Wikipedia talk:Harassment

Thanks everyone who has been responding. I agree with what Thryduulf and Ivanvector have suggested. But I'm somewhere between ambivalent and uncomfortable with what Mkdw has proposed. The most substantive change that it involves is the way that it addresses things like educational, outreach, or meet-up projects, and it seems to me to go in the wrong direction there, per earlier discussion about outreach, above. It seems to add additional restrictions on top of the policy here. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:18, 18 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Tryptofish: I am unclear about what additional restrictions you are concerned about. If you are attending an event that has its own code of conduct, terms of use, or friendly space policy, you are already subject to those policies. If an outreach program has its own policy that prohibits any private unauthorized communication then that policy prevails over Wikipedia policy. We do have the authority to say private contact is acceptable in that situation. That is up to the organizers and stating so here may directly contradict a local event policy. I specifically omitted wording that definitively prohibits private contact because we cannot account for every situation in the real-world. Mkdw ^talk 19:56, 18 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect that we are each misunderstanding the other. Where you refer to the WMF Friendly Space policy, it sounds like you are saying that it applies in addition to the en-wiki harassment policy. So it would be like editors here are always subject to the harassment policy, and additionally become subject to the friendly space policy when they get involved with certain organized activities. I'm not seeing what that would accomplish, since WMF terms of use always apply here (but I would not mind having a see also going to the friendly space page). If you scroll up a bit above the section break, to where it says "Outreach observations", there is discussion about how there are certain programs in which some types of off-wiki communication within an organized structure is acceptable, that would not be acceptable if an individual editor seeks out another editor's private information. And, more broadly, I'm just not seeing what it is about the second paragraph that you are trying to correct. Is that clearer? --Tryptofish (talk) 20:16, 18 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, we're not understanding each other. Plainly, the sentence, "or as part of organized projects such as educational, outreach, or meet-up projects" should be removed. The other changes were for clarity, grammar, and putting it in a more formal language setting. Mkdw ^talk 00:22, 29 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I don't in fact understand. Why should that sentence be removed? (Again, please take a look at the comments above, starting at "Outreach observations", before replying.) Thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:56, 29 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

(PS. To other editors: the very fact of the two of us not understanding things the same way should serve as another demonstration of why a revision is needed, and why the existing language is insufficient. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:58, 29 December 2018 (UTC))[reply]

I read the concerns about outreach when I first wrote my proposal and I already explained above the issue with this wording. I have provided a more detailed explained at User talk:Tryptofish#Harassment amendment. Mkdw ^talk 01:20, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

My apologies for coming very late to this discussion. I want to add my voice to those above saying that off-wiki contact, using details not posted on-wiki, is not necessarily harassment and insisting that it is cheapens harassment and plays down some terrible experiences.
I have very occasionally (twice, perhaps?) contacted other editors by phone. This has happened in the course of patrolling UAA where a new editor claims to represent a public institution (museum or library). I've blocked the account for violating the policy on usernames that imply shared use, dropped the appropriate template on their TP but also made what I consider a courtesy a phone call to the reception desk of the institution, asking to speak to whoever handles their Wikipedia presence to explain the problem and what they need to do to fix it. In every case, the call has been welcome and appreciated. Is this harassment? I certainly don't think so, but by some definitions floating around here it would be.
I think some of the disagreements are helpfully clarified by Tornado Chaser's proposed edit above; some proposals here seek to ban all off-wiki contact without prior affirmative consent, not because that is always harassment but because it may constitute harassment or may be perceived as harassment. Imposing a blanket ban, and so losing the benefit of examples above of helpful and welcome off-site contact in order to prevent other inappropriate cases, may be a reasonable thing to do (I'm in two minds) especially given the difficulty we have articulating when such contact is and isn't harassing. But we should be explicit that we are casting the net wide, and prohibiting some unproblematic situations in order to protect people from harassment, rather than simply broadening our definition of harassment to the point where it is nearly meaningless. GoldenRing (talk) 03:17, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The key thing about those examples, as I see it, is that if someone claims, on-wiki, to be representing an organisation then they are effectively disclosing that they can be contacted through that organisation. Stopping that contact is not the aim of this change nor do I see it being affected by the recently proposed versions either. Thryduulf (talk) 21:31, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

(EC) I appreciate that that is how you see it, but I'm seeing a number of others here who don't see it that way. Eg. Tryptofish above, "tracking down their contact information that they did not post here should be against policy." My example above would breach such a policy, because I googled the organisation to find a phone number for them. Ryk72 takes this even further with "if a Wikipedia editor makes unsolicited phone calls to another editor on a phone number that they have not explicitly provided on Wiki, it is an act of harassment - intent is immaterial; how the call is received is immaterial - it is an act of harassment."
Mkdw's proposed text above is problematic for me because it defines harassment in part as "unwanted contact." How is an editor to know whether contact is welcome until it has been attempted? There seems to be general agreement that finding an editor's personal phone number and using it is unacceptable, but it isn't obvious to me that such cases would always fall under "inappropriate" or "unwanted"; this seems to me to be a case of banning a wide range of contact in order to prevent the fraction that is actually a problem. As I said above, this may well be a reasonable trade-off, but we should not seek to justify it by pretending that every such case is harassment. GoldenRing (talk) 22:27, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You make a good point about what you quoted me as saying. And I actually did not intend it to apply to what you described. I would very much welcome ideas about how to put this into policy language, since we certainly have a lot of illustrations of how not to say it. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:54, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

That distinction, between "is always" and really-is-not-always, is on my mind too. And it's difficult to put it into precise language. I'll repeat what Mkdw pointed out above, that there is a parallel discussion going on at User talk:Tryptofish#Harassment amendment. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:14, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Things that are (not) always unacceptable

Following on from comments by Tryptofish, Mkdw and GoldenRing (among others) above it may help if we work out some examples of what we see as always unacceptable, and some examples of what is (sometimes) acceptable and work out if there is an easily expressed way of determining what puts something in one category or another:
Things that are always unacceptable without explicit advance permission:

• Contacting an editor off-wiki regarding an on-wiki dispute you and they are both involved in - doubly so if contact is by phone - an order of magnitude more so if contact is in person. If unsolicited contact with an editor is necessary it is almost always going to be better if this is initiated by an editor who is not, and has not recently been, involved in any dispute with the editor being contacted.
• Intentionally contacting an editor in person, other than at an event you and they are both attending.
• Contacting an editor at an event in any way that breaches the policies of that event.
• Contacting an editor via their personal phone/email/etc when these have not been made available publicly.
• Contacting an editor via their place of work when their edits to Wikipedia do not clearly form part of their duties.
• Contacting an editor using any method they have explicitly asked you not to use (excluding vague or overbroad requests not to post on the editor's talk page)
• Sleuthing alternative contact details for an editor when working details have been posted/linked to on-wiki.
• Sharing contact details with third parties (other than exceptions below)
• Using contact details provided for Wikipedia/Wikimedia matters

Things that are (sometimes) acceptable:

• Contacting an editor at an organisation they explicitly or otherwise very clearly (claim to) represent, using publicly available contact details for that organisation.
• Contacting an editor using contact details posted or linked to on-wiki (only regarding Wikipedia/Wikimedia matters unless
• Contacting a teacher/tutor/professor/etc regarding an on-wiki activity they are (apparently) running/organising/instigated for their pupils/students/etc. Where possible, contact should normally be made through/via their educational institution.
• Sharing contact details with the
  emergency response team
  or other emergency responders.
• Sharing contact details when required to do so by law enforcement or similar bodies (but inform m:Legal as soon as possible)

These are my initial opinions only (it does not necessarily reflect consensus), not all of them have been thoroughly thought through, wording above is explicitly not intended as policy wording, and I am explicitly not proposing this as a list of examples to be included in any policy and it is definitely not a complete list. Thryduulf (talk) 23:44, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I think that this is a very helpful exercise. To take a pair of examples where I'm having a hard time putting it into policy-style language:

1. Contacting an editor via their personal phone/email/etc when these have not been made available publicly.
2. Contacting a teacher/tutor/professor/etc regarding an on-wiki activity they are (apparently) running/organising/instigated for their pupils/students/etc. Where possible, contact should normally be made through/via their educational institution.

I think we all agree that there are situations in which the first example is something we want to prohibit, and I think (hope!) that the second example is something we want to permit. But doing the second example pretty much requires violating the first. I'm coming up blank on how to explain that in a policy. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:54, 30 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I would say, there is no instance unless for some emergency situation which I am having a hard time imagining, where we contact a teacher personally when the editing work is in the name of students. Working with students is a professional endeavour and we don't have the right unless given permission, in my opinion anyway, to contact a teacher of any kind through personal means.Littleolive oil (talk) 00:42, 31 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If the teacher is working for/with an educational institution then we should be making contact with them through that institution if we can - no question. If however we can find only personal contact details (which would I suspect be most likely if it was a private tutor or someone not working through an official institution) then the answer is not so clear-cut. Thryduulf (talk) 01:03, 31 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The more I see of the discussions here, the more I am convinced that we need to clarify the policy about this, and the more I am convinced that it is depressingly difficult to do so. About class projects, I urge interested editors to look over the recent history of WP:Education noticeboard. It is not at all unusual to have class projects that show up at en-Wiki without going through the processes set up by WMF/WikiEd, create significant disruption, and subsequently result in some editors who are also highly trustworthy staff of WikiEd getting in touch privately with the instructor and working helpfully to fix the situation. If that's harassment of the instructor, well, to call it that would be ludicrous.

More broadly, I want to thank Thryduulf for setting up this part of the discussion, and GoldenRing for articulating particularly well why we should not classify a lot of off-wiki contact as harassment. I've slept on it, and I'm somewhat changing my previous opinion, to believe now that we need to define harassment here somewhat narrowly. In considering the lists above, I'm starting to think that the distinguishing factors (thinking out loud here, far from a final determination) between what is and what isn't acceptable come down to (or at least include) two specifics. (1) It's harassment when the communication comes as part of any sort of dispute – because that greatly exacerbates the dispute by adding a menacing aspect to it. (2) It's harassment when the editor contacted has a reasonable expectation that the contact information would not have been used because they had not provided it on-wiki – because that kind of contact is creepy and potentially menacing. But when neither of those two criteria apply, I'm not sure that it is harassment. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:29, 31 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It occurs to me to add: (3) It's harassment when the editor contacted has asked not to be contacted that way. It might be possible to combine (2) and (3). --Tryptofish (talk) 00:12, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Thryduulf: A few times you have mentioned the case of educators organising projects for students outside of an organisational setting (private tutors etc). Is this a case that has ever come up? Or is it more a hypothetical? GoldenRing (talk) 22:29, 1 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@GoldenRing: I've never been involved with WikiEd so I can't say whether it has ever happened or not - my whole knowledge about this subject comes from this discussion. Thryduulf (talk) 22:59, 1 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've followed the issues surrounding class projects for a long time, and I do not recollect any problems related to that. If it is just one or two students editing, I doubt that other editors would even realize that they were doing it as part of a tutorial, unless two students were editing closely-related pages. If it were something with multiple students editing as part of such a tutorial, it would be regarded at WikiEd as still being a "class assignment", whether or not the "class" was conducted within an educational institution or as part of a private teaching exercise. What I think that means for the discussion here is that we can get only so far by basing this policy on a distinction between contacting someone through their institution or contacting them individually. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:09, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What about something on these lines:

The wording is rather clumsy in places, in particular the bit about professional capacity; this is an attempt to capture the private tutor situation. Also the "in Ralston to an on-wiki dispute"is perhaps unclear; where an admin blocks an org account and makes a courtesy phone call, that's intended to be permitted, but where they block an org account and the user kicks up a big fuss on-wiki about admin abuse and so on, then a phone call should not be permitted. The "required by law" language is intended where eg one editor sues another; we can block the plaintiff under NLT, but want to avoid blocking the defendant for responding to the suit. I'm still just thinking out loud. GoldenRing (talk) 23:40, 1 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

My initial thoughts: I see the following as issues, in no particular order. I'd rather omit the legal parts, because the example you give is the only one I can think of where that applies, and both parties would be kept off-wiki until the legal dispute is resolved. We need to add something about it being fine to use email when the email function is enabled. I don't like saying in a policy that the policy bans some things that are actually OK, the way that last sentence does. I'm not sure that "on behalf of an organization" adequately reflects class projects: the students edit on their own behalves in order to get course credit, and the instructor might not be editing at all. Also, I can see an ugly opportunity for gaming if someone says that they contacted someone at their workplace because of a flimsy association between the editing and the workplace. Even if it's not gaming, there can be a lot of confusion over what constitutes "reasonable belief" – after all, the drama over the now-blocked editor that set off this entire discussion arose over contacting someone over their possible COI by using their organizational contact information. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:26, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your thoughts. Having re-read this discussion this morning, I am starting to think maybe "no unsolicited phone calls ever" is the right approach, but I'm trying to see if we can frame a policy that avoids that. To respond to your points:

1. Would we block an editor for responding to an off-wiki suit? The actual text of
   WP:NLT
   says we wouldn't even block the plaintiff, so long as it isn't mentioned on-wiki. I can think of various other hypothetical situations, but admittedly they are mostly real-world-situation-plus-both-happen-to-be-wikipedians.
2. "publicly inviting contact on-wiki" is meant to capture the email function, but it could be explicitly added.
3. IMO off-site contact with students in this situation should be off-limits; I can't see a situation where we should be looking up a student's contact details. And if the instructor is not editing, the contact is outside the scope of the policy.
4. probably the most important part of the text is that it is never okay to make off-wiki contact where there is an on-wiki dispute. In these situations, even if the intent is good and the call would have actually helped, the potential for it to go wrong is enormous. Perhaps there are still opportunities for gaming here, with tag-teaming and such.
5. I think it is important that the policy sets a clear expectation that off-wiki contact is normally not okay, even in situations where no harm is done. I don't want editors to be able to say, "but the policy is ridiculously over-broad and my particular case didn't do any harm." Even if their particular case of off-wiki contact didn't do any specific harm, it still did a general harm of normalising a sort of contact that some editors are known to find particularly distressing.

