Policy talk:Universal Code of Conduct/Archive 3

Language Fluency and skills

While I agree that our multi lingual wikis such as Meta and Wikimedia Commons need to be open for people regardless of language fluency. It is an issue on other projects. I'm always careful when I edit on a Wiki where I don't speak the language, and I don't expect to be treated the same as on a wiki where I do speak the relevant language. I'm sure we have deleted people's contributions and probably also blocked people on the English language Wikipedia because either their skills or the language fluency wasn't sufficient for them to be a net positive to the project. On at least one language version of Wikipedia we have a real problem with lack of sufficiently skilled native speakers to maintain quality. The Foundation in hindsight would also have a problem complying with this language fluency policy. Most years it hosts wikimania with one or two host languages and a clear policy that only proficient speakers of a host language will qualify for scholarship grants. I agree we need to think about linguistic equity, and probably host more meetings where the required language is not the usual English. But we also need to retain the ability to require certain minimum skill levels in issues such as language when we are running projects to write encyclopaedias and other crowd sourced works. This part of the code needs to differentiate between things like gender and ethnicity where we don't allow discrimination. Things like age where we sometimes have to put a legal minimum. And things like skill level and language fluency where we do need to discriminate.

We also need to think very carefully how we handle language fluency issues that are really linguistic disputes. Several Wikipedia versions have chosen to standardise on particular versions of a language - I think Portuguese at one stage had a situation where some Wikipedians based in Portugal were unhappy with having Brazilian Portuguese as the standard for the Portuguese Wikipedia. English doesn't have this problem as we standardise spelling at the article level not the project level. But I wonder if standardising a language version of Wikipedia on one particular dialect would be considered to be secrminitaing discriminating against people who speak other dialects of that language? WereSpielChequers (talk) 15:41, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

We don't want to do anything that smacks of secrminitaing. EEng (talk) 16:44, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

I’ve learned enough lovely and interesting words from contributors that I've no shame in admitting I tried to look this up, EEng (seemed like a cromulent word to me =).

The Universal Code of Conduct is meant to remain subject to appropriate context. If a contributor lacking in fluency or competency persists in making unsuitable changes to a project, administrative intervention may be necessary to prevent those unsuitable changes in this context.

In Phase 2 participants may identify ways the UCoC seems to conflict with local policies in general, or in the specific context of a particular community.

Ideally, enforcement outside issues of a legal nature would generally be handled by local communities according to their existing community culture, policy, and practice. Where this is not possible, or where local policy and the draft universal policy diverge, please mention this in the consultations.

The drafting committee writing the enforcement section will take these concerns into account, and will be able to recommend improvements to the currently ratified document.

Thank you for the feedback WereSpielChequers! It will be useful for the drafting committee. Feel free to let me know if you have any other ideas. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 16:55, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Xeno. Given the ongoing greying of the pedia, I think we can anticipate in future decades having a lot of admins who need to have the tools gently prized away from them, much as a very diplomatic pair of policemen persuaded my mother to stop driving after her last car was written off by a malicious lamppost. I'm not sure whether that counts as age discrimination or discrimination against those who suffer from the diseases of ageing. But we will need to do this, and we can't assume that every admin will just hand in the tools when they start getting dementia. Perhaps what is needed is a mechanism whereby the community can agree to some exceptions that apply to the UCOC. WereSpielChequers (talk) 17:24, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Structure

The balance between positive behaviours to strive for and negative behaviours that will not be tolerated is a good way to structure these things from what I've seen. The CoC that a user group I'm involved with followsa similar organisation v:WikiJournal_User_Group/Code_of_conduct/Draft. In case it's useful, there's also a section at the bottom of that page with some other useful inspirations. Some possible things to consider including:

• Have examples in collapsed sections for each item (currently included for 'Respect the way that contributors name and describe themselves')
  • Indeed, different communities could contain different examples to illustrate the concepts in a locally relevant way.
• Have a final section of 'possible responses that may be taken' so that people understand that there are a spectrum of response measures

T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 11:33, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Unusual idea

Lets throw away safety and inclusion together with divercity and transgenderism from Wiki and concentrate on writing Enciclopedia, not left ideas--1Goldberg2 (talk) 16:30, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Hate speech clause

In Section 3.3, third bullet, I would suggest to replace "Hate speech in any form, or discriminatory" with "Any deliberate use of".

Reason: A term like "Hate speech" already carries deeply ingrained definitions which may differ from the one intended here. The rest of the bullet point ("language aimed at...") gives an excellent definition of the prohibited behavior, so it is best to shift the focus to that definition.

Eldar (talk) 01:02, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

That makes sense. Eissink (talk) 07:42, 3 February 2021 (UTC).

