Education
Wikimedia is writing specific regulations to tackle discrimination in Wikipedia
Wikipedia is planning to crack down on harassment and other "toxic" behavior with a new code of conduct. The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia among other projects, voted on Friday to adopt a more formal moderation process. The Foundation will draft details of this process by the end of 2020 and, until then, will be responsible for implementing stop-gap anti-harassment policies.
"Harassment, negative conduct and incivility in the Wikimedia community are contradictory to our common ideals and counterproductive to our goal and mission," the board said in a statement. "The Board does not agree that we have made adequate strides in the establishment of friendly , open, harassing-free spaces in which people can make a positive difference and discuss constructively."
The board of trustees gave four specific directives to the Wikimedia Foundation. It is to draft a "binding minimum set of standards" for behavior on its platforms, shaped by input from the community. It needs to "ban, punish or otherwise restrict access" to people who break that code, as well as to set up a review process that involves the community. It will "significantly improve cooperation and coordination with city leaders" through moderation. Beyond these directives, the Wikimedia Foundation is also expected to put more resources into its Trust and Safety team, including more staff and better training tools.
Around the same time , the project developed out of a freewheeling community-focused ethos — and many people object to the type of top-down compliance that you would expect on a corporate web site.
Such issues came to the fore last year when the Wikimedia Foundation suspended a popular yet abrasive editor who was accused by other users of relentless abuse. The interference bypassed the usual collective arbitration procedure of Wikipedia, and some administrators quit during the uproar that resulted.
The Board of Trustees does not address the dispute, only saying that the vote "formalizes years of concerted attempts by individual volunteers, Wikimedia members, Foundation employees, and others to avoid abuse and encourage inclusive Wikimedia projects." But on the discussion page, one editor referenced the suspension to suggest that the Wikimedia Foundation could not intervene with Wikipedia.
In the midst of all this, Wikipedia has become one of the most respected Internet sites. For example, YouTube uses Wikipedia pages to discard conspiratorial videos. That raised the stakes and provided a huge incentive for disinformation artists to target the web. Friday's vote indicates that the Wikimedia Foundation should take a more active role in moderating the website, even if we don't know exactly how it is.