Another aspect that I don't think has been discussed is that we encourage editors to contact image owners to ask if they will release content under a free license. In the general case this won't be in the scope of this policy but the owner may happen to be a Wikipedian (and the connection may not be public). I'm generally worried about situations that amount to a real world situation that would normally be fine except both parties happen to be Wikipedians and the potential for the harassment policy to be weaponised in these situations. GoldenRing (talk) 10:46, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The point about file license permissions is a very good one, that I don't think anyone thought of before. Given that we have three versions being discussed here, the one that I suggested, the one that Mkdw suggested, and yours, I feel like we should be trying to get them into a single version. You've explained a lot of the points I raised, but we will need language that stands on its own, without a separate explanation. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:20, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Second section break

Given that most of the editors who have commented here are strongly in favor of a revision of some sort, it's been a surprisingly slow process to actually agree about what such a revision should be. I've been thinking hard about what other editors have been saying, and maybe I can reboot this discussion by suggesting this:

The mention of the outing section could be blue-linked. What I did was revise the second paragraph to use "depending on the context" as an alternative to trying list what is OK, and then to try to identify what editors seem to agree are the situations where it is never OK. I think it indicates what we consider to be harassment without making everything else harassment. I think that, ultimately, we have to rely on administrator judgment to distinguish between what is and isn't off-site harassment, just as we rely on it in the outing section to distinguish between outing and "unintentional and non-malicious" conduct, and we should not try to enumerate every possible situation. Does this move in the right direction? --Tryptofish (talk) 23:27, 4 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• @Tryptofish: I may be a bit behind, since there has been much discussion. If not already stricken, I would remove "Contacting a teacher/tutor/professor/etc regarding an on-wiki activity..." from the proposal. One can always contact the editor on their talk page; I do not see where off-wiki contact without permission would be appropriate. Same for editors claiming to represent a company or an organisation. K.e.coffman (talk) 01:00, 5 January 2019 (UTC)``[reply]
• Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I appreciate all the work you have done on this Tryptofish and I would support the immediate above proposed change. Mkdw ^talk 01:30, 5 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks, both of you. K.e.coffman, this most recent version omits all mention of teachers, companies, etc. Mkdw, I'm very glad that I came up with something that works for you. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:26, 5 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Earlier in these discussions, some editors expressed the view that no such revision is needed. I'd be interested in what editors believe, currently, about how we should determine whether or not there is sufficient consensus to implement the revision. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:24, 7 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Are there any objections to implementing the version in this subsection of the talk page? If so, that's OK – I don't want to change anything if there are still objections. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:14, 13 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'm largely happy with the version in this subsection and my only issues are with phraseology rather than the intended meaning. I don't want to let perfect be the enemy of the good, so my comments here should not prevent a consensus to post, especially as I can't immediately suggest anything better in either case.

      My first comment is regarding the "when directed at another editor" clause - I clearly understand that it is intended to limit the applicability in response to the comments in preceding sections of this discussion, but for someone not familiar with that I wonder whether it would be misinterpreted to be endorsing harassment of non-editors? Rather than rewording it may just be better to have an explanatory footnote summarising why this clause exists?

      The other point is that in "Never contact another editor in this way as part of a dispute" it isn't necessarily immediately clear what "this way" refers to - I know what it means, but would someone not familiar with these discussions? Especially if they are wikilawyering, they may argue that it could mean either (or both) of the preceding two sentences. My only thoughts on alternative wordings for this are either very clumsy, repetitious or both and not necessarily without their own problems. Thryduulf (talk) 18:01, 14 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the very thoughtful comments. About the first point, I'm not too worried, because it only says that it "violates the harassment policy", not that anything else is OK – and

WP:HNE

already has the issue covered.

The second point is actually something I had been thinking about, too. Like you, I've thought about alternative ways to say it, but have not come up with anything that isn't clumsy or repetitious. I do, however, think that the intended meaning is the obvious and common-sense one, and that it would be difficult for anyone to wikilawyer it convincingly. If anyone thinks of a better solution, I'd welcome it. I'm going to wait several more days before enacting anything, to allow for such feedback, as well as to give time for any editors to say that they oppose the change more broadly. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:05, 14 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, thinking about it a little more, I tend to believe that contacting someone through the contact information they provide or through Wikipedia email, when it's part of a dispute or after being asked not to do so, may, "depending on the context", potentially be harassment. For that reason, I think the proposed language may be OK as it is. Editors who earlier opposed any change have argued that there are times when if a user doesn't have the judgment to understand the difference between what is and what isn't harassment, then that user cannot be helped by a policy revision. I still obviously believe the proposed change fixes something that needed to be made explicit, but I also think that we do not need to explain the obvious for every conceivable circumstance. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:19, 14 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I remain of the view that prohibiting all off-wiki contact as harassment is both a misrepresentation of the nature of harassment and an unhelpful "bright line" response to a situation containing nuance and grey areas. Looking at the text proposed, I note:

Editors who welcome private communication typically post their preferred contact information on Wikipedia, sometimes enabling email through the Wikipedia interface. Contacting an editor using any other contact information, without first obtaining explicit permission, should be assumed to be uninvited and, depending on the context, may be harassment. Never contact another editor in this way as part of a dispute, or when the editor has asked not to be contacted that way. Unexpected contact using personal information as described above in "Posting of personal information" may be perceived as a threat to the safety and well-being of the person being contacted.

This is badly written. Of course using other contact information is uninvited if you have found the contact details independently and not sought permission, there is no need to "assume" that it is uninvited when it is self-evident that it must be. I find the second last sentence in this quote a little odd, too, as it says not to use such contact channels when in a dispute or when those have been explicitly ruled out, but leaves plenty of space for wikilawyering around those edges – especially as the sort of declarations envisaged here are rare. Perhaps something like:

Editors can choose to accept private communications by email through the Wikipedia interface. Some editors also invite off-wiki contact by providing contact information on their user page while others may post that they do not wish to be contacted in certain ways. Using any channel other than one plainly stated on-wiki to approach an editor off-wiki without first obtaining explicit permission is usually inappropriate and so is strongly discouraged. An editor may well perceive such unexpected contact as harassment or even as a threat to his or her safety and well-being, especially if you and the editor are involved in a dispute or if you have disregarding the editor's stated wishes regarding off-wiki communication.

The final sentence of the proposal has the wrong focus, in my opinion:

Users who are contacted through inappropriate means should report occurrences privately to the

emergency response team

.

The issue, surely, is whether the contact was experienced as harassment rather than whether the means of communication was "inappropriate." I suggest:

Users who experience inappropriate off-wiki contact should report occurrences privately to the

emergency response team

.

I would also like to point out a real-life example from recently. A new editor recently wrote a bio and started an article on an obscure area of chemistry. On being challenged, the editor revealed that s/he was the student of the academic that was the subject of the bio, that the new article was about this academic's research, and that the student had been told to create a bio for the Professor. For some students, on encountering problems (the Professor failed NPROF and the only material for the article was primary literature from that research group) and fearing the Professor's reaction, might well engage in problematic editing. Contacting the Professor directly to explain why their bio was not being kept was preferable to the student engaging in socking, etc, to try to save the pages. Now, under some of the above proposals, whether the Professor could be contacted (by email) would depend on whether the Professor also had an account. To me, this is a case where off-wiki contact was appropriate, so long as it was polite and informative and not aggressive or critical, etc. This is one reason why I think leaving some space (by saying discouraged but not prohibited, for example) is appropriate. Yes, some editors may do foolish things, but if so, judge them on how the recipient feels and / or what was said. After all, they can harass through the WP email option too, and we would sanction them for doing the wrong thing, not prohibit anyone else using the email feature. EdChem (talk) 13:55, 16 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback, and I'll largely defer to what other editors think. Starting with your last point, about changing "Users who are contacted through inappropriate means" to "Users who experience inappropriate off-wiki contact", that strikes me as an improvement, and I'll happily agree to it.

For the rest, I think that it is very important to recognize that the version proposed just before your revisions says "depending on the context". Consequently, it most definitely is not "prohibiting all off-wiki contact as harassment". And it would allow contact with the professor in your example; in fact, the language was crafted with such situations specifically in mind. Such contact is always uninvited, and saying so prevents wikilawyering over "I thought they wouldn't mind", but whether it is harassment depends upon the details. Conversely, where your revision says that it is "usually inappropriate and so is strongly discouraged", that seems to me to get it wrong. A policy that says that something is discouraged is going to be difficult to enforce. There are times when this kind of conduct is vastly worse than "discouraged", and there are other times, not necessarily "unusual", where off-wiki contact is entirely benign.

So that's what I think. I'd like to wrap this discussion up soon. --Tryptofish (talk) 14:46, 16 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Tryptofish. Obviously consensus will determine what is changed so if my thoughts aren't supported then I'll accept that. I don't understand how stating that uninvited contact is, in fact, uninvited precludes or prevents an "I thought they wouldn't mind" response, but I do agree that details dictate whether the contact is harassment. As for enforcement, the only way to make it simple is a bright line "no contact" policy, which I think would be ridiculous. I think the recent fracas over off-wiki contact became far too focussed on the contact being off-wiki rather than on the nature of the contact / discussion... but mine may be a minority view. I'm glad you like the change at the end, which is meant to highlight the response to inappropriate conduct in off-wiki contact, rather than on simply the fact of off-wiki contact without considering its content. EdChem (talk) 11:02, 17 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for following up on this. I agree that there needs to be a change, but I'm still at sea as to what the change should be. The difficulty with "depending on context" is that it leaves the door open to contact that is intended to be benign but is received badly by the other party; at that point, the damage has been done. The very situation that kicked off this whole process could easily be cast in this light; Jytdog's intentions in contacting another editor were all good but the conversation went badly, the recipient was upset by it and Jytdog has been indeffed as a result (or that is my reading of the situation; I was inactive for the majority of it and didn't follow it closely). I think even the language about disputes may not have stopped this from happening; the line being between being in a dispute and trying to help a new user understand how their editing doesn't line up with the community's expectations is a pretty grey one.
Leaving what is an isn't okay up to administrators means dealing with many of these situations after the fact by (essentially) punishing the wrong-doers, rather than having a very clear expectation about what is and isn't acceptable and preventing the harm from being done.
The simple fact of the matter is that some editors find being contacted off-wiki about things on-wiki perfectly normal and unremarkable and other editors find it very creepy and threatening. There is, in general, no way to predict which reaction you're going to get.This is why I prefer a blanket ban with specific, narrow exceptions. GoldenRing (talk) 11:53, 17 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, both of you, for the gracious and thoughtful replies. I notice how EdChem refers to "a bright line 'no contact' policy, which I think would be ridiculous" and GoldenRing says "I prefer a blanket ban with specific, narrow exceptions". To some degree, we all agree about that, and to some degree there are differences of opinion about how extensive the exceptions have to be in order not to be ridiculous, and we are never going to achieve perfection on how to delineate that. (Maybe a future dispute over administrative judgment about context will illuminate the next round of revisions – nothing we do now needs to be permanent, of course.) I'll give this another day or so, mainly to preclude any complaints that we didn't listen to editors who oppose making any change. But then, I think it's going to be time to make the revision and move on. Thanks everyone. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:06, 17 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I also think the important thing here is that what we currently have is not sufficient and it needs to be replaced. I suggest we implement the latest proposal and we can always revisit it should a situation arise that we never considered, or editing activities become disrupted. I expect this policy will continue to evolve, especially since harassment law is undergoing massive Common law reform. Mkdw ^talk 23:40, 17 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

 Done. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:14, 21 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, I edit Wikipedia professionally for a university and do Wikipedia research. I am writing to seek wiki community endorsement to receive US$5000 Wikimedia Foundation funds to better wikify some automated research on Wikipedia misconduct. If you can support this research then please sign off at the bottom of the research description.

• meta:Grants:Project/University of Virginia/Machine learning to predict Wikimedia user blocks

I recognize that I am not posting on a board which is a perfect fit for seeking support and comments about an "Artificial intelligence in Wikimedia projects" approach to wiki community management, but as I have looked around in other places I think this board might be the most popular place for discussing responses to user misconduct.

The research is a data science examination of variables which have correlated with a user account getting a block in the past. The research output will be a list of accounts which closely match those blocked accounts, but which do not have blocks themselves. There will be no quick solution here, but I am looking to advance the conversation on this topic in both technical and non-technical directions. If anyone has questions I could talk here, but I appreciate any response - including criticism and challenges - on the talk page at the grant request. Thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:33, 14 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

English Wikipedia and elsewhere in Wikimedia projects there are various processes by means of which the wiki attempts to match a Wikimedia user account with some other off-wiki identity.