Thank you both for your comments about s3.3 of current Policy text: I have included the suggested change for consideration. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 16:20, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Section 3.1 -- Harassment

From Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review#3.1_–_Harassment

> (Note: The terms “race” and “ethnicity” are included here as prohibited ways

> to distinguish people. The Wikimedia movement does not endorse these terms

> as meaningful distinctions among people and believes that they should not be

> used outside of prohibiting them as the basis for personal attacks).

This is good wording indeed ... but a detail is missing. I would enhance the note to:

(Note: The terms “race” and “ethnicity” and “sex” are included here as prohibited ways

to distinguish people. The Wikimedia movement does not endorse these terms

as meaningful distinctions among people and believes that they should not be

used outside of prohibiting them as the basis for personal attacks).

Taylor 49 (talk) 14:54, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

We could simply say that we don't care how someone identifies instead of contradicting ourselves. Vexations (talk) 21:20, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Vexations WE is very vague and it is more complicated than just stating we do not care... Zblace (talk) 11:34, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

I could have said "all of us" instead. Instead of "do not care", "are indifferent to" or "find it without interest or concern". Or just "what you are is none of our business". Yes, it is a bit more complicated than that, because it isn't necessarily our consensus. Some of us insist that the projects ought to be "colourblind", others find that that not-racism perpetuates the status quo that inflicts injustices upon racialized minorities, and we should be actively anti-racist. I try to be that in my personal life, but I'm afraid not everyone is quite on board with that yet.

What I meant in my response though, was that in stead of saying that it is forbidden to call someone a "something", because "something" is a bad concept, even though we have to use it to describe what it is that we can't say, we say it's wrong to differentiate on any kind of identity. Vexations (talk) 12:51, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Changes to the main page

Yair rand: I appreciate your attention to the main page text and understand the motivation behind those copy edits. As the originally submitted text was sent for translation to support the Phase 2 community consultations efforts, would you be willing to restore the previous version of the English text copy to avoid confusion between projects?

The change in Special:Diff/21050573 adds a statement of expectation that is contingent on the results of upcoming consultations, and should be amended or restored to the original for clarity.

The change in Special:Diff/21051464 appears to link to a discussion about holding Wikimedia Foundation accountable to a new concept that has not yet been enacted. The phrase you added ("have rejected any WMF-imposed code of conduct") does not seem to accurately describe the outcome of that link.

This consultation involves all language communities, and a stable, translated description of the project is needed. Due to the way the translation work is structured, it would be best if revisions were proposed on talk before major changes are made.

I look forward to hearing more about your thoughts on the project. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 16:00, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Xeno (WMF) Wouldn't it be best to let this page stabilize, and then send it off for retranslation? If the page has been improved, then the translations should be improved to match it, not the page reverted.

I'll also say that I believe that the unanimous consensus at the link added by Special:Diff/21051464 does include 'It will not attempt to impose their notions of civility upon the communities with very diverse cultural backgrounds in the form of a central "code of conduct".', and it's hard to understand why that wouldn't be considered a rejection by the community that's at worthy of mention, at least until consensus changes. TomDotGov (talk) (hold the election) 17:32, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Ideally yes; however, the local language consultations are underway - so there is a need to have stable text and a uniform document across languages. Yair rand hasn’t had an opportunity to respond, so I’d like to resolve the two issues identified above while incorporating some of their changes.

There have been many community discussions held on Meta and at local projects about the Universal Code of Conduct, so including a link to one particular Meta strategy talk page section does not seem to be a representative way of showing the views present in the many communities in the movement.

Perhaps a better option would be to link to a page cataloging past discussions about the Universal Code of Conduct (including the one currently linked), so readers can make their own determination about community acceptance or rejection of the project’s objectives. TomDotGov: Please let me know what you think. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 16:09, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Given that the idea that pages can change is at the very heart of the **wiki** movement, it seems that a consultation procedure that assumes stable text is misguided. I'd suggest updating the procedures to match reality, rather than expecting people to stop editing pages. That's especially true now that the one of the recommendations of the strategy process is that we manage internal knowledge - adding relevant information to pages is something that needs to be encouraged.

I think it makes sense to link to as much on-wiki discussion as possible. TomDotGov (talk) (hold the election) 00:06, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

@Xeno (WMF): The one linked is the only large multi-project discussion I'm aware of on whether to accept a WMF-pushed code of conduct, and it's a good representation of responses globally. Locally, there have also been, IIRC, discussions on the Russian and English Wikipedias with similar results, and another shorter discussion here on Meta. The WMF tried to push various consultations along the lines of "Once we do this, how should it be done?", and I don't think one could reasonably consider those to be discussions of the basic issue of whether to let the WMF do it at all. (There are also the wildly-misrepresentative WMF reports on "consultations", which I assume none of us want to get into.) In any case, the link target can be changed without causing translation difficulties, correct? So if is to be altered (perhaps to a new page outlining discussions and results), the link target is not time-sensitive from the perspective of translations.

