Wikitanvir (WMF)

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-- 18:18, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

Yours

Greetings Wikitanvir: You -or a bot- left a message on my talk page. I followed your link to a pages which are already "too long, don't read." And I read all of it. It cost the project time I would have used to contribute substantively. I think perhaps your effort needs some more organization and less chaotic expression of opinions. Perhaps break it in pieces and have committees work on the parts? I am not going to join in the "shouting at clouds" that is going on now - and I'm not certain that this would even have any long-term effect on behavior on the projects - since the root cause is individual behavior not project rules.

During my time on the project, I have received several death threats for volunteering and WMF has done absolutely NOTHING to the perpetrators. One of them was later blocked - not for the threats on administrators - but for making controversial changes to the page of "Barney the Purple Dinosaur." The foundation did absolutely nothing to protect its volunteers - but acted quickly for the Purple Dinosaur. That really shows priorities!

Besides the overt threats, I have also received

• Insults
• Sexual harassment
• Encouraging harm to others
• Disclosure of personal data (Doxing)
• Hounding - following a person across the project(s) and repeatedly critiquing their work mainly with the intent to upset or discourage them (1) and
• Trolling

At no time in any of this did I receive help from the foundation. In fact, being female, in some of these situations, I couldn't even get any help from other editors or administrators. I can refer you to the page of one individual who was blocked after multi-year harassment and trolling - periodically someone still leaves a message telling Commons we should unblock him because he doesn't behave like that anywhere else on the project.

Because I edit under my own name, it is easy for people to find me to harass my off-site email - and this has happened on numerous occasions. Currently your system doesn't forward any email at all (see note on my talk page). I asked for help with this, received none and have left a message informing people that Wiki does not send me any emails at all on my page - else they would think I was ignoring them.

Even with all this, I like what I do for Commons, and I am still here despite the threats and the disrespect due to being a female administrator and bureaucrat. I have done what I can to help others who were put in similar untenable situations, but have never seen action from WMF.

Because of WMF's inaction, I do not have a lot of faith or trust that this project will ever protect their volunteers and this current effort just looks like more words to publish and subsequently ignore. Thank you for letting me know it's happening, but I'm not spending any time on it at this point. What the Board of Trustees approved is barely legible English and contains the internal contradictions busily being pointed out on the discussion page by folks who like having discussions. Not being among them, and unlikely to have more to contribute than they do, I find no reason to chime in. Cheers! Ellin Beltz (talk) 20:24, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

(1) I no longer edit on en:wiki very often due to harassment and I was doing good things over there. It made me sad, but it's not worth the pain.

@Ellin Beltz: Thanks for your long and elaborate feedback here about the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). I am sad to read you have been harassed and so on. After years of consultations in the Wikimedia Movement one of the remedies that came forward is to have a Universal Code of Conduct. Now there is such a text. The current consultation is about enforcing the rules, which had primarily to be done by the members of the community of Commons, the ordinary users, the admins and the bureaucrats. You are one of the leaders, being an admin and a bureaucrat here, and have a role in enforcing a code of conduct, or the maintenance of civility. I wish you a lot of luck and good health. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 15:02, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi again. WMF has the ability to stop any kind of bad behavior through the "terms of service." This CoC thing just adds another layer without any form of enforcement - which makes the rules are a total waste of time. Yes, I work for civility on Commons. We try to enforce the rules we have not make up new ones. As a matter of fact, if you will look at my talk page, you will see that one of our old problems is back again. User name is over there, no reason to say it again. Used to come onto Commons and revert administrator decisions - overturn deletions, mis-inform users, and behave misogynistically. Took us over a year to get him blocked, and he's still asking to get unblocked so he can go back to telling our admins why we don't know anything and how his ways are better. There's no way to appeal any of this. There is no higher power. WMF makes money to stay afloat based on volunteer workers like myself, but doesn't give us any support when we're hassled or threatened. Barney the Purple Dinosaur gets more respect. Admins in online chat rooms and video games get more support than we do from the Foundation. Now you want us to rewrite what is already written in the hopes you might enforce something this time? LULZ, sure. One thing you could do for Commons would to stop being stingy and check every incoming upload for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter transmission numbers. But no, that costs money, and the Foundation won't do it. Instead WMF makes volunteers waste time manually checking a metadata field for something which could be automated. This whole thing would be funny if it weren't so sad. Ellin Beltz (talk) 21:46, 10 February 2021 (UTC)