I am collecting whatever practices, guidelines, or essays exist on wiki processes for examining off-wiki identity. If anyone has something then please share at

• Wikipedia:Identity verification

I am posting here because I have observed that when subjects of articles write to

Thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:13, 9 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The recent death of User:Shock Brigade Harvester Boris caused me to wonder: If a Wikipedia editor has died, and that person's real-world identity is not publicly known (not really an issue for Boris as he previously edited under his real name, although the Wikipedia article on his real-life identity still does not mention this), does it violate OUTING for someone who knows the connection between their Wikipedia identity and their real-world identity to make it public? Or does OUTING only apply to still-living Wikipedians? —David Eppstein (talk) 00:21, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I would say yes - treat it like BLP, in that there are certain things we shouldn't do in the 6 -24 months after the death of a person. --Masem (t) 00:29, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm hard pressed to say it's outing. It's normal to link to a real-world obituary (which will invariably include the person's real name), and many deaths are reported by family members, who will usually include the editor's real name. Let's just say I wouldn't normally consider it a blocking offense except in rather extreme circumstances. Risker (talk) 18:04, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think its best to use common sense. If a family member or someone else close to the deceased editor links to an obituary then that's going to be fine in most circumstances. However just because they are deceased doesn't give you permission to make the connection public without a reason. It will also depend how private they were about their real life identity - if it was an open secret (for want of a better term) then making the connection public isn't going to harm, but if they are very careful about keeping the two parts of their life separate then I'd be very wary of saying their death changes that without knowledge of any explicit wishes or knowledge of why they kept their real name very private. Thryduulf (talk) 20:33, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, of course it applies, let's say per

WP:OUTING already really covers why that's not forbidden by the policy. But discovering and revealing a deceased editor's identity when they had not disclosed it themselves is indeed outing, and there could very well still be BLP-level implications for the editor's family. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 20:38, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

Yes. For those of us who live, work or travel outside the relative safety of the West, editing according to our policies & guidelines is not necessarily an apolitical act, and can create a degree of risk. In particular locations, such risk does not expire with the death of the individual editor, but extends to friends, family & associates. -

'c.s.n.s.' 01:29, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

No, if the purpose of the identification is to let wiki-friends and colleagues know that a beloved wiki-colleague will no longer be editing. This has happened numerous times, with the details of the wiki-colleague's identity and real-world accomplishments in the area of their wiki-expertise also being denoted. See for instance User talk:Viva-Verdi#Rest in peace, Viva-Verdi, a tireless long-term contributor to opera articles all across Wikipedia. Harassment is harassment; caring memorialization and community notification is not harassment. Softlavender (talk) 03:43, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I am concerned that wikipedia editors may mention a real-world relationship with another editor, without either one disclosing anything else personal like location, but if one of them dies and is posthumously "outed" this could risk outing of the still living editor. Tornado chaser (talk) 23:58, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes: Echoing

WP:BLP - family members may innocently post materials that put other editors at risk of real-world harassment or other harm. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 20:28, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

When we talk about the wiki justice system, what is the general term for what we try to prevent? If anyone can point me to policy pages for the umbrella concept then thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk) 00:00, 31 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• "Abuse" includes a clear assumption of bad faith; "error" includes the opposite assumption. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 19:27, 13 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Could we add a clause that more explicitly states the policy (as agreed to by all members of ArbCom who were elected last year, virtually all members of the 2015 ArbCom, and pretty much every other long-term contributor I've talked to on the matter) that it is not hounding to go through another editor's contributions if one believes there are serious issues with textual plagiarism, misreading of sources, etc.? Use of wording like "an apparent aim" and so on implies we are starting out with the assumption that hounding is taking place, since in common parlance that word implies something that appears to be the case, whether or not it actually is, and "usually for collegial or administrative purposes" seems to imply that anyone who is engaged in malicious POV-pushing or the like can just say they don't feel comfortable with User X monitoring their edits and it is therefore not "collegial", when I'm pretty sure that doing so for the good of the encyclopedia is not considered hounding whether or not the offending party considers it to be collegial; how about "usually for purposes of improving the encyclopedia" or the like? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 05:20, 30 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think we need to be careful about making any such changes, because they can potentially open up a lot of opportunities for wikilawyering by users who actually are hounding someone. I'm not aware of bogus accusations of hounding being a problem; such accusations happen, but they are usually recognized for what they are. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:58, 30 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Tryptofish: I'm not aware of bogus accusations of hounding being a problem See the most recent ANI archive; the accusations were recognized, but not before a bunch of users showed up and said "well, the accusations are bogus, and ongoing despite multiple warnings, but let's not warn them this time and see if it works out better". See also the 2015 Hijiri88/Catflap08 case, where a bogus hounding accusation went so long with only the long-term allies of the victim (me, in case I need to explicitly disclose that) noticing it that it led to an IBAN, which in turn went all the way up to ArbCom, where ArbCom said pretty clearly "No, that wasn't hounding" -- and yet people were still trying to pretend that wasn't what they said as late as summer of last year.[3] Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:39, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't want to find the "summer of last year" diff, but then the "people" in question showed up again below (

I'm sure by complete coincidence[4]) and I needed to track it down for a post elsewhere, so I figured I might as well add it to the above. The other comments immediately before and (I think..?) after also contain the same kind of content. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:46, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

I actually am aware of those various things. It's not up to me, and if other editors want to pursue this further, I'm happy to follow the discussion. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:13, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, someone just tried to do exactly that ^^^, they were in violation, but tried to claim they were being helpful, citing the fact that those of us who clean up after vandals and copyvios etc do have to follow contribs. It didn't fly. I added the following before seeing the above, so I'll go take another look and see if I think it needs any more tweaks.

Per a discussion at ANI about the spirit of this policy being violated, I have added a clause to the last paragraph to emphasize that it's not always about the type of edits made when a user is hounding another; the main problem is the hounding itself. It now reads, with the new text italicized here: The important component of hounding is disruption to another user's own enjoyment of editing, or disruption to the project generally, for no overriding reason. Even if the individual edits themselves are not disruptive per se, "following another user around", if done to cause distress (such as following an editor with whom the user is in conflict), or if the following is accompanied by tendentiousness, personal attacks, or other disruptive behavior, it may become a very serious matter and could result in blocks and other editing restrictions. -

☼ 19:38, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

I think that your addition was a good one, thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:40, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

As was yours, Thank you, too. :) -

☼ 21:21, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

@CorbieVreccan: Are you referring to the thread you recently opened at ANI? That was not "exactly that"; following around editors you don't like for the purpose of harassing/intimidating/whatevering them, and not directly reverting their edits but making it clear you are monitoring their edits without good reason is not at all even comparable to following the edits of a disruptive editor and reverting those edits because those edits are disruptive. It's practically the opposite: if the person claimed they were monitoring disruptive editors, that claim could be easily refuted by pointing out that if their "followees"' edits had been disruptive they would have reverted them.

I was hounded once in 2012/2013 by an editor behaving in the above-described manner, but I've encountered far more bad-faith hounding accusations, so I really don't think editing this policy page to make it harder to violate this policy in the former but easier to violate it in the latter. I don't mind the recent additions overall, but I think such as following an editor with whom the user is in conflict definitely needs to be discussed: any disruptive POV-pusher can claim to be "in conflict" with an editor who is protecting the encyclopedia from their disruption. Believe me, when you edit in topic areas like I often do, proving consistent violation of our content policies to the community at ANI or to ArbCom is extremely difficult, and making this policy more permissive of their argument that it's "just a regular conflict between Wikipedians" is not likely to help improve the experience of building the encyclopedia. Pinging User:Curly Turkey and User:Nishidani, who can vouch for what I'm talking about: a certain disruptive editor whose username was 11 characters long created massive problems for our Japanese history articles over a period of more than three years. (It wasn't anyone I've ever been IBANned with -- I'm not naming them because I suspect both the pinged editors could name the editor in question off the top of their head without needing to look it up despite how long ago it was, because that's how bad it was.) The user frequently made bad-faith hounding accusations, and was for a time able to get a sympathetic ear at ANI from those members of the community who looked at the content of their edits and couldn't tell immediately that they were disastrous for the project. We still have not fully cleared up all of the messes they caused. And I've encountered similar problems with other editors more recently -- serial plagiarists, POV pushers, and generally tendentious editors don't want their disruptive editors monitored and reverted, but the harassment policy is not meant to enable them.

The proposed wording would make them technically right to say that editors who were "in conflict with them" were hounding them by going around reverting their edits, even though this was never the case -- they made disruptive edits, and knowledgeable and diligent Wikipedians went to the effort of undoing those edits.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 14:34, 8 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The user hounding me did try to claim they were just following me to be helpful to the 'pedia. They tried to claim they didn't know about the Recent Changes or Random Page functions so had to use other editors' contribs as their watchlist. As someone who's also had to clean up against long-term vandals, and those who've flown under the radar for years as citespammers, or those who've used the wiki to push POVs or even perpetuate hoaxes, I deeply sympathize with not having this abused against those of us who have to use a disruptive user's contribs to clean up their mess and abuse. I am open to whatever we need to do to keep it clear that cleaning up after disruption is completely different from a creep stalking a constructive editor. -

☼ 17:41, 8 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

I see Hijiri 88's point about (such as following an editor with whom the user is in conflict). Let me suggest tightening it up as either (such as following an editor with whom the user is in conflict in order to harass that editor) or (such as following an editor with whom the user is in conflict in order to further that conflict). --Tryptofish (talk) 21:22, 8 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure what wording would do away with the accusations. I'm in the habit of checking the contribs of those I interact with, and when I see MOS non-compliance (for example) in the articles I'm skimming through, I fix them. This has led to an accusation of hounding with someone I was in conflict with, even though the edits were unrelated to the dispute and not directed at the other editor (say, a

MOS:LQ fix when the dispute has to do with an unrelated grammar or usage issue). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:25, 9 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

I approve of Tryptofish's revised wording. It adequately addresses my concerns. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 07:13, 9 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to suggest that you RfC this proposed change before there is any consideration of altering the wording of the policy accordingly. This would be a not-insubstantial change to key wording in one of Wikipedia's most important behavioural guidelines--indeed, after

WP:NPA, perhaps the single most important policy on the project with regard to restraining bad acts and maintaining a hostility-free environment for all editors. I therefore do not think three editors (two of whom are currently involved--as either party or commentator--in a live and as yet unresolved ANI about this exact behaviour, who therefor have skin in the game as regards what this policy currently says) bouncing around a prospective change is sufficient indicia of community will to change the policy without a broader effort at securing consensus on the matter. I think it's entirely possible that the policy reads as it does because the community embraces a precautionary principle on such matters and does in fact prefer (or even expect) that editors will not follow other parties with whom they have conflicted on one issue to additional spaces, no matter how convinced they are that the other party "needs to be restrained"; at the very least, I think this point is deserving of further and broader discussion than has yet taken place before the proposed change is seriously considered. Snow ^{let's rap} 08:10, 9 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

@Snow Rise: who therefor have skin in the game as regards what this policy currently says Not really -- the precise wording used on this policy page does not affect what the actual policy is, which has never been ... well, the way you've interpreted it in virtually all of my prior encounters with you. ArbCom and community consensus have been clear about this over and over and over again, and everyone here (both those who have recently been falsely accused of hounding -- me and Tryptofish -- and those who have recently accused others, who used "good edits" as an excuse, of hounding -- me and Corbie), not mention everyone in the thread you refer to who isn't either (a) a new user unfamiliar with policy or (b) a tendentious editor themselves engaged in hounding behaviour, agrees that monitoring the problematic edits of problematic editors is not hounding. What's more, I opened this section discussion before that ANI thread was filed, and the amended wording came from people who actually disagreed with my original proposal.

Moreover -- would it be okay if I asked how you found this discussion? You say this is a very important policy page, but you've never edited here before yesterday, and given how you were the "people" I was referring to above it seems highly suspect that you would show up here to oppose amended wording that would make this policy more clearly out-of-line with your somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation of it. (Not to mention that "coincidentally" showing up to accuse someone of "hounding" literally every time they notice a problem editor like the 11-character one above has something of a

WP:KETTLE

flavour about it.)

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:14, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A) Insofar as you opened this before the ANI thread, that's a fair point, but clearly this suggested change of wording does not come out of nowhere, and you are in fact highly motivated to see the wording of this policy changed for reasons that go beyond an abstract interest in the topic. In other words, you are not the most neutral of parties. You might rightly respond "I don't need to be neutral--it doesn't matter what context gave rise to my interest, I have a concern about the policy language and think it should be changed." And fair enough, if that were your position.Even so, this is a not-insignificant change to policy language that is vital as a bulwark against harassment and disruption on this project and I simply do not think it is appropriate to change the language without broader indication that this represents true community consensus rather than the perspective of a handful of contributors whose outlook on the issue is currently coloured by their present disputes concerning the matter. Even if we give you every benefit of the doubt and assume that the person currently accusing you of stalking is exactly who you say they are--a histrionic problem editor, abusing the wording of the policy to give you headaches for your good faith efforts to clean up his mess--the circumstances could still blind you to consequences of changing the language in other contexts, where hounding being reported is genuine.

I'm sorry, but I'm just not comfortable as a community member (with a decade of experience understanding how these issues impact dispute escalation and editor retention) having that change made without RfCing it, ideally at

WP:VPP

, for the wider community to validate or reject. And let me be clear: I am not even saying that your position is without merit or out of nowhere--I get the argument you are advancing, but I think there are a lot of consequences to changing this language which may not be immediately obvious from your own personal experience and that it ought to benefit from more than a couple of days haggling between a handful of editors (some of them incensed by their own recent interactions involving issues covered under the wording) before the language of this policy is changed; said language is too important to project integrity and an open and inclusive community to have it altered in a fly-by-night fashion.

B) I am here on this talk page responding to the RfC in the thread above, a link to which you can find on my talk page, where it was posted three days ago. A minimal amount of review/a simple ctrl-f search of this page might have saved you the trouble of making a baseless and paranoid accusation which is surely doing nothing to augment your position here. And I'll thank you kindly to strike your smarmy little "I'm sure it's just coincidence" comment further up the thread. I don't know why you would think that my comments (as a non-involved community member) at your ANI threads in the past would evidence some sort of preoccupation with your activity on this project, but I assure you, I have zero personal interest in your comings and goings. If I were involving myself now out of some ulterior motive involving you, I'd be at the ANI, where your conduct is being reviewed. But I don't care about the outcome of your dispute, other than to say that I hope the community volunteers there get it right. However, I am quite concerned about issues that might be implicated by changes to this policy--and it is that and that alone that spurred my comment when I saw this thread. I don't know if you are still of the belief that you are being persecuted by an organized effort involving various editors, as you have expressed in the past, but I can assure you (not for the first time, but hopefully for the last) I am no part of any such supposed effort.