Re Special:Diff/21050573, I don't understand what you're referring to. Could you be more specific? Thanks. --Yair rand (talk) 00:31, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

To help explain, I've amended it in an edit meant to incorporate the spirit of your changes while allowing the English text to more closely reflect the version that was previously used for translation with the originally-submitted text.

SPoore (WMF) is coordinating the translation efforts and can explain further about that process and the need to collaborate on changes on the talk page before implementing them to ensure consistent translations and support the goal of a useful consultation.

Thanks again for your suggestions to improve the main page and providing sources of community comments about the UCoC, now being collected at Universal Code of Conduct/Discussions. Links like this will be useful in gathering a wide and diverse range of views to deliver useful feedback regarding the community's thoughts about the potential for a UCoC to be implemented. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 21:03, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Appreciation

This expresses all my thoughts and wishes (as a Wikimedia editor) regarding what should be in place as UCoC. I truly appreciate everyone’s efforts and commitments in drafting this recommendations to adopt. I suggest! A UCoC section be added in the sidebar of every Wikimedia projects in order to give direct access for everyone. Thank you for taking time out of your personal time to help the world be a better place for all of us. Em-mustapha ^{User | talk} 15:07, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Em-mustapha: Thank you for your comments! I will forward your idea to include a sidebar link at all Wikimedia projects providing access to the policy. Feel free to let me know if you have any more ideas! Xeno (WMF) (talk) 16:16, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Xeno (WMF)! I will, whenever I have one. Em-mustapha ^{User | talk} 20:10, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Ethics in International Arbitration: Can International Institutions Resolve a Universal Code of Conduct for all Participants in the Proceeding?

Interesting: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2021/02/rose-rameau-ethics-international-arbitration/ –xeno 16:59, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

I also found "Universal Code of Conduct to Prevent and Address Maltreatment in Sport" https://sirc.ca/safe-sport/uccms/ –xeno 17:10, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Please replace the GAFAM survey by a survey on an ethically acceptable server

Moved from Talk:Universal Code of Conduct/Policy text#Please replace the GAFAM survey by a survey on an ethically acceptable server. Iniquity (talk) 11:02, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

On one of the WMF wikis, I have just noticed an invitation to take part in an UCoC survey on a GAFAM website that will violate my privacy and that will support non-free software. Both of these are fundamentally opposed to the aims of the free knowledge movement. Google and the other components of GAFAM are centralised, secretive organisations that maximise their value on their market. WMF wikis are the (almost) complete opposite.

To whichever UCoC-related person had the crazy idea of setting up a survey on a Google server: Please look through https://switching.software to find an ethically acceptable survey software package and host for carrying out the survey. Resistance is fertile, not futile! Keep in mind that people living in the European Union have the GDPR to defend our rights and do not wish to "be the product" of Google. Thanks. Just to be clear: I'm criticising the action as hypocritical, not the person. Boud (talk) 03:43, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

That's a normal behaviour for those (WMF)ers, they don't care about our core values but go for minimum effort, not better privacy. I've told them more then just once, that Facebook, Google or anything along that lines can't produce a valid outcome, as it excludes those, eho care a bit about privacy. Using Google, Facebook, Twitter and other junk like that mus be completely off the table, at least as an input option for the community. What people do in private is their business, but the WMF , and the whole Wikiverse, has to have higher standards. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 11:23, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

If we're ever going to formalize the rights of Wikimedians, this ought to be one of them: No policy of any Wikimedia project shall be construed or applied so as to require a Wikimedian to reveal any personal information or require, coerce or otherwise force a Wikimedian to use non-free, non-gratis software or services. I just noticed that on Commons there is now a proposal to ban the practice Vexations (talk) 13:21, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

In short I expect something like "We used Google Form but don't do this at home: this is not a feature, this is a bug. Can you help us to adopt something Free?" and the answer is: Thank you for your work and yes, we can help you! You can start from the WMF's extraordinary technical department and the Wikimedia awesome tech volunteers, get them involved to adopt a solution respecting users' freedoms. For example I suggest LimeSurvey and QuickSurvey or nextCloud Forms. Yes, they are widely adopted. Yes, they have no limitations if you host them or if you have a serious partner. Feel free to ask me (and other people) how. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 23:30, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

See also Talk:Wikimania 2021/Call for participation#I want to give a contribution... but please no Google Form :( --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 10:19, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

It looks like Phoebe has got the point over at the Wikimania 2021 link. :) Though I don't see an explicit apology. :( Someone in the Board insulted the community and saw no need to apologise. UCoC would not make apologies obligatory, but they do help. Maybe the Board ought to organise an "introduction to free knowledge and how to avoid GAFAM/BATX" one-day workshop every time there are new Board members, whether they are the appointed or elected members. It shouldn't be hard to find some Wikimedia techies willing to do that remotely over e.g. jitsi or BigBlueButton rather than through freedom-violating software that I won't name. Boud (talk) 20:55, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Google just completely firred it ethics, they don't have an ethic any longer (officially, in reality they always were evil). See this article in the Kurier about this. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 06:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Terminology problem: corporate culture of top-down control

I've spent some time looking through the UCoC issue politically, in terms of the Wikimedia community. The current content of the page here includes near the top: "... though the community has not approved the Universal Code of Conduct. Phase 2 involves community conversations and proposal drafting on how to implement and enforce the UCoC."

