". The staff seem to have realized that removing sysop tools from a large portion of the admin corps as required would be disastrous. One of the more egregious problems present in the UCoC text is already likely to be the subject of review following an open letter by a user group, though many, many others remain largely unconsidered. Local community preparatory work for dealing with possible WMF action is ... roughly what I would expect (including the commitments to not cooperate with UCoC efforts, or to implement them). This is a pretty bad situation. -- Yair Rand בתאריך יום ג׳, 5 באפר׳ 2022 ב-17:32 מאת Stella Ng <s...@wikimedia.org >: > Hello All, > > We would like to thank the over 2300 Wikimedians who participated in the > recently concluded community vote on the Enforcement Guidelines for the > Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Enforcement_guidelines>. > At this time, the volunteer scrutinizing group has completed the review > of the accuracy of the vote and the final results are available on > Meta-wiki. A quick summary can be found below: > > > - > > 58.6% Yes, 41.4% No > > > - > > Contributors from 128 home wikis participated in the vote > - > > Over thirty languages were supported in the ballot > > > What this outcome means is that there is enough support for the Board to > review the document. It does not mean that the Enforcement Guidelines are > automatically complete. > > From here, the project team will collate and summarize the comments > provided in the voting process, and publish them on Meta-wiki. The > Enforcement Guidelines will be submitted to the Board of Trustees for their > consideration. The Board will review input given during the vote, and > examine whether there are aspects of the Guidelines that need further > refinement. If so, these comments, and the input provided through Meta-wiki > and other community conversations, will provide a good starting point for > revising the Guidelines to meet the needs expressed by communities in the > voter’s responses. > > In the event the Board moves forward with ratification, the UCoC project > team will begin supporting specific proposals in the Guidelines. Some of > these proposals include working with community members to form the U4C > Building Committee, starting consultations on training, and supporting > conversations on improving our reporting systems. There is still a lot to > be done, but we will be able to move into the next phase of this work. > > Many people took part in making sure the policy and the enforcement > guidelines work for our communities. We will continue to collaboratively > work on the details of the strong proposals outlined in the Guidelines as > presented by the Wikimedians who engaged with the project in different ways > over the last year. > > Once again, we thank everyone who participated in the ratification of the > Enforcement Guidelines. > > Regards, > > Stella Ng on behalf of the UCoC Project Team > > Senior Manager, Trust and Safety Policy > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines > at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l > Public archives at > https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/B42TE3IZNGKTEPBMORULKNDVJIXM6AC7/ > To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org
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