So please, let's keep this clinical and wiki-professional: if you think my concerns about the policy are exaggerated with regard to how the larger community would feel about it, the solution is simple enough--solicit such opinions. My cup does not exactly floweth over with regard to time for the project right now, but I do recognize that insofar as I've raised the procedural/scale of consensus issue here, I've inherited a certain small burden of reciprocal responsibility for advancing and defending the precautionary position, so if you would like to collaborate on co-authoring an RfC, I'll make the time to do so. Indeed, if you are of the opinion that it's my responsibility alone since I raised the need for broader community discussion, I'll do all of the leg work if that is your preference. Again, I do not reject your position wholesale, but alterations of key policy language ought to be done slowly and methodically and (where our policy regarding harassment is concerned in particular) with a full and detailed contemplation of possible unintended consequences. We can stand to talk about this a little longer and with the benefit of more voices, is what I'm trying to say. Snow ^{let's rap} 05:21, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I never implied I was "neutral". My initial replies to both Trypto and Corbie made direct reference to my interest in this matter. But my interest in this matter is what gives me an awareness of prior community and ArbCom rulings on the matter; you're every bit as non-neutral as me but your history on the matter shows you consistently in the minority (virtually everyone who at one time agreed with you in this or that discussion later recanted upon seeing the evidence, was banned, or was given a limited sanction and left the site). Any addition to policy wording that is simply making clearer an overwhelming community consensus on what the policy actually is does not need a prior VPPRFC, especially when the only editor opposed to the simple talk page discussion has a demonstrated history of counter-policy statements on the matter. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:09, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Forgive the painfully long response: it may be a day or more before I can respond further, and I wanted to be as plain and detailed about my concerns here as I could:

You're purporting to know my position on this better than I do, because I don't recall any instances in which I have previously commented anywhere on this project (at least at any length) concerning the particular issue raised in this thread. You'll have to refresh my memory if you think I have previously weighed in on the topic before, and who these other editors were who I was supposedly in alignment with. For the record, my opinion on the matter today, based on the change you propose in the abstract, rather than particular conduct, is that it is a situation-contextual call, when someone follows someone another editor to numerous spaces and engages in either combative exchanges or undoing/thwarting the other person's work. There are occasionally good faith reasons to do this, but there are also a bevy of ways in which it can represent thoroughly inappropriate harassment--either transparent or thinly disguised as being in the project's best interests, even where taking the issue to a central discussion space specializing on the relevant content or administrative issues would have been far more appropriate (and cost the community far less time) than going off to engage the vandal/bad actor in one-on-one editorial combat. On the whole, I think the policy ought to lean to the side of encouraging people away from following other editors with whom they they have recently conflicted, at least as far as "following" includes actively reverting them or commenting upon their contributions in diverse areas, rather than including wording which will definitely be perceived by some problem editors as saying "Go ahead, track someone like a bloodhound, provided that you feel you can make an argument that to (and you alone) sounds honest that what you are doing is in the best interests of the project."

That's an incredibly low threshold for some people to meet, particularly if we adopt the breadth of the standard you propose above, where concerns about the "misreading of sources" would be substantial enough grounds to stalk someone's edits (here meaning the party would be reverting at least some of them across disparate pages. In my opinion, that kind of activity definetly falls solidly within the category of behaviours this policy is designed to prevent; and if you want to establish consensus otherwise, I suggest you are going to need to get more specific about where you think ArbCom has expressed differently or who exactly these large numbers of editors are who agree that we should adopt a more laissez-faire standard to permitting editors to decide for themselves that they should undertake a unilateral chain of actions to stopping and editor who they perceive as a net negative, rather than bringing serial issues to the attention of an appropriate workspace--which it seems to me is the usual and most stable response to problem editors. Greenlighting a policing instinct may seem like a good idea to you from where you are standing now, but this would open up a huge can of worms regarding two classes of problem editor: the outright harassing troll and the (possibly well-intentioned) overzealous editor looking to throw their weight around regarding particular content or meta issues.

And look, clearly this is an area where the particular facts and nuances make a lot of difference. At one end of the spectrum you have blatant vandals: no one is going to have a problem if a regular good-faith contributor follows this person from page to page reverting 50 instances of "Eat more spam." We rely upon such attentiveness, though it's worth noting that most of this work is undertaken within task forces dedicated to these simple calls, with clear rules urging caution on even borderline cases. Then you have situations where one might perceive a common thread of an obvious content issue running through a series of edits; in rare instances, this might be an acceptable response if you think the other editor is going to be receptive to your edit summary and comport accordingly, rather than reverting and/or continuing on with the activity--either way, as soon as it's clear that you are not having a meeting of the minds, it's time to take it to a community space or process. Towards the other end of the continuum is when someone has had a disagreement and continues to engage with the editor they perceive as a problem in a unilateral fashion, particularly over a significant period f time, dropping in to discussions they are involved in across disparate subjects or doing serial reverts of content that that are unrelated to a very specific common mistake--at that point, red flags ought to be going up for everyone, including the person doing the commenting/reverting.

Now obviously, the issues are always judged on a case-by-case basis, either by an admin, the community at large, or (in extremis) ArbCom. And generally the requisite amount of attention to the details is made. The question is, what default standard here best serves the community's wishes and interests best here? And let's be honest, we pretty regularly find every possible way to excuse an editor with a positive track record from even the hint of a sanction, so long as it is clear that they were operating from legitimate editorial/community concerns. We typically take no action even where there were clear issues with over-zealousness or a needlessly aggressive approach. So we are then left to ask which is the greater harm: 1) Preserving the traditional wording and having some editors continuing to have to account for why they are following someone else around, undoing their edits without community involvement even where they are not obvious vandalism, even if it occasionally leaves some of those editors feeling burned by what they feel is unkind or unwarranted scrutiny (sometimes a very legitimate complaint, sometimes not), or 2) Changing the wording uncarefully and end up greenlighting the most aggressive instincts of some of our more disruptive editors, and providing a rhetorical safe harbor for those looking to outright harass, so long as they can argue that they had a concern about an editor that seemed legitimate to them.

Now, this is not necessarily a zero-sum argument: there may be wording that is both nuanced and concise enough to be added that would address both areas of concern. But to the extent there is a conflict between addressing these two harms, I know which one I think is of deeper concern and greater scope for this project and which I think the policy ought to be engineered towards more, where there is a conflict. And I'm not at all convinced that the community is as supportive as you believe it to be of the notion of being more permissive about letting editors follow eachother around, engaging in unwanted interactions, provided they can argue they were doing it for the project. That just seems like an untenable standard to me. I'm willing to be proven wrong by a community discussion, of course. And genuinely, I am curious to hear what ArbCom rulings you feel are most on point here and which arguments from others you have found most compelling. But at present, I remain concerned about putting language expressly allowing or encouraging following behaviour into the policy, due to the forgoing concerns. Snow ^{let's rap} 07:46, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Myself, the accusation of hounding was leveled by the person who actually was hounding me, and the whole thing was reasonably quickly resolved, so I've been experiencing it from both sides – but I really do not see the issues in these edits here as having anything to do with my personal experience, and I'm not approaching it that way. I don't think it's productive to keep discussing the personal aspects anyway, because we need to consider the general case. I'm friendly to having an RfC, but I think it would be useful to have some more local discussion first, in order to give the future RfC the best possible focus.

It seems to me that the specific thing that might benefit from wider discussion would be the part about "such as following an editor with whom the user is in conflict". Am I right about that, or is there anything else? I assume (but could be missing something) that the rest of the recent changes are things like this: [5], which seem noncontroversial to me. I'd like to identify locally, first, what specific language is in question, and what possible fixes to it there might be. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:53, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: I like the above "addition" (support) for clarification. If "hound" was meant literally not to follow any editor it could hinder many forms of maintenance on Wikipedia so the wording "for no overriding reason" seems important. Otr500 (talk) 13:48, 8 June 2019 (UTC)]][reply]
• Comment: No matter how perfectly we manage to word this, there will always be disruptive editors who gaslight, DARVO, wikilawyer, and, to be blunt, just out and out LIE. There will always be cases that wind up at ANI. This is the current wording of the final paragraph:

The important component of hounding is disruption to another user's own enjoyment of editing, or disruption to the project generally, for no constructive reason. Even if the individual edits themselves are not disruptive per se, "following another user around", if done to cause distress, or if that following is accompanied by tendentiousness, personal attacks, or other disruptive behavior, it may become a very serious matter and could result in blocks and other editing restrictions.

I think it's about as clear as we can get without further introducing issues per

☼ 20:30, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

I also am not particularly alarmed by anything that has been suggested, but if an RfC would calm any concerns, I'm friendly to that, too. As far as I can tell, the only part that really lends itself to an RfC is this: [6], with variations like this: [7]. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:01, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm more amenable to the first of those options than the second, personally: the second option is about as paradigmatic an example of begging the question as I can imagine; of course following someone around "in order to harass them" is impermissible, but that's a pretty clearly circular description. The entire purpose of this policy (and that section in particular) is to try to describe what harassment/hounding looks like and what behaviours the community expects editors to avoid. So, again, saying "following someone around for the purposes of harassment is hounding, and hounding is a form of harassment" gets us nowhere and is in fact a form of syllogistic fallacy that is going to clarify nothing for anyone trying to act in good faith, while also simultaneously giving problem editors all kinds of cover whenever the community tries to hold them accountable for stalking behaviour, because they will be able to (quite honestly) state: "Well the policy says I can follow them around so long as I wasn't doing it to harass, and I give you my solemn vow that I wasn't doing this to harass and here's my "proof": [insert five issues they pull from the other user's edit history in order to justify the stalking].

In contrast, I believe the community actually does feel that editors should not be following one-another around when they have recently conflicted, reverting eachother on articles or responding on talk/project spaces that are unrelated to a common issue. If an editor comes across someone who is (just as an example) changing the formatting of a template across twenty different articles, such that is is not transcluding properly, and the reviewing editor makes an effort to discuss the changes, but sees no reason to wait to revert the clearly harmful effects, per

WP:BRD

, by all means they should be able to do that without too much worry about accusations of bad faith behaviour--because that is clearly not hounding. However, suppose the problem editor then responds tersely or antagonistically to the correcting editor, and two days later, the correcting editor decides to follow this person to an RfC, a village pump discussion, and an AfD, despite never contributing to any of the involved articles/spaces, and then corrects three edits of the other editor that were made at unrelated articles, without a common underlying editorial issue. I believe that crosses into the kind of behaviour the community definitely expects this policy to prevent. Because at that point, the reacting editor, no matter how good faith their intentions, has appointed themselves chaperon, judge, and gatekeeper with regard to another editor and their contributions, in contravention of all of this project's norms on dispute resolution.

If a community member believes there are issues with core competency in another editor, there are spaces on this project set aside specifically for addressing such concerns. And if there isn't an over-arcing

WP:CIR

concern, they can raise the individual issues on talk pages (which, frankly, they should be doing anyway). Deciding instead to revert numerous unrelated edits of another editor without consensus discussion in that context is just never going to be an appropriate means of controlling the problematic edits, and at that point, no editor should be trying to face down the situation as a self-appointed Wikipedia policeman. For one thing, it almost always creates more work than it saves for the community, when the other editor pretty invariably feels hounded and lodges their own complaint and/or ends up feuding with their "persecutor". Put otherwise, following this impulse to shadow someone almost always ends up being a net negative for the project, even if it let's you clean up a larger number of problem edits a couple of hours earlier. We have a consensus-based approach to disputes on this project for a reason, and our policies are expressly designed to edge editors towards consensus processes, rather than deputizing themselves to review another editor's contributions whole-cloth and act unilaterally in reverting all that they find to be in error.

Personally, I think the language of the policy is already well-balanced to neither encourage improper following nor hinder appropriate following, and my first choice would be to leave it as is in this regard. After that I would support your re-phrasing here as a second most desirable choice. I believe introducing this wording would be a huge mistake, as it would add almost no real clarity for good actors and would become a rhetorical shield for parties engaged in harassment, who would also be more than happy to engage in gamesmanship surrounding the ambiguity that the "you following is only hounding (a form of harassment on this project) if you are doing it to harass" standand would open up. Of course, we shouldn't paint ourselves into a corner here: there are probably many more workable options than these three, and that's exactly the kind of thing an RfC can help to shed light on. Snow ^{let's rap} 23:54, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Your whole comment, when read together, doesn't make sense: you say it is circular and begging the question to say that following around for the purpose of harassment is a form of harassment, but then your counter examples are all cases where the following is clearly done for the purpose of harassment. What has the rest of us concerned is cases where the following around was not done for the purpose of harassment but for the protection of our free encyclopedia's integrity, but that this fact is only "clear" to someone with a knowledge of the subject matter, thus making it much too easy for the self-proclaimed "houndee" to convince a significant portion of the community to sanction an editor for doing the right thing.

AGF says that an ANI contributor (or an Arbitrator, for that matter) should not assume that harassment was the intent if they do not understand that, for instance, our original

Battle of Shigisan

was an OR nightmare compiled of a bunch of obscure references in ancient primary sources that contradict both each other and the known facts about the geography of that part of Japan, but the sad fact is that they sometimes do assume that, which is why this policy page should be worded in a manner that does not make it easier for such accidents to happen. The 11-character editor probably should have been sitebanned immediately following that Shigisan incident in 2013, but instead it took a long three years because the rest of us were afraid of being accused of "hounding" him (or at least that was what I was afraid of).