The second part literally contradicts the first part. If the community has not approved UCoC, then it is politically unacceptable to say that what remains to be discussed are options for how to implement and enforce UCoC, rather than whether to implement and enforce it. We're aware that WMF members are in close contact with the corporate world, and as the WMF wikis together form one of the world's top few websites, we're aware that corporate and political pressure on WMF must be huge. I can empathise (without agreeing) with individuals finding it hard to not fall into top-down culture.

I see this as primarily a problem of WMF insensitivity to the community and difficulty in rejecting corporate culture. For the particular example I've cited here, a sufficient improvement, it seems to me, would be:

"... though the community has not approved the Universal Code of Conduct. Phase 2 involves community conversations and proposal drafting on how, if accepted by the community, UCoC would be implemented and enforced."

The actual intent and need for UCoC seems valid to me. I've noticed the practical involvement of Wikimedia communities other than the dominant en.Wikipedia community in consultations, and I assume that this is a deliberate aim to bypass our known demographic biases. This is very positive, and I'm sure that it wasn't that easy to organise. On the other hand, I don't think that the en.Wikipedia community should be de facto excluded from participating in making the decision by not making the proposal widely known.

Major grassroots international organisations doing a huge amount of good for the world like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have had their own issues of top-down decision-making, including a few well-known blunders, and they also have some in-built structural problems, but there's no particular reason to suspect that the individuals making decisions were not highly committed, long-term experienced human rights activists doing their best to make good decisions for their organisations; so it would be surprising if WMF completely escaped making a few major blunders. This particular case is not as bad as the ridiculous "branding" proposal, since in this case (UCoC), my prediction is that if the Wikimedia community is given the chance to participate in a legitimate decision-making process, then there'll be an overwhelming decision in favour of the proposal. If we're not given the chance to participate (not just "be consulted"), then a lot of energy will be wasted on a symbolic battle for power between WMF and the community.

I've also noticed that at least some code of conduct texts give the impression of a willingness to violate habeas corpus and the assumption of innocence, reversing well accepted human rights standards; I hypothesise (I may well be wrong) that some of that culture might have seeped into the idea of UCoC, which "must be enforced" even before it has been accepted as a decision.

I suggest that WMF people do a bit of editing and fix up all the Lukashenko type terminology and replace it by phrasing that shows more respect for the community, making it clear that it's the community's prerogative to have the final say in constitutional-type decision-making. Boud (talk) 00:53, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

It does appear that some is affected by American politics, but not all American "rights" are granted. But at least it can be discussed. Probably nothing will happen as a result of discussion, unless one of those "blunders" is identified. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:50, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

Hello, I’m helping facilitate community discussions about this project, and appreciate each of your thoughts on the matter. I agree that global community approval is difficult to demonstrate especially while there are reasonable questions from reasonably-minded contributors about the practicality of the policy text, or the notion altogether. That said, the process is still ongoing and other reasonably-minded contributors hope to see the project followed through to completion so proposals can be published for community consideration (even if they don’t approve of the practicality of the policy text as it exists today).

Please note en.wiki and other larger projects are not being excluded: those local language consultations started earlier as they required more time due to the translation workflows or multilingual nature of those projects. As we move into the fact-finding consultation planned for March, project participants will have an opportunity to contribute to global discussions as well as discussions that are tailored to their project. Any community discussions (facilitated or otherwise) about the UCoC may be posted to the Discussions page, and I’ve been following along with the discussions ongoing on FrWiki and NlWiki.

To the point about the Phase 2 consultations seeming to beg the question: I’m not sure that is the case. Of course, there is a legal role that platform providers must play in setting codes of conduct for visitors, so this process can reasonably be seen as fulfilling a fiduciary duty to sustain and enhance the viability and resilience of the global platform upon which the individually self-governing projects thrive. More importantly though, the desire for such a global policy comes from the Movement Strategy discussions which was a global sourcing of input from all Wikimedia communities and stakeholders on strategic direction.

My hope is that the UCoC will serve as an overlay for the existing community policies, practices, and procedures of mature projects (see, for example, this mapping in the French Wikipedia discussion) and serve as a starter document for newer and less-developed ones. The most successful policy will be one met with wide community approval precisely because it respects the way their community operates and aligns itself with the pre-existing community governance, moderation structures, and values. It will also be one that helps create stable pathways for the community to resolve issues and work to fulfill several of the high-priority community wishlist items that have been sought such as better support for cross-wiki abuse monitoring and response, and support for users who experience or address harassment within communities (such as the WikiLearn pilot program currently ongoing).

