New Wikimedia Foundation extremist policy
Posted: Sat Jul 09, 2022 12:28 am
On June 8th and with no announcement or advertisement the Wikimedia foundation released a new policy, Terrorist and violent extremist content procedures and guidelines found here: https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/T ... guidelines. It appears to have been created and primarily edited by WMF Tech Law Lead Counsel Charles Roslof. Of course these will be handled be none other than the Trust and Safety team, whom almost no one in the community actually trusts.
I noticed this mentioned in the recent Signpost article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... _and_notes
Now, this seems like a good idea up front, no one wants terrorists proliferating on their sites right. Well, given what we have seen from the WMF in the past, this is likely to be misused. From a cursory look, there are several problems that come to mind:
First, with a multilingual, multinational and multicultural project like the Wikipedia foundation projects, one persons terrorist could be anothers freedom fighter, so who decides what is a terrorist and what isn't.
Second, to put it succinctly, the community sucks! It is inevitable someone will make accusations of another on some morale, religious or cultural grounds, "TERRORIST I SAY, TERRORIST!" This will lead to counter allegations, hurt feelings and, potentially, ARBCOM cases for those projects that have them.
Third problem, the WMF is pretty awful with the concept of innocent until proven guilty. So they are likely to take the word of whichever editor has the most political capital on the site. In most cases, the Admins and functionaries.
There are of course many other issues inherent in this type of policy including how to enforce it, legal ramifications for the accused and accuser, etc. In summary, on the WMF projects due to incompetent leadership and low morals, this is likely going to be used as a way to ban editors with a viewpoint someone doesn't like.
I noticed this mentioned in the recent Signpost article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... _and_notes
Now, this seems like a good idea up front, no one wants terrorists proliferating on their sites right. Well, given what we have seen from the WMF in the past, this is likely to be misused. From a cursory look, there are several problems that come to mind:
First, with a multilingual, multinational and multicultural project like the Wikipedia foundation projects, one persons terrorist could be anothers freedom fighter, so who decides what is a terrorist and what isn't.
Second, to put it succinctly, the community sucks! It is inevitable someone will make accusations of another on some morale, religious or cultural grounds, "TERRORIST I SAY, TERRORIST!" This will lead to counter allegations, hurt feelings and, potentially, ARBCOM cases for those projects that have them.
Third problem, the WMF is pretty awful with the concept of innocent until proven guilty. So they are likely to take the word of whichever editor has the most political capital on the site. In most cases, the Admins and functionaries.
There are of course many other issues inherent in this type of policy including how to enforce it, legal ramifications for the accused and accuser, etc. In summary, on the WMF projects due to incompetent leadership and low morals, this is likely going to be used as a way to ban editors with a viewpoint someone doesn't like.