(As an aside, I've found that about 90% of the time when editors claim they are being hounded when in fact what they are trying to do is violate policy while avoiding scrutiny, they are themselves also engaging in clear harassment of the party they claim is hounding them: case in point at the current ANI, how did some I first interacted with a month ago know about a conflict I had had with another editor more than six years ago? That is what

WP:HOUND

is meant to be condemning.)

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:18, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There is such a thing as trying to do the right thing, but going about it in the wrong way. I don't believe that its an omission that this policy language imparts the idea "Avoid following editors with who you have recently conflicted." rather than "Avoid following editors you have recently conflicted with (unless you are of the opinion that they are really in the wrong about something)."; I think that's entirely by design and reflects community consensus to discourage such behaviour. Or at least, I'm convinced enough that I'm willing to test the belief against community feedback.

Regarding AGF, I couldn't agree more as to its crucial role here, and I would expect anyone actually analyzing user conduct to apply it liberally in a community discussion. But we're not evaluating any actual user's conduct here at the moment; we're considering what proscriptive language will better serve the community's interests and guard against more serious harm, and ideally best serve to prevent conflict in the first place. I understand your argument, but, at least where the second of the proposed changes is concerned, I believe such an alteration would admit a much greater harm for the community (particularly for those who face inordinate amounts of harassment to begin with) than would leaving the language as it stands. Though again, we shouldn't necessarily limit ourselves to just the three options that have been considered thus far; there may be wording that threads the needle to address all concerns.

I will say though, that I don't share your perspective on the likelihood of a some slick troll managing to hoodwink a 'significant enough portion' of the community at ANI such that they manipulate the community into sanctioning a completely innocent editor who in no way even so much as brushed up against violating a policy themselves. That strikes me as a phantom concern. Wikipedia brings together experts from the entire span of human endeavour and inquiry--we don't all have to know eachother's fields of expertise inside and out in order to recognize whose behaviour is more

wp:disruptive

--because that question is more about out standards of conduct than it is about an interpretation of any particular area of content. Experienced community members are pretty good, if imperfect, at sniffing out the bull and reconstructing a chain of events--that's one of the virtues of our systems: nothing said is lost from the record completely. Collectively, we usually manage to identify the one troll (if there is one in a given conflict--more often there is a mix of poor behaviour and blame to go around for all involved parties). Beyond all of that, as I noted above, we are, if anything, immensely predisposed to giving free passes at ANI these days for petty lousy behaviour, when we see that there was a significant enough underlying editorial issue. I'm struggling to think of anyone who ever got CBANned (or even faced a block of significant length as the result of an ANI consensus) who did absolutely nothing wrong in my eyes; I don't think I've ever seen that. I've seen plenty of sanctions that were more severe than I thought were warranted in the circumstances, but that's another thing entirely.

But it's always nice to end on some degree of agreement, and as to your last point there or hounders being prone to the loudest complaints of being hounded, I think that's essentially correct. But in my view that's all the more reason not to allow the waters to be further muddied by introducing language that would let both sides (whoever is "more" in the right/the original "victim"/whatever) be more liberal in following eachother around and refusing to disengage. It's actually one of the more compelling reasons for why adding "unless you think they are a problem" type language (into the statements in HOUNDING that otherwise just plainly discourage following between parties recently in conflict) would spur more disruption overall. Snow ^{let's rap} 05:14, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't share your perspective on the likelihood of a some slick troll managing to hoodwink a 'significant enough portion' of the community at ANI such that they manipulate the community into sanctioning a completely innocent editor who in no way even so much as brushed up against violating a policy themselves He hoodwinked you, didn't he? honestly, it doesn't really matter whether you share my perspective on the likelihood of something that actually happened over and over again. (FWIW, I'm not so much talking about successfully getting the so-called "hound" sanctioned as successfully avoiding sanctions for themselves by playing on the sympathy people might have for an editor who claims to have been hounded and can present clear evidence of having been followed; neither I nor any other user was ever sanctioned as a direct consequence of CurtisNaito's hounding accusations, at least not by the community, but there was also this case where an editor who repeatedly inserted OR, unverifiable content, fake citations, and BLP violations with virtually every mainspace edit he made, and I was sanctioned as a direct consequence of trying to clean up the messes he made and his convincing enough of the community I was "hounding him" that no one was willing to sanction him, eventually leading to an IBAN.) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:41, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think its particularly helpful to rehash a five year old discussion, and re-litigate particular points where you think the community let you down. I will say that this much is not only clear in my memory, but also the closure summaries of the numerous ANIs you two filed against one-another: there was blame to go around there, and that was definitely an example of a situation which would not have been helped by either one of you feeling more free to follow, revert, and comment upon eachother. I've been trying to avoid reference to any particular editor or episode in this discussion for a number of reasons, but if you are going to make your years-long issues with Catflap08 the platform upon which we test your proposed change, I'd say it very much highlights why it is a bad idea, because what was needed there was definitely not for both parties to have more license to argue you were in eachother's business for good reasons. And anyway, surely from your perspective you must feel that ANI got the situation more right than wrong, insofar as it ultimately removed Catflap from the project, and not you? All of that said, I think you ought to try your best to consider the implications of your proposed change from a wider perspective than your own personal experience; I won't waste my time telling you to try to put it from mind altogether--if its still so fresh in your mind all these years later, that's clearly not happening any time soon. But this section of this policy is critically important to protecting open-access to this project, and it deserves to have you examine it from all angles and consider the likely flip-side consequences of what you are proposing.

Anyway, maybe we're at an impasse. I still believe there could be wording to side-step the apparent conflict of factors here and leave all concerns addressed but perhaps its time to step back and see if anyone can put something feasible forward. Failing that, I still favour the status quo version, am open to Tryptofish's first proposal, but opposed to the second/reworded proposal, for reasons discussed at length above. If we can't find a reasonable middle-ground or simply all-around superior wording, it's probably time to consider how to neutrally format the prompt and arguments for an RfC, but I'm not keen to leap at it today. Snow ^{let's rap} 07:43, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not talking about the community letting me down (I'm fine, and basically always have been). I'm talking about the community letting the encyclopedia down. As I said above, CurtisNaito's mess still has not been cleaned up.[8] Given that, it seems a bit disingenuous to talk about it as "rehashing a five year old discussion". Anyway, you are the one who brought Catflap into it by honing in on the "hoodwink the community to sanction an innocent editor" point that I was never trying to make. I could name easily a half dozen editors but chose CurtisNaito because his disruption was more widespread and insidious. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:05, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Anyway, you are the one who brought Catflap into it by honing in on the "hoodwink the community to sanction an innocent editor" point that I was never trying to make. No, I didn't. Own your own decisions. I purposefully avoided referencing any particular editor or situation and kept all of my arguments rooted in abstracts for a number of reasons. Do no attribute you to me your decision to bring your own history into this: that was 100% you. I advanced the argument that your hypothetical scenario of someone convincing the community to ban someone at ANI who had done absolutely nothing wrong was unrealistic; you and you alone chose to present your history with Catflap as a counter-argument to that situation.

And for the record, it's a really bad example. First off, Catflap "hoodwinked" pretty much no one: he came in for a lot of criticism in those threads, including from yours truly, as best I can recall. It's just that he wasn't the only one. Indeed, not even he and you were the only ones: as I recall there was a whole cluster of you, multiple parties on both "sides", who were far too incapable of leaving eachother's orbits, ultimately necessitating an ArbCom case to separate you all, and (just like those of us who had tried to contain the spiraling fiasco at ANI over the course of years) ArbCom found there was plenty of blame to apportion between you; they very clearly did not find that you were a completely innocent bystander. That whole situation is just bad ground for you to stake your argument for liberalizing these rules on, considering the findings of that case and the consensus of many of those ANI threads.

But once again, I strongly urge that we discuss these matters in more generalized terms rather than examining them through the lens of your past conflicts. It's not going to make you any happier examining the issue in only that light and it won't be good for discussion and isolating and addressing the broader issues here. We can examine the policy implications of this proposed change without using the names Hijiri88, Catflap08 and CurtisNaito as subject matter, and I strongly, strongly urge that we use such an approach. Snow ^{let's rap} 08:29, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Replying on your talk page, since hardly any of the above is related to this discussion. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:39, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is the tl;dr

I think we need to boil this down to a reasonably simple set of decisions. Until the most recent edits, this was the stable version of the Hounding section: [9]

Hounding on Wikipedia (or "wikihounding") is the singling out of one or more editors, joining discussions on multiple pages or topics they may edit or multiple debates where they contribute, to repeatedly confront or inhibit their work. This is with an apparent aim of creating irritation, annoyance or distress to the other editor. Hounding usually involves following the target from place to place on Wikipedia.

Many users

mediation, incidents, and arbitration cases. Using dispute resolution can itself constitute hounding if it involves persistently making frivolous or meritless complaints about another editor.

The important component of hounding is disruption to another user's own enjoyment of editing, or to the project generally, for no overriding reason. If "following another user around" is accompanied by tendentiousness, personal attacks, or other disruptive behavior, it may become a very serious matter and could result in blocks

and other editing restrictions.

And this is the version as of now: [10]

Hounding on Wikipedia (or "wikihounding") is the singling out of one or more editors, joining discussions on multiple pages or topics they may edit or multiple debates where they contribute, to repeatedly confront or inhibit their work. This is with an apparent aim of creating irritation, annoyance or distress to the other editor. Hounding usually involves following the target from place to place on Wikipedia.

Many users

mediation, incidents, and arbitration cases. Using dispute resolution can itself constitute hounding if it involves persistently making frivolous or meritless complaints about another editor.

The important component of hounding is disruption to another user's own enjoyment of editing, or disruption to the project generally, for no constructive reason. Even if the individual edits themselves are not disruptive per se, "following another user around", if done to cause distress, or if that following is accompanied by tendentiousness, personal attacks, or other disruptive behavior, it may become a very serious matter and could result in blocks

and other editing restrictions.

Hounding on Wikipedia (or "wikihounding") is the singling out of one or more editors, joining discussions on multiple pages or topics they may edit or multiple debates where they contribute, to repeatedly confront or inhibit their work. This is with an apparent aim of creating irritation, annoyance or distress to the other editor. Hounding usually involves following the target from place to place on Wikipedia.

Many users

mediation, incidents, and arbitration cases. Using dispute resolution can itself constitute hounding if it involves persistently making frivolous or meritless complaints about another editor.

The important component of hounding is disruption to another user's own enjoyment of editing, or disruption to the project generally, for no constructive reason. Even if the individual edits themselves are not disruptive per se, "following another user around", if done to cause distress (such as following an editor with whom the user is in conflict in order to further that conflict), or if that following is accompanied by tendentiousness, personal attacks, or other disruptive behavior, it may become a very serious matter and could result in blocks

and other editing restrictions.

Based on the preceding discussion, "in order to further that conflict" is the version that all three editors seem to prefer or at least object to the least, so that's how I presented it. Would it be best to (1) leave the entire parenthetic phrase out, thus maintaining the present-day wording? Or should we (2) have an RfC over whether or not to add that phrase? Personally, I don't care, although when I look at the section as a whole, the green part actually seems somewhat redundant to me. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:54, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Current Version (no parenthetic) is fine with me. I am the editor who first added the stuff about "in conflict", but I now see it's not necessary, and could lead to misinterpretation. This is fine as it is. (P.S. But I really don't care. If others really want the green clause, I will not try to block consensus.) -
  ☼ 22:17, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply
  ]

CorbieVreccan: Courtesy ping, I think you are supporting what Tryptofish proposed as option one, but with an !vote that flags 'Version 2'; was this an error or am I misreading? I'd like to format my own response below as a formal !vote as well, but before I do that, I'd like to make sure we are all using the same scheme for what option 1 and 2 are. Snow ^{let's rap} 22:31, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't usually reply mid-stream like this, but so it doesn't get lost: Oh, OK, I see what you mean. I was referring to the middle version above, that shows as Diff 2 in the preview. The Current Version. I spaced that Trypto was calling that "option 1". So, yeah. Option 1, no parenthetic, which to simplify matters I'll leave all numbers out and just call Current Version. Editing my comment for (hopeful) clarity. -

☼ 22:43, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

I understood it the way that you intended it, so no worries, I think we all agree. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:49, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Current/Status quo version. Thanks for putting in some time to simplify matters, Tryptofish. One of the benefits of your having repeated the entire three paragraphs is that it helps to emphasize that there's a lot of content around the proposed change that helps clarify what this section of the policy means (both for editors acting in good faith/in a non-disruptive, and those who are going beyond their remit)--I'm sure that was probably the major reason you decided to approach it like that, and its effective in reducing my concerns some at least. That said, I'm in agreement with you that the green portion is at best redundant, though I would personally argue that the "in order to advance the conflict" bit introduces an issue into the wording and encourages bad acts/gives rhetorical safe harbor to those who actually do hound; it is ever-so-slightly less problematic than "in order to harass that editor", but insofar I feel this section is intended to discourage certain classes of aggressive engagement between editors, I don't like either proposed additional caveat. So, my hierarchy of preference (in descending order) of proposals to date:

• Status quo version (do not add any of the additional text highlighted in green in Tryptofish's post above)
• "(such as following an editor with whom the user is in conflict)"
• "(such as following an editor with whom the user is in conflict in order to further that conflict)"

I'm really only keen on the first option, but if it will resolve the issue to everyone's satisfaction, I can see myself embracing the second. The third is a shade farther than I can see myself supporting, but it may be worth waiting to see what other people think of it. The variation of the third option that would have ended in "in order to harass", I definitely cannot support. I gather from your last message that your preferences are similar, except in that you don't see a hugely problematic difference between choices options 2 and 3? Snow ^{let's rap} 22:24, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks both of you! I want to wait until we hear from Hijiri, but I tentatively think that we may be able to resolve the whole issue simply by leaving things as they are now, without adding the green part and without any need for an RfC: just declare victory now, and be done with it! I think the present-day version is my first choice, and it sounds like both of you feel the same way. Hijiri reverted the "green" addition back to the present-day version, but also expressed support for the version with "in order to..." while opposing it without a modifier. I think that means we are all satisfied with leaving things as they are, and I'm crossing my fingers that that's really the case. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:33, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I agree that the text is fine with the parenthetical clause completely removed. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:48, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Great, who'd have guessed we were so close to a version that was acceptable to everyone all along? There's probably a lesson in that. But any thread that ends in solid consensus is a good one I suppose, compared against alternatives. Thanks again to Trypto for putting a point back on things. Snow ^{let's rap} 10:14, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

All's well that ends well! --Tryptofish (talk) 22:35, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia:Media copyright questions#Copyright holder posting their own text on Wikipedia? Basically I'm wondering if someone adding text to Wikipedia and implicitly claiming the copyright on that text means that they have admitted to being an off-wiki individual who had previously published the same text elsewhere. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:57, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think that if someone posts on-wiki something to the effect of "Here is some text that is authored by [name], and I am that person", that would be voluntarily posting their identity onsite. But it still would be a bad idea for other editors to search that information out if it isn't posted on that person's user page. Do other editors agree with that? --Tryptofish (talk) 22:36, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Since people have noticed that it works very well to harass people by taking them to noticeboards (eventually if you complain enough and you're well enough known, you'll get the other person sanctioned regardless of the merits.