I do wonder whether the UCoC can truly cover all cultural contexts, and it’s one of the reasons I took this role: to act as a conduit for community concerns and ensure that the points where the global policy is impractical in individual community contexts are identified and clearly highlighted to the drafting committee writing the application section. In preparing reports about input and sentiment, we won’t be diminishing any criticism, and on-wiki reports will be available for review and comment. There are still ongoing discussions in many places about the practicality, enforceability, translatability, and applicability of the policy text as we move forward, and the UCoC will be subject to periodic and as-needed reviews.

I also consider the potential in the successful creation and adoption of such a document: those same best practices that have been developed over thousands (millions?) of volunteer hours will be made available to the global communities that have not yet achieved the same level of organization. Pulling together wide and varied viewpoints from the communities to attempt to distill into simple actionable terms the types of behaviour that are acceptable in our collaborative environments globally is a monumental challenge. The policy produced must be practical for our communities: "if it doesn't make sense, then I hope the Board does not ratify it."

To your substantive concerns: these are exactly the type of issues upon which community input is being sought in the upcoming consultations. I do look forward to hearing more of your in-depth thoughts on these matters, and appreciate the time you took to express your concern about the seemingly contradictory statement in the lead. I did notice these changes have caused some confusion in other community discussions. I would like to implement the following change (which clarifies and highlights that while there is a global policy in development, the various communities are still discussing the practicality or applicability of such a policy for their community):

The Board of Trustees announced its approval of the UCoC Policy on 2 February 2021. Community discussions about the practicality and application of the UCoC are ongoing. Phase 2 involves community conversations and proposal drafting on the potential methods to enforce the UCoC contingent on implementation and adoption. It officially began in February 2021.

@Xeno: The Resolution of the Board of Trustees dates back to December 9th 2020 JustB EU (talk) 19:58, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

@Boud, Graeme Bartlett, Yair rand, Arccosecant, and TomDotGov: Please let me know if this makes sense. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 19:01, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

While the question of how to determine community approval - "making the decision" - is undetermined, it seems to me that algorithms that are likely to converge on a decision are feasible. There could be a weighting to give nearly equal weight to all Wikimedia communities above a certain threshold of self-sustainability and healthy community functioning. For example, all communities above the median (or 75th percentile or 25 percentile or ...) of numbers of confirmed, experienced, autopatrolled editors would get equal weight; smaller communities' weights would be tapered down to near zero for the smallest. This would make, for example, Arabic and Farsi and Indonesian Wikipedia individual users more influential (individually) than individual English Wikipedia users, while not making the result sensitive to decisions in tiny communities. So more like the UN General Assembly rather than the UNSC, where "might is right" for the permanent five. And a 2/3 majority (after weighting) for a yes/no vote would be required. This is just off the top of my head to start the ball rolling. Anyway, for the wording, I propose ALT1:

The Board of Trustees announced its approval of the UCoC Policy on 2 February 2021. Community discussions about the practicality and application of the UCoC are ongoing. Phase 2 involves community conversations and proposal drafting on the potential methods to enforce the UCoC, contingent on the community making a positive decision in favour of the UCoC. Phase 2 officially began in February 2021. The community decision will be conducted during Phase 3.

I removed "implementation" after "contingent", because if UCoC is implemented, then that means that is has been done, carried out, enforced, it seems to me. A formal declaration is not an "implementation". If the WMF Board has not yet accepted the need for a community decision, then you could omit the last sentence for the moment, but it's the elephant in the room that you (the Board) have to deal with sooner or later. Better have the community decision be made in Phase 3 than never. The word decision seems critical to me. Corporations consult with their senior staff and workers; participatory organisations have (in principle) decisions made by the participants. Boud (talk) 19:56, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

@Xeno (WMF): I don't believe this is a useful change, as it implies that the Board can make arbitrary changes to policy without community support. Wikimedia isn't Google or Facebook, where they have a central board that directs the actions of the corporation. Instead, the Wikimedia Foundation is closer to a fiscal sponsor for the various projects that produce the mission's value. While I'm sure that the UCoC is binding on WMF employees like yourself, it isn't the Board or Foundation's place to exercise powers that the projects haven't delegated to it.

Fundamentally, the UCoC is an okay-ish idea, provided it's enforced in a way the community finds fair. But trying to impose it without the consent of the community is going to harm it's ability to be a movement tool. It is very important to indicate that it hasn't gone through any sort of community process, and isn't policy outside of the Foundation until it does. And what's more, by misunderstanding the status of the UCoC, the Foundation risks reducing support. TomDotGov (talk) (hold the election) 19:58, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

@Xeno (WMF): I think such a change could be acceptable, however, it should be more explicit that a binding community approval process is required, so I propose this wording:

The Board of Trustees announced its approval of the UCoC Policy on 2 February 2021. Community discussions about the practicality and application of the UCoC are ongoing. Phase 2 involves community conversations and proposal drafting on the potential methods to enforce the UCoC, contingent on community ratification of UCoC. Phase 2 officially began in February 2021. A binding community ratification process will be conducted during Phase 3.

It needs to be made clear that the WMF is not forcibly imposing the UCoC onto the community, rather that the WMF is asking the community to implement an idea that they find beneficial. Also, I would suggest to the WMF that they hold some form of formal (i.e. with a binding vote) request for amendments to the UCoC, to ensure that community concerns are properly addressed. — csc^-1 21:32, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

@Boud, Graeme Bartlett, Yair rand, Arccosecant, and TomDotGov: How should community consensus be determined? If each community has only one vote (or, as happens in US Presidential elections, each community votes as a block), then each community's vote should get a weighting to ensure fairness by ensuring that larger projects have a greater influence than smaller projects, but that this influence is not disproportionate.

One way is to use the Penrose method with the driving metric [my terminology] being the number of hits each community's project gets. Alternatively, the driving metric could be the number of articles in that community's project. In the Penrose method, the weighting factor for each vote is the square root of the number in the driving metric. The Wikipedia artcile shows how the Penrose method could work in the European Union with each country's population being the driving metric. In that example, Germany's population is 206 times that of Malta, but its vote is worth 14.3 times that of Malta's. In the case of the UCoC, this would mean that the viewpoint of the English Wikipedia (6.24 million articles) would be worth 22 times the viewpoint of the Limburghish Wikipedia (13k articles). Martinvl (talk) 22:03, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

@Martinvl: The vote should be based on approval by some super-majority threshold (perhaps 75-85%, akin to an enwiki RfB, as this sort of thing needs very broad consensus) by editors rather than projects, since people aren't tied to one specific project. This should deal with any concerns about relative size of communities. You'd want to implement that same sort of voting restrictions there are for steward/board/arbcom elections obviously. — csc^-1 22:17, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

I agree that editors should be allowed only one vote, with the right to choose which wiki they want to use as their justification for voting, but with equal weights per vote, independent of which wiki community, I don't understand how this would balance between the communities. One equally weighted vote per editor would mean that enwiki dominates overwhelmingly, and, generally, a small bunch of rich-country-language wikis dominate, more or less imitating the United Nations Security Council, in terms of lack of balance. A power of 0.5 or even 0.3 would seem reasonable to me to flatten the relative power of the biggest communities. Boud (talk) 22:33, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

The issue is that people aren't just part of one community, they might be active at a bunch of different wiki's, and might not even have a "main" project. Obviously you do need to address massive enwiki influence, so I'd say the best way to do that would be to have 2 votes, one unweighted wikimedia-wide, and another per-project vote (where you can vote in all projects you're an active contributor to) weighted by pages/edits/users/something (and the weighted vote would be distributed to yes/no proportionally, no WikiElectoralCollege please). I'd imagine a good procedure could look like this:

1. This current discussion over enforcement finishes up
2. An window to propose amendments opens up, which would require a 65% or so margin to pass
3. A vote is held to "Ratify" or "Reject" the UCoC, if ratified, it goes into effect
4. If rejected, a window for discussion opens, and then another amendment window opens in order to fix it
5. Hold another vote, if rejected again, repeat this process, but allow an amendment to kill the UCoC if it become unsalvageable.
6. If it keeps failing, perhaps allow the community to write their own version?

This could help get a community approved UCoC passed, though it feels excessively bureaucratic. — csc^-1 23:46, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Global policy decisions are made with properly internationalized (and well-advertised) RfCs or votes, with a reasonably high threshold for consensus, and with plenty of discussion. See for example the vote on establishing the Global sysops user group.

Re the text on the page: It's very important to mention explicitly that the community has not approved the UCoC. I don't know what the WMF actually plans, but we should be careful not to attribute specific intentions to them that we're not sure about. (I suspect that eventually we will (completely independent of the WMF) have an actual process for the community actually writing and approving a baseline set of global conduct rules, and the WMF will waste a lot of everyone's time before then being uncooperative and generally threatening about this.) --Yair rand (talk) 02:39, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

@Martinvl: I don't think that determining consensus for a policy is hard when the policy has consensus. We do it all the time, through the wiki process. Someone suggests a change, and people discuss it. If the change is a good one, it sticks, if not, someone will suggest an improvement, or suggest that the status quo is the best. If something is particularly thorny, then perhaps an RfC is is in order, but that should be the exception, not the rule.

The problem here is that the UCoC didn't go through the open improvement process that everything else goes through, and so it doesn't benefit from the consensus that improvement process naturally produces. I don't think that talking about voting methods and so on is really the right way to go about this - generally, when something is ready to become policy, it should be obvious to everyone that it is. If nobody can suggest a way to improve things, then we're probably in a good place.