This is how Sagecandor operated. Another person, an inveterate administrative board user, was recently banned by the WMF. I have recently received a no-fault IBAN with someone who has contacted every disciplinary board known to Wikipedia to lobby against me.

This is also very much common knowledge to Wikipedians. (AE abuse, in particular, has been mentioned in the current ArbCom case on Poland.) So, could we have some statement as to why we should not include:

On-wiki harassment via repeated groundless prosecutions at administrative boards such as WP:ANI, WP:AE, WP:ARBCOM, or WP:AN can lead to sanctions.

While this is in verity a special case of hounding it should be treated separately because it is so common. This seems signifcantly more important than the question of whether one may or may not restore user-deleted posts on a userpage (treated at length in the text), especially given the current discussions on community health related to another over-zealous prosecutor. 🌿 SashiRolls ^{t · c} 11:51, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The only problem with this is that sometimes people need to be taken to boards over and over again, like

WP:BOOMERANGed. PCHS-NJROTC ^{(Messages)Have a blessed day.} 14:47, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

I would suggest that that is not a problem: you are saying that in fact we don't have a problem, based on what you've seen, that boomerangs happen when they should. I'm saying there is a problem, that I can and probably will eventually get around to further documenting. But regardless, administrative actions should follow policy, so it's a good thing when justified boomerangs happen, not a problem. It is pretty clear that the WMF did not feel that the "community" had done enough boomeranging in the

much publicized case about the en.wp banned admin, suggesting that insufficient attention is perhaps paid to abuse of administrative boards. I believe they said there was a problem with the community's enforcement of the TOS. Sagecandor, incidentally, was never bothered for harassment, the case was just quietly zipped up in an SPI. 🌿 SashiRolls ^{t · c} 15:21, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

I generally support the sentiment, but I think PCHS-NJROTC raises a valid practical concern. However, User:PCHS-NJROTC, isn't the fact that this Keegscee fella had to be taken to boards over and over again itself indicate that these boards fail at what they're suppose to do (assuming your characterization of the user is correct)? Volunteer Marek (talk) 00:20, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@

WP:HARASS people. As long as personal biases infiltrate objective discussion, the boards will be ineffective to a certain degree. PCHS-NJROTC ^{(Messages)Have a blessed day.} 07:00, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

I think the more targeted question here is whether the proposed additional language actually accomplishes anything. I don't think it's likely to change the proportion of legitimate vs. abusive filings in administrative/beahvioural review spaces, nor change the realpolitik reasons why the inappropriate uses of such forums are difficult to contain while many perfectly reasonable fillings fail to address or restrain truly disruptive behaviour. The reasons for those issues are nuanced and too difficult to capture in brief format here, though at the same time, the proposed addition reflects something that is manifestly true and yet probably represents more complication than clarity to say expressly in this policy.

All factors weighed, I think I would oppose the additional of that sentence, under a

WP:BOOMERANG is a case-specific call that the community will need to make in each instance (with the community members who volunteer in those spaces being largely practiced in making that call), and adding language that prejudices that call in one direction or the other here probably is not useful--afterall, can we really say that it's more common than not that a thread in an administrative space is frivolous? I'm certainly not comfortable making that assertion as an empirical matter. So it's probably not worthwhile to bloat out this policy by even one more sentence for the purpose of saying something that (as a textual matter) is taken for granted by most of the community, but which could be easily weaponized by repeat offenders who have to be brought to the community's attention time and again. So not withstanding Sashi's presumably good-faith motivation here, I'd be opposed to adding that language.Snow ^{let's rap} 20:32, 26 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

and still it contains more actual information. ^^ (The very important bit about the serious

WP:GANG problem en.wp suffers from needs to be added.) 🌿 SashiRolls ^{t · c} 21:23, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

I am strongly opposed to those changes, for the reasons I expressed above, and those of Tryptofish below. It would do next to nothing to forestall actual harassment via process, which is an issue that can (and should) be addressed by the community in the forum in question when the process is being abused (i.e. the most common context for a

WP:BOOMERANG sanction). Meanwhile, every disruptive editor who legitimately need to be restrained via a community processes in one of those spaces would find rhetorical shelter in the language you want added and and constantly stonewall discussion by flippant reference to WP:Harassment--that is "This is the fifth time I have been brought to ANI by editors working on articles pertaining to subject matter X!" would become (to the mind or at least the tactics of the disruptive editor) evidence that they are being harassed, rather than evidence that maybe there is indeed a particular long-term behavioural issue needing addressing. ArbCom and the admins/community volunteers at AN/I know how to recognize and deal with abusive filings. They don't need this policy language to recognize and react to it, and the downsides are far too substantial. There are also a number of issues with the wording you've employed there. We don't "prosecute" at noticeboards or ArbCom, we discuss issues. Yes, we do occasionally sanction community members (very rarely, when compared against the over-all number of complaints), but it's not a punitive process and its not meant to be adversarial by design. Lastly, you cut out a lot of language there that stresses the precautionary principle and urges people to be mindful and cautious of anything that looks like it leans more towards harassment than productive activity. No, I'm sorry, I'm just very much opposed to replacing the present wording of that passage with your proposed language, well-intentioned as I am sure it is. Snow ^{let's rap} 06:05, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

Also there are more paragraphs, the tag-team harassment bit does not need to be the renvoi of this paragraph, It could be in one of the other paragraphs. I just think this section is the right place to mention it, as that is often how it feels to many contributors who end up feeling, sometimes mostly mistakenly that they are dealing with teams. It is reassuring that policy reflects ideal practice, and from experience, I will tell you that tag-team behavior should be WP:NOTHERE but it's not. 🌿 SashiRolls ^{t · c} 21:46, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Also just for info, you may want to compare two versions of WP:NOTHERE in terms of the veneer given to the question of tag-team

• I had no intention of commenting in this section, but because of the comments in a section below, where I had already commented earlier, I will now. I think that tightening up the existing wording in the Hounding section is a good idea. I think adding any of the proposed new material would be a mistake. It would open up the door to users who were properly being sanctioned for disruptive conduct trying to wikilawyer that they were being harassed by administrators and others. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:27, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Strangely, the word "safety" appears only once on the page as I write, the words "trust" and "support" are both missing from the policy page. Shouldn't we have a link to the T&S anonymous tip jar?

I also notice that the root "crit" (criticize, criticism, criteria, critique, etc.) is nowhere to be found on this page. Shouldn't we have something defining legitimate critical inquiry in policy? 🌿 SashiRolls ^{t · c} 12:42, 26 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It is interesting how the elephant in the room is being scrupulously avoided. T&S and ArbCom concur that en.wp is not doing a good job dealing with harassment (cf. ArbCom statement). Part of the problem is that there is no explanation of how the line should be drawn between legitimate criticism and harassment. We all agree that calling someone on the telephone after doing opposition research to dig up their phone number, as in the jytdog case, is harassment and not legitimate criticism. But some attempt should be made to define legitimate (i.e. diff-based and easily verifiable) criticism. Why is everyone avoiding the elephant and focusing on an already far too long section on outing?) 🌿 SashiRolls ^{t · c} 21:48, 30 June 2019 (UTC)*[reply]

added a link to T&S, citing their meta page. I got a pat on the back then reverted. The board of trustees recently said this: "The Board views this as part of a much-needed community debate on toxic behavior. In spite of the considerable disruption this has caused for many, we hope this serves as a catalyzing moment for us to move forward together to ensure the health and vitality of our communities. source (in which nowhere is it said that the en.wp harassment policy should not have a link to T&S). Did I stumble into some sort of turf war again? ^^ 🌿 SashiRolls ^{t · c} 23:09, 6 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to propose an addition to the second paragraph of

Starship.paint, thank you for this proposal. I think that this clarification is important. I think the question that remains for me is how strictly this is to be interpreted: For instance, if a user links from their user page to their personal website and their personal website links to their Twitter account, can that Twitter account be referenced? StudiesWorld (talk) 14:25, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have no idea (obviously from recent events I'm not an expert in this policy). @Oshwah:, hard question here! starship.paint (talk) 14:38, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it can. ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 14:39, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

starship.paint, if that's the case then I think there needs to be some clarification, but I'm not sure how best to clarify without opening a loophole or overcomplicating the policy. Let me think on it for a while and if I have a thought, I'll get back to you. StudiesWorld (talk) 14:51, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Oshwah: - since you said yes to the Twitter account being linked from that linked website, what about this example. Editor links to his website. His website says: "I'm gay." I discuss with that editor: "hey, you linked to your website, which said you're gay." Is it outing? starship.paint (talk) 15:02, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Starship.paint - No, it is not. ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 15:29, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I feel like that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis based on whether it's clear they intended to share that information on Wikipedia. Something like eg. someone using their userpage to link to their personal website, which has all their personal information prominently placed on the landing page you immediately arrive on after clicking the link, would reasonably mean they're sharing that information themselves on Wikipedia, so referencing it would not be outing. On the other hand, someone linking to their Reddit account, which happens to contain a post in their history from 2015 where they shared their personal details, probably would not count as intentionally sharing those details, so bringing them up on-wiki would probably still be outing. --Aquillion (talk) 16:40, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I see a complication here, related to socking and particularly self-promotion.

Editor Mr X makes a series of edits. They're not great, and they're somewhat self-promotional. They're reverted by numerous editors. Clearly consensus is against them.

IP *.999 comes along, makes the same edits again. An unproven suspicion arises that IP *.999 and Mr X are connected.

IP *.999 geolocates narrowly and robustly to Argleton. Mr X Industries is based in Argleton, as can be seen from their own website, or from their Facebook.

Is it permissible SPI investigation to connect all three? Or is that outing? Andy Dingley (talk) 14:31, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Erm, Andy Dingley … I'm not an expert on socking stuff … but can't an SPI investigation (and CheckUser requested) be proposed purely because Mr X and 999 have made the same (or very similar) edits? Is there even a need to mention the off-wiki stuff? starship.paint (talk) 14:38, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

SPI refuses to address IPs with checkuser. In some cases, the

WP:QUACKing is enough to link them, or often it's errors by confusing which sock they're editing as. But there are certainly cases – and some are blog posts saying, "Ha ha, I'm socking on WP" – where it's off-wiki evidence that gives the link. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:44, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

Andy Dingley - It's not outing to take on-wiki edits, evidence, and information and use them to connect the dots between users to genuinely assert that sock puppetry, block or ban evasion, abuse, or other policy violations in this aspect are occurring. Since you wouldn't have access to the geolocation of Mr X (only checkusers do, and after they retrieve the account's IP information), you'd be making the assertion in the SPI that, due to the very similar edits to the same article from the .999 IP and Mr X, they are most likely the same person and both users should be blocked due to repeated self-promotion. Saying that the .999 IP and Mr X are both from Argleton based off of the geolocation that you pull from the .999 IP is speculation based off of the similar edits that you believe links the two users as the same person.

That's completely different than (for example) performing an internet search for "Mr X", finding that there's LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube accounts that are very similarly spelled or worded as "Mr X", finding a tweet that the Twitter account you found posted saying that they're "Mr X" on Wikipedia, then going back to Wikipedia, posting the external links there and saying that you found "Mr X" on the internet, here's his other accounts, and look - his name is actually Richard Head from California. Do you see the (very big) difference between the first example above regarding the SPI, and this one? The first example is not considered outing. This example here is absolutely a violation of policy and would be considered outing if Mr X did not publicly disclose those links on Wikipedia or any WMF project site using his account. :-) ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 14:55, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

So what about a case where we're dealing with Commons, and Commons content sourced from Flickr or Facebook, where there's a clear indication from the Mr X account that they are Mr X industries (they're claiming this as justification for using the images), and where the off-wiki Mr X identity links publicly to Argleton. Similarly those who (Mr Y) who are linking their on-wiki edits as promotion of Mr Y's other interests, such as th Mr Y public Facebook. Now yes, none of this is proof that they are Mr X (they could simply be joe-jobbing). But if there is then an IP which geolocates to Mr X (with a degree of confidence, if not certainty, as good as any other use of IPs in CU) I see that as a reasonable connection to draw. No off-wiki information has been acquired here beyond what Mr X has offered themselves ("I am Mr X of Facebook", "Mr X of Facebook is based in Argleton"), and so it's no more than if Mr X on WP had claimed directly to be based in Argleton, then the IP's geolocation reveals the crossover.

Also there's some inconsistency of IPs at SPI. Some CUs won't reveal linking information in order to avoid making such a link. However others simply refuse to look at IPs at all, even keeping the results to themselves, so IPs effectively get a free hand. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:01, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Andy Dingley - If the images were uploaded by Mr X himself, and they clearly display or show that he has a non-ambiguous and obvious relationship with Mr X Industries, I would not consider it outing for you to discuss on-wiki what you see in the image and what you believe that it means. This is a case where the user has provided (and hence disclosed) that information themselves, and so long as you're not disclosing or sharing information that you found on your own by using external off-wiki searches, websites, or other means in your comments or statements, I don't see an issue with "calling it as you see it". It's perfectly fine for you to see an image that Mr X uploaded to Commons that shows him wearing a Mr X Industries uniform and posing together with other Mr X Industries employees, and then say in a comment, "hey, this image Mr X uploaded looks to be an image of him wearing a Mr X Industries uniform. He edits that article a lot, and he includes a lot of unsourced and non-neutral content that adds a positive bias to the article's content. I believe that he works for this company and that there's a COI issue with him and this article subject." ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 18:45, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

My goodness, my ears are burning.- MrX 🖋 19:06, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The gig is up, MrX! You've been able to fly under the radar for a long time, but you put your hand in the cookie jar too many times to not be caught. We know what you're up to, and your tyranny toward everyone while behind the cloak and sword of Mr X Incorporated is over! I'm gonna go blow the lid off the whole conspiracy, and the trails are all going to point to you! I also have evidence that will lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton. (I hope people here will get that joke and reference) :-P ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 00:13, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

WP:ASPERSIONS that MrX could be related to Mr C Incorporated or Hillary Clinton. StudiesWorld (talk) 00:15, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

Neverrrr! :-P ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 00:21, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This makes me think we may need a joke version of ANI, if only for April Fool's Day. StudiesWorld (talk) 00:24, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oh no! I knew my day of reckoning would eventually come.- MrX 🖋 00:46, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Andy Dingley - After re-reading your follow-up question above, I'll expand a bit in order to try and fully answer your question regarding the situation. So long as you're using on-wiki information that the user disclosed or added themselves to directly connect the dots to information (wherever it may be), you will not be engaging in outing of the user. I'll summarize it in a simple manner by saying it like this: If the user discloses the information or URLs, etc using their account, then they opened that door for you to walk through. Going through the door that they opened is not outing. If you go out and begin searches on your own to find information about that user and then publish that information about the user on-wiki (meaning you didn't start from information they posted on-wiki, but instead started from searches or other external means that you instigated on your own), you opened that door. If you walk through the door that you opened for yourself, it will be considered outing and a severe breach of Wikipedia policy.

If Mr X publishes an external URL to website A on their user page using their account, and website A contains their personal information, posts, photos, whatever..., and you click on a URL that you found on website A to go to website B, and website B contains more information about them that website A doesn't have published, discussing the additional information about the user that you found on website B is not outing. You used the URL that he disclosed, visited the site, found the other site directly from the first site, and found that information. Now, lets say that Mr X discloses the URL to website A just like in the previous example, but website A does not contain a link to website B. Instead, you use information from website A to start a web search about Mr X and/or start looking around the internet for more stuff on Mr X yourself and on your own, and you then run into website B from your searches, discussing the additional information you found on website B that was not shared on website A would not be acceptable. You didn't find website B and the additional information from website A and hence from information that Mr X disclosed on Wikipedia using his account. You found that information on website B using other searches or means. That's the difference. I hope these simple examples help put everything into perspective and that they make sense. :-) ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 00:34, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't agree with the final paragraph. If someone doesn't intend to share information, spending time researching (including eg. pouring over every post on a social media account they linked) and then sharing it on-wiki is outing them. The example I posted above is someone linking to their Reddit account; if you go through their posts and find one from 2015 where they shared personal information, then post that information on-wiki, you are absolutely outing them, since it's unreasonable to infer that they intended to share that information themselves, and since it could reasonably be considered to have been hidden before. More generally, outing will almost always involve a user accidentally leaking information in some form; interpreting an accidental release of information as sufficient to make something not outing them would undermine the entire policy. I don't see how "you posted your real name, which I was able to use to connect the dots and find your address even though you wanted to keep it hidden" is any different from "you posted a link to your Reddit account, which I was able to pour over and find your address within even though you wanted to keep it hidden." --Aquillion (talk) 16:50, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I think the policy is already fairly clear on this: simply editing under a real name is not an invitation to off-wiki opposition research. I think a lot of the confusion here is that this isn’t really outing in the sense of making a real life identity known. It very much is harassment as opposition research. If anything, I’d be more inclined to add an ALLCAPS anchor and shortcut about opposition research than anything else.
  Speaking more generally, people get caught up in the specifics of the harassment policy and question what the lines are, which I don’t think is a good approach to it. A good axiom to follow about the harassment policy is this: if it’s creepy or would make someone feel violated in real life, it will be creepy or make someone feel violated on Wikipedia.
  In the recent case: yes, 100%, if you came up to random strangers in real life, at their job, and knowing who they were asked them to verify their social media profiles, it would be creepy and make someone feel violated. People don’t like strangers looking through their details and letting them know they’re being watched, even if the info is public. I’ve said it before: if anyone came around doing that at any workplace I’ve been at, the cops would be called and they’d have been trespassed. I don’t mean to harp on it, but it is a really good example of the creepy IRL is creepy on-wiki rule. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:30, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with everything that Tony said. I think it's also important to recognize that there can be false flags in these kinds of situations. It occurs to me: maybe it would be a good idea to have a quote box on the page about the "creepy IRL" rule. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:22, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm looking closely at the existing language in terms of the proposed clarification. I see that the policy already says:

The fact that an editor has posted personal information or edits under their own name, making them easily identifiable through online searches, is not an excuse to post the results of "opposition research"

and Posting links to other accounts on other websites is allowable in specific situations (but see also

Conflict of interest noticeboard

is not a violation of this policy... To combat impersonation (an editor claiming falsely to be a particular person), it is permissible to post or link to disavowals from that person, provided that the person has explicitly and in good faith given their consent, and provided that there is a high degree of confidence in the authenticity of the source.

This already covers a lot of what the proposed sentence would address. As I see it, the only new information it would add is that, outside of the "specific situations" that are cited, such linking is usually not permitted – and it seems to me that this fact really is already so clearly implied that we would be getting into a situation of instruction creep if we were to add some version of the proposed sentence. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:48, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

And the danger of instruction creep on this policy in particular is pretty big. It gets us focused on red lines and on the assumption that if you don't cross one, you're okay. The difficult cases are ones where there aren't red lines, but there exists enough of a pattern that a block is justified. When we get into instruction creep, those situations become much more difficult from the oversighter/admin side of things. The policy here is clear: do not do off-wiki opposition research. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:01, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What some call "opposition research" others call investigative reporting. I must say knowing that a user who harassed me was associated with the "donkey punch" entries and the Dan Savage Rick Santorum meme (as well as being topic banned from the area they were editing) would not have been possible were it not for off-wiki sources (i.e. the wider world). Those of us who are a bit cynical about the state of the current health of en.wp (like T&S, like the NYT, like Salon, like ArbCom, etc.) might suggest that saying "do not do off-wiki investigation" gives embedded power users a pass allowing them to avoid legitimate scrutiny/criticism of their actions. The problems with Cirt, jytdog, Fram, and many others would all have been much more quickly resolved if more people had listened to the off-wiki wiki-watchers. Walled gardens & echo chambers are dangerous, especially when people get gagged or gas-lighted in those lovely gardeny spaces. 🌿 SashiRolls ^{t · c} 21:57, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Jytdog was blocked for violating the very policy you're critiquing. Sagecandor was not blocked because of off-wiki stuff, even if it existed. He was blocked based on a publicly filed SPI containing diffs and based off of CheckUser data reviewed by a local functionary. That didn't require digging into his personal life off-wiki, and anyone could have done it. Those are both very good examples of why this policy works. Off-wiki opposition research of personal lives is entirely unneeded. If there really does need to be off-wiki evidence submitted, ArbCom or the functionaries list are always available for people, and speaking from the perspective of the functionaries list, we do treat allegations, even made against "power users", very seriously. If people don't trust ArbCom or the functionaries team, T&S exists as well. There are structures in place where the people involved are held accountable for any actions they take so we don't need individuals who have no source of accountability taking matters into their own hands and posting opposition research on a public wiki. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:21, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No, Sagecandor was blocked because a whole host of evidence was compiled for the SPI through work done by several people off-wiki... (and it still took over a year from the time ArbCom was first informed). I am not criticizing the "outing" policy, I am saying that "off-wiki investigation" is not at all the same thing as "trawling through someone's FB and linkedin", so we should be very careful not to say, as you did, that policy prohibits "off-wiki opposition research" unless we're clear about exactly what that means. For example, by linking to the mainspace definition of opposition research this policy page currently suggests that we cannot use prior media coverage about problems on en.wp to point out further problems on en.wp... that's rather odd, no? 🌿 SashiRolls ^{t · c} 22:36, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You can't use press coverage of individuals for their off-wiki activity. You can use press coverage that critiques Wikipedia in general. That is my understanding of the policy, and I think it is one that would be shared by others thinking back to a few cases we've had. On the Sagecandor point: yes, you can gather diffs via email or other forums, but the things that are posted on-wiki cannot be things such as "SashiRolls publicly identifies as Example Person and here is their Twitter." You could send it to a CU via email or to the functionaries list or the CheckUser OTRS queue. In general, off-wiki evidence is much less damning than people involved think, and I can personally only think of one SPI where it made me change my mind. I'm sure there are others, but the percentage is pretty small, and the CU team is able to handle it to the point where people posting it in a public forum is unneeded. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:46, 30 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your response here... it's clear and concise. Maybe we could focus on some of the difficult questions in other sections? ^^ 🌿 SashiRolls ^{t · c} 00:53, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@TonyBallioni: - I don't agree with your approach that you're looking at it that simply editing under a real name is not an invitation to off-wiki opposition research. Yes, there may be cases of opposition research, I don't like Editor Z, I search for things about him online. But what if things weren't opposition research (it wasn't, in my case, not sure if you knew). Let's say on Twitter, there's this user that is the #1 supporter of Fraser Anning, and is posting comments many view as racist. Let's say this user claims to be an English Wikipedian, regularly edits articles on Fraser Anning, and uses the same user name both on Wikipedia and Twitter, but did not reveal it on Wikipedia. If I discussed the Twitter comments with this editor, that would be outing, which is not permissible. But that wouldn't be opposition research, don't you agree? starship.paint (talk) 03:44, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Starship.paint, uh, that's pretty much the definition of opposition research and that was what you were doing before... TonyBallioni (talk) 03:47, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@TonyBallioni: - no argh. I think I wasn't clear. Let's say I am totally unaware of Editor A on Wikipedia. I start by chancing upon the Twitter account that claims to be Editor A. So, I ask Editor A a question about Twitter on Wikipedia. That is outing, but is that opposition research? starship.paint (talk) 03:49, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think it falls under the same premise. We can come up with all of these hypotheticals, but in practice, it is not going to be likely that someone comes across a Wikipedia editor's external accounts unless they were looking for them. Most Wikipedians are not public figures, and the odds of someone finding a Tweet from a random account related to Fraser Anning unless one was looking up things related to Fraser Anning with an eye for controversy are relatively low.