It might be harder to develop a policy this way (though adding diverse perspectives might make things easier). It's important to facilitate things such that the changes can be discussed in multiple langanges. (I'm surprised that the WMF invests in things like branding junkets and not machine translation to make this easier.) At the end of the day, it's the way that has been proven to work, and I'm not sure that a bespoke voting process will. TomDotGov (talk) (hold the election) 04:52, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

What I think is that the terms and conditions should not at all be controversial. They should include complying with the law. They should aim for the purposes of the Wikipedias and allied projects, but should not be overlaying American political values. They should be able to get overwhelming support, say 90% of projects support including what is there. If a project thinks something is missing, then they can add to their own local policies. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:19, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

I agree with the apparently unanimous concerns expressed above, regarding the text proposed by Xeno (WMF). At best the text is unclear, and at worst it indicates a problem. The text deletes the community from the the most important portion. It is unclear whether removing the community was a well-intentioned-but-excessive attempt to shorten and simplify, or whether it was intended to be a substantive deletion of the most crucial issue. The current text includes a step seeking community acceptance. We can sort out the details on that step after Xeno clarifies the Foundation position. I would suggest there are basically two paths forwards. One path is for the Foundation to affirm and collaborate on that step, focusing on the key points of critics on what is necessary to ensure and maximize community acceptance. I wold be happy to assist with that. The other path, a painful and historically repeating pattern, is for the Foundation to focus on friendly feedback, to deny/ignore a step to determine community consensus, and then the step typically happens anyway. In the latter case it would be one-or-more critics organizing a hostile RFC, an RFC focused on the strongest unaddressed flaws and criticisms. Alsee (talk) 10:59, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

← Thanks to everyone for the suggestions about the main page text; an incorporating update was made. I noticed additional good faith changes, and have concerns with the current text.

Re: Special:Diff/21181403: the discussion above demonstrates how difficult it is to measure formal approval on a global scale, so the text should reflect what can be more readily measured (the sentiment and positions of individual communities) to assist with understanding (especially by those not familiar with the structure of the Board, the Foundation, or how individual participants, communities, and groups make up the global movement).

Re: Special:Diff/21181180: many participants have asked for a code to be implemented, and much of the code is derived from established policies present in many projects. Many called for additional resources and support for contributors who are identifying and responding to problems. Many communities have a means of enforcing basic expectations by extension of the terms of use or existing policies, guidelines, and practice which already prohibit harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism.

The text should be more clear for those not familiar with the intricacies of the projects:

"Individual communities within the global movement have not necessarily approved or adopted a means of enforcing this Code of Conduct."

I appreciate the desire for broad participatory global input into the document and this is represented in my consultation design, which continues the project focus on wide community engagement. The project team continues to review and adapt to ensure the process remains inclusive and participatory across the movement and will be posting additional details and an updated timeline soon. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 00:45, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

A problem that the WMF seems to be running into recently is the use of bespoke processes to evaluate consensus. If a policy actually has consensus, there shouldn't be any need for "consultation design" - the consensus of interested parties should be obvious. That it's not means that the policy needs to be changed, not the process.

I don't believe edits like Special:Diff/21177867 are helpful, as the WMF should not be hiding the lack of community approval from the reader. It's important that a policy like this gain community approval, so as to prevent the massive diversion of effort that happened in, for example, en:WP:FRAM. TomDotGov (talk) (hold the election) 15:43, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

The proposed text implies something that is incorrect. The global community has not approved the UCoC. We have systems for this kind of thing, and they don't involve WMF staffers telephoning handpicked users, holding confidential conversations involving leading questions, "reporting" the results in a broadly misrepresentative manner, and claiming support. --Yair rand (talk) 14:38, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

Yair rand, the suggested text states that individual communities within the global movement have not necessarily approved or adopted a means of enforcing the code of conduct. Is that not accurate?

The description above of the process used to gauge global opinions seems unfair: to date, the UCoC project has involved many on-wiki discussions in multiple languages inviting wide input from all global users responding to calls for feedback and a comprehensive revision process.

The page text should reflect a globally-representative and inclusive view. With the restored wording, readers unfamiliar with Wikimedia projects may form the mistaken impression that basic conduct expectations are not approved or enforced by individual communities in the global movement. This is not the case, as there are existing mechanisms in place to address unacceptable behaviour. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 20:10, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

To each of your three points:

• The sentence does not outright state any literal falsehoods, no. That's not exactly great praise. The clear implications are false. ("More-recently-established Wikimedia projects are not necessarily populated entirely by lizard people." is also technically true, while implying falsehoods.)
• There certainly were many discussions, in various media. Most of the WMF-initiated ones clumsily avoided all the main issues, like whether the WMF should be involving itself in conduct policy, or the role of global policies in this area. After ignoring the parts of discussion they didn't like, WMF staff put together some wildly misleading reports to the Board in order to get approval for something the community opposed. Then, instead of taking a supporting role in the process per the Board's expectations, the WMF just appointed whoever they felt like to write the document, ostensibly with "community input" while generally ignoring actual community processes. And then at the end individual trustees dictated a bunch of things they felt should be in the UCoC, in what could reasonably be called abuse of power. I skipped over a lot of the bad behaviour in this summary, but I think everyone here understands the gist of how it all went. The community rejected the UCoC.
• That's an argument against putting out a WMF press release linking to an internal page about a potentially confusing unapproved proposal, not an argument against clearly marking the proposal's status. While we have some responsibility for cleaning up the WMF's mistakes that harm Wikimedia's reputation, building mistakes around those mistakes is not sensible. The wikis make their own conduct policies reasonably clear to their own users; I'm not concerned about them thinking that those disappeared because of an unapproved UCoC. If we wanted to take the expressed risks seriously, we would put a notice at the top of the page saying something like "Wikimedia projects establish and enforce conduct policies independently. Go there if you want to find out what the policies are. This thing here is some nonsense put together by a confused support organization." (Less sarcastically, maybe.) But we don't, so we won't.

--Yair rand (talk) 21:22, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Edit request | Legal status Code of Conduct

In an official Resolution of the Wikimedia Fuundation you can find here: Approval Universal Code of Conduct, the Code of Coduct has been approved by the Foundation as "an enforceable policy across all online and offline Wikimedia projects and spaces". Some aspects related to that purpose are not clear (yet) from the project page:

• It would be good to make clear what legal status this Code of Conduct has / will have in the somewhat intransparent range of policy - and guideline rulings published all over the Wikipedia platform. It looks like this Code of Conduct will have a status above the local community guidelines and below the general Terms of Use.
• Does at this moment a set of policies / guidelines exist that are enforceable across all local Wikipedia projects, comparable to this new Code of Conduct? When yes, will the Code of Conduct replace this policies?
• Who will have the right / obligation to enforce the Code of Conduct?

Not asking to answer these quesions personally, it's feedback from the user-workfloor in Europe. Thanks. WillTim 2001:16B8:8C13:FF01:196F:BE90:43F6:9FEA 17:15, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Hello WillTim: there is “Refraining from certain activity” in the current Terms of Use: the UCoC seeks to expanding on conduct expectations in more detail; see Universal Code of Conduct/FAQ#Redundancy with Terms of Use. The UCoC is meant to be subsidiary to the Terms of Use where currently the right or obligation to enforce depends on the type of report and the capacity of the project upon which the report is made. For example, some projects are served by global sysops, stewards, and other users who patrol globally. Other projects have well-developed local policies and conflict resolution systems. Severe cases that cannot be addressed locally are often referred to the Foundation’s Trust and Safety team. This is a key question being explored in Phase 2, so please let me know if you have any input on the subject or further questions. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 20:29, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

My two cents (see above for more careful wording): The Wikipedias' (and other WMF wikis') content is free-licensed and copyright rests with the authors. Hypothetically, we (the community) could switch from WMF-operated/funded servers to an alternative set of servers. The effort involved would be huge, and would be a huge sink (waste) of time and energy, but the possibility is there - hypothetically. WMF's terms of use are for Wikipedias hosted on WMF servers; hosting on alternative servers would require whoever is hosting those servers to take the legal responsibility and risks and declare terms of service. (I'm not a lawyer.) The bottom line is that there is a subtle political battle going on between WMF and the community about governance. It's subtle, because the community (in my prediction) is very likely to accept UCoC after sufficient corrections and changes of attitude by the WMF, while WMF knows that for the community to say "we reject UCoC" would make us look like an extreme-right community that wants to have the right to be sexist, racist and so on. As the Wikipedias are the only world-dominating web service that is community based and transparent, in contrast to GAFAM/BATX, it's unsurprising that WMF is under pressure to imitate the GAFAM corporate culture of top-down control. Anwyay, see above to see if the WMF wants to challenge the community to fork onto other servers or rather accepts to acknowledge community sovereignty in decision-making. My impression is that the answers to the specific questions depend on the community insisting on our sovereignty, not asking if we still have it. Boud (talk) 21:37, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

No summary report yet?

The summary report on feedback is supposed to be released this month. Now we're closer to February, and I've not yet seen the report to this date. George Ho (talk) 05:40, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

George Ho: Thank you for your query; the summary report can be found here. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 15:36, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

That is an astonishingly one-sided summary. I have followed those discussions closely on several projects in multiple languages and I don't recognize them in the summary at all. Some citations would be in order. What I find most disturbing is that the WMF now has adopted the absolute lowest behavioral standards (the UCoC is a miminum baseline after all) for itself. That is hasn't occurred to anyone at the WMF that they should adopt a code of conduct that requires the highest standards instead is, well, telling. Vexations (talk) 15:58, 14 March 2021 (UTC)