If you were to find the name of an editor you recognized on Twitter, go to the article and see them editing it, and then ask the person if it was them, yes, I would classify it as opposition research because that's exactly how it looks to me, a neutral third-party. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:57, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@TonyBallioni: - it is not going to be likely that someone comes across a Wikipedia editor's external accounts unless they were looking for them - it may not be likely, but that's what happened in my case. Was I performing opposition research on specific WMF staffers? I would say no, because I've never known of them before. However, I was probably performing opposition research on the WMF in general, yes. Was that permissible? Floquenbeam and Espresso Addict, probably did similar actions in this case. GorillaWarfare, Swarm and Wehwalt responded to my 'opposition research on the WMF' actions, but did not object. Casliber probably read what I wrote, and didn't object either. Moe Epsilon did object. And then, we have people who posted / discussed Katherine's tweets, a larger group I won't identify. Is discussing Katherine's tweets opposition research? Is opposition research on the WMF not permissible? It's all not very clear. starship.paint (talk) 04:20, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't want to relitigate your block, but what you did was indeed opposition research. Looking up negative information in general about people off-site, finding specific people as a part of that research, and then coming back to use that information against them is opposition research. I'll repeat what I said above: we don't want this page to be overly specific. If we start listing everything that is inappropriate, we get into the realm where if something isn't listed here it is okay, which is not how a policy like this should operate. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:43, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@TonyBallioni: - I'm not looking to relitigate my block. If what I did was indeed opposition research, then it was tolerated by several prominent members of the community. If opposition research is bad, do you see how that would be a problem? starship.paint (talk) 04:49, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I’m done here. Cheerios. Someone else will have to officially table my proposal, if it ever comes to that. starship.paint (talk) 06:59, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I'm a little late here but I do think the policy should be clarified, even if not with the exact wording as proposed. Maybe different wording? Maybe it needs an information page with examples of do's and don'ts? Pinging Winged Blades of Godric in case he has some ideas. – Levivich 01:50, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This discussion has not been formulated as a straw poll, but I'm personally prepared to support the additional language more or less as Starship presented it. It's clearly what the policy has always urged, and how it has been consistently interpreted by the community, including by ArbCom and admins and veteran community members working in relevant spaces such as SPI and ANI--at least to the extent that I've ever seen the issue expressed. There are massively important community priorities behind our commitment to protecting the identities of our users their access to anonymity if they so choose to embrace it when participating in this project, and it's manifestly clear that it cannot be abrogated by technicality, no matter what someone says off-project; connecting on-project and off-project conduct is vastly beyond the permitted remit of another community member, no matter that might allow this or that editor "make a case" against a sock puppet who will otherwise go un-blocked, or a similar situation. Clarifying the language to formalize that point can only be a positive change. Frankly, I'm a little confused by the back and forth above between Starship and Tony as to where the line between outing and "opposition research" is. Clearly there's a lot of overlap between the two and, regardless, it's not the like the proposed change is a zero-sum contest between those two interests: making the outing rules more express will eliminate (or at least proscribe) more instances of outing, regardless of whether they contain opposition research or not. those two concerns are in alignment, with regard to the proposed change, as far as I can tell. Snow ^{let's rap} 06:25, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have any good ideas, but is there perhaps an alternative way of wording it? --Tryptofish (talk) 15:53, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree quite strongly: spelling things out will name it significantly easier for people to harass others because of the “it’s not forbidden” effect. On the opposition research point: not sure what’s confusing. Don’t be creepy and go through another editor’s Facebook looking for pictures of them drunk while in school, even if they say their identity on here.

I’m fine with tweaking wording here, but spelling out specifics is less than ideal. What about this Dredging up their off-site opinions or other undisclosed off-wiki information to repeatedly challenge their edits can be a form of harassment, even if their identity is public. change is in the bold, I also removed the clause about past edits since it’s a bit weird in that section and it’s covered adequately elsewhere. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:32, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I guess I'm still not following the nature of your argument. We are still talking about Starship's proposed addition, right? Why would adding "Even in the case that a person claims on an external website to be a Wikipedia editor, sharing any external information not present on Wikipedia is still a form of outing." to the existing language regarding

WP:OVERSIGHT

work that could have been prevented in the first instance.

Your alternative proposal may very well be something we would want to consider in addition, but your wording doesn't really address the issue that Starship brought up here and which the rest of us are discussing; there's a lot of overlap (that is, there would be plenty of disruptive behaviour that would be covered by both Starship's proposed addition and your proposed additions), but the issue of whether or not to add wording saying essentially "You cannot connect an editor to their off-project identities, even if they identify themselves as a Wikipedian on other webpages." is not really the same question as to whether or not to also sharpen language regarding "opposition research". Plenty of conduct would be covered by both proposals, but they're not in opposition (they'd actually row together in pretty much all circumstances). More to the point, I'm still struggling to understand why you would think that Starship's proposed additional wording would invite more outing, when it simply clarifies that the particular behaviour of bringing a person's off-project identity and activities into a discussion here is textbook outing, regardless of whether they disclose their editorial identity elsewhere. And again, that's already the standard: we're just making it clear for those who didn't realize that was there is no exception to the general outing principle here, just because someone discloses (or seems to disclose) their identity as a Wikipedian on another site.

Not to sound like a broken record, but your proposal may well be worth considering, and you should open a separate thread to consider it. But it's a discrete issue from that which Starship has raised here, and the two are by no means mutually exclusive proposals. Unless I'm misapprehending your position in some way--which I may very well be, because your argument is still not adding up for me, if I'm reading it correctly. Snow ^{let's rap} 21:52, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

My issue with Starship's addition is that the entire point of the current wording of this policy is that it is intentionally ambiguous as to what is and isn't allowed. This is because of the complexity of these situations. Adding hard and fast rules makes it more like a checklist and instruction creep. We don't want to list that many specifics here otherwise it will look like things we don't list are things that are permissible to do. In the case of harassment, this is not ideal as unfortunately people will find new and unique ways to target other human beings. I think my addition makes the point Starship is trying to make more clear without the risk of instruction creep, and I don't think it needs a new section to discuss it because the idea is similar. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:33, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I agree in general with the principle that when connections to a real-world identity are only incoming (from other sites) and not outgoing (from here to those other sites) then they cannot be revealed per OUTING, and with the idea of making that more explicit. However, I think the exact sentence "Even in the case that a person claims on an external website to be a Wikipedia editor, sharing any external information not present on Wikipedia is still a form of outing." goes too far, in that it requires people to write on Wikipedia all possible information that can be shared. As an example, I link from my Wikipedia user page my real name, my professional home page, my blog, and a Wikipedia article that happens to be about me. I do not link from my user page various other network identities that are, however, linked elsewhere: my home page links to an account on the Mastodon social media server, and to my Google Scholar profile, for instance, neither of which is linked on my user page. The proposed wording would make it a violation of OUTING to mention my Mastodon account or my Google Scholar account, even though I make no secret of those accounts, because they are not explicitly mentioned on-Wikipedia. I think that it should be allowed to mention identities such as these that are either linked directly on-Wikipedia or indirectly and publicly from a page that is linked on-Wikipedia (only one level of indirection to prevent gaming by following long chains of links). We could either make a rule about this or let common sense prevail. But I don't think we should make it ridiculously difficult for users to disclose their identity even when they try, by adding requirements that the user page should be an exhaustive list of all possible connected accounts that might ever come up in conversation. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:22, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

But why would we balance the policy to facilitate easier willing disclosures rather than to proscribe inappropriate ones? Remember, this is

WP:NOTASOCIALNETWORK

. A person's off-project activities should rarely, if ever, be a source of significant discussion on this project. Besides, if we're talking about not getting in the way of editors who wanted the information in question disclosed here, this policy is not a problem, because they aren't going to be pushing for sanctions/oversighting on something they want people to know. This policy, rather, is aimed at protecting the right to anonymity that has been enshrined as a protected feature of this project and community since their inception, and which assurance is absolutely vital to large numbers of out editors (sometimes as a question of livelihood or even personal safety). The policy against outing needs to stay focused on that interest, not making things easier for those who have no such concerns and wish to promote or socialize and link to aspects of their identities that have nothing to do with the workings of this project.

If people want to index their social media, career, or other personal webpages here, I guess more power to them, though I don't see the point of it, given what we are meant to be focused on here. And I suppose to the extent that such information is listed here, referencing those accounts here should be considered an exception to outing (I don't why you would ever do that in a way that has anything to do with this project's work, but whatever). But allowing a daisy-chain exception would be a stupendously bad idea to me: even if we attempted to limit it to a "two degrees of separation only" rule as you suggest (which I think would actually be extremely difficult to catch in the policy in a manner that is both clear and succinct) it would still invite all manner of gamesmanship of our outing principles and focus on off-project activities that are just not appropriate topics of discussion here to begin. Even if someone lists their Facebook account on their en.WP user page, I would still consider it borderline (if not outright) inappropriate to go look at their conduct on that site and then bring here whatever is found there. There's just no legitimate project-oriented purpose for it. And we definitely should not be watering down (even a small amount) protections for people who wouldn't want their off-project identities/activities mentioned here, just to make willing disclosures more convenient for those who want to. That would just turn our hierarchy of priorities (regarding the people and interests

WP:OUTING is meant to protect), completely on its head. Snow ^{let's rap} 22:28, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

It is not just on-Wiki discussions that this policy affects. As an active Wikipedia editor, I don't want to fall afoul of this policy even in my off-wiki activity. Because of this, this policy has already repeatedly prevented me from publicly crediting editors with their good edits. To do so, I would have to name those editors in a way recognizable to the external communities in which I want to give the credit. And although the people I have in mind have not actually been hiding their identity here, they have also not been familiar enough with the ins and outs of this policy to have created an explicit link from their userpages here to their identities elsewhere. If we can't tell the world about the good edits people are doing, it makes it harder to attract other people to help edit. And if we make our outing policy so complicated and difficult that only experts on outing policy are capable of making their identities public, we won't be able to tell the world about anyone else's good works. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:57, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, such concerns, if they require more finessed language to avoid issue, are better addressed in

WP:OUTING

, since they would involve activities covered by the former rather than the latter. But generally speaking, this community does not get involved in policing off-project behaviour. It occasionally comes up in an ArbCom case, where it involves harassment that is directly and clearly related to an on-project dispute, but if the significant nexus of the dispute doesn't arise here, it's generally seen as beyond this community's remit to police off-project activity, owing to the facts that A) it is often difficult to establish identity with certainty (and dubiously ethical under our policies to publicly probe that question in depth), or to establish the facts and chain of events (it's not like our admins have revision histories and checkuser tools to work with on other sites as they do here), and B) because that's just not seen as an appropriate function for our community to get entangled in off-project matters. There are exceptions, but they are rare and I can't imagine anyone getting taken to ArbCom by a party who got celebrated for something off-project, when they make the connection between their off-project accounts and their account here and are looking to engage in cross-site chatter.

Basically the harassment policy as it is currently written is just never going to be invoked by somebody who doesn't mind your off-project comment. And if you messed up and did contact someone off site who didn't want that attention, then it's hardly a benefit if the policy is changed to greenlight that behaviour, because you clearly were over-confident in your analysis that the person was seeking or open to such plaudits. Either way, it's virtually impossible that you'd end up with a sanction for one off-hand compliment: you'd either have to be repeatedly contacting someone who already made it clear to you that they didn't want to hear from you off-project, or you'd have to have made a large number of similar blunders involving a significant number of editors, all of whom brought their concerns to ArbCom. And if either of those things is happening, I can't see it as a positive development to weaken our

WP:OUTING standards for the sake of protecting the ability of someone to thank others off-project who don't even want that communication. Snow ^{let's rap} 00:21, 5 July 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

I think it's worth considering that the outing policy already defines outing in terms of the disclosure of "personal information". So, working off of David Eppstein's examples, his disclosure of his real name, professional page, blog, and BLP makes the associated kinds of personal information (such as his real name, profession, workplace, and anything else at his BLP) voluntarily disclosed. He doesn't link from here to his Google Scholar account, so (unless it's in his BLP; I didn't look) some information about how many times he has been cited by other scholars might not be directly linked to from on-wiki. But is "number of cites" considered to be "personal information" as defined by this policy? I don't think so. So if an editor looked that information up and added it to his BLP would that be outing? No, I don't think it would. But if they found his home phone number at an external site and posted that? Yes, it would. One way to think about it is whether the kind of information could be considered to be something that a person could be harassed with, or as TonyBallioni put it, whether that kind of information would come across as creepy. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:49, 5 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

One problem to be solved here is clarifying the (as David Eppstein put it) "inbound/outbound" dichotomy–the notion that "outing" your WP account off-wiki isn't the same as "outing" yourself on-wiki. I like Snow's formulation of "You cannot connect an editor to their off-project identities, even if they identify themselves as a Wikipedian on other webpages", to which I would add, "unless they have posted their identity on wiki" (or language to that effect, noting the #RfC: Clarification of OUTING thread above about what "on wiki" means, exactly). A second issue is the scope-of-outing issue raised by David Eppstein immediately above. That's an interesting question that ties into the opposition research concerns, and that whole "I know it when I see it" line-of-thinking about whether something is "creepy" or just referring to public information. I'm not sure that there is a "rule" that can be written for that particular point, as it's a very fine line between saying (hypothetical example) "Hey David, I read in the newspaper you won the Nobel Prize–congratulations!" and "Hey David, I read in the newspaper you didn't win the Nobel Prize–too bad!" The latter can be an honest expression of sympathy, or it can be sarcastic trolling or "opposition research", depending on who's saying it and in what context. However, to TonyB's point about leaving it vague, I must disagree about the philosophy behind it; I've never before heard someone make the argument that the clearer you spell out a rule, the easier it becomes to break, and thus what we want are vague rules. I believe the point of a rule (or policy) should be to set clear expectations of behavior for the purpose of teaching people what to do and what not to do, so that they can do (or not do) the right thing. Thus, I think we want clear rules, so that people can read and follow them, as opposed to vague "principles" whose purpose is to provide justification for future enforcement actions without first being clear about what does and what does not violate the principle. – Levivich 17:32, 7 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sarcasm is one thing. It's easy enough for people who think they can get a rise out of you to say other borderline-insulting sarcastic things without having to out you to do it (I probably shouldn't name names). Complaining to your employer (which has happened to me, not recently) is an entirely different matter, and something that I think should be disallowed regardless of how public the identity is. But often the people who do that sort of thing are not actually editors, just people who dislike something we include in our articles. Maybe we should keep in mind that there's this bigger class of potential outing violators over whom we have little or no control. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:04, 7 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think there have been some questions about whether the WMF T&S are currently handling basic harassment issues at en-wiki. Here is the link to what the WMF Board have said: [11], where they say that they have instructed T&S to work only on things like "legal issues, threats of violence, cross-wiki abuse, and child protection issues until consultation and agreement between T&S and the community are achieved." --Tryptofish (talk) 20:28, 7 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There is a discussion about where, if anywhere, it is best for the

Hello all, I recently closed the OUTING RfC above. It's getting fairly late here and I'm having trouble translating what I wrote into actual edits to the policy, so if anyone wants to take a crack at implementing the RfC closure, I'd be grateful. (Alternatively, perhaps it doesn't need to be really integrated into the text of the policy; a footnote quoting an excerpt from the close might do just fine.) Best, Kevin (aka L235 · t · c) 04:42, 7 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]