Wikidata:Behavior norms

This page is a work in progress, not an article or policy, and may be incomplete and/or unreliable.
Please offer suggestions on the talk page.

The need edit

Wikidata has been growing steadily and impressively, surprising and delighting us every year. The community has been growing as well. As more people join, and as Wikidata becomes more and more mainstream (we see this in the relative portion of conference talks involving it, for example, not just in Wikimedia events, but in non-Wikimedia GLAM events as well), we will also be seeing more people in need of help, orientation and direction.

We will also likely see a rise in friction, as people who join for the wrong reasons or who despite good faith fail to understand the scope and purpose of Wikidata will make mistakes or misbehave, sometimes repeatedly, in ways that would frustrate the community and possibly bring out emotional responses.

Also, Wikidata is enjoying plenty of institutional partners and contributors not from the more-established parts of the Wikimedia movement, and they are sometimes taken aback by the bluntness or downright hostility sometimes (rarely, happily!) displayed by other Wikidatans.

All this suggests that it is time to get serious about norms of behavior on and around Wikidata. Following conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation's Trust and Safety team (=Trust and Safety (Q39698698)), I would like to encourage the community to begin work on some policy around behavior, which we may want to call a code of conduct, or we may decide not to.

While we do have some policy, like no personal attacks, assume good faith, and a blocking policy, it seems to me we need a more comprehensive and more explicit policy.

To spell out the main advantages, policy on contributor behavior would allow us to make explicit our currently-implicit expectations of user conduct, and would provide clear paths of resolution in cases of violation of the policy. It will reduce arbitrariness (which was fine and even somewhat necessary during the early years) and mitigate the risk of favoritism or "untouchable because venerable" contributors, and it would, in short, be a Good Thing, and a sign of our project's growing maturity.

Process edit

I think before we dive in, it would be useful to gauge community opinion about the process we might use to arrive at our codified behavioral norms. I would very much like to see us, the active Wikidata community, rise to this challenge and design an appropriate, welcoming, inclusive, but also protective policy for how we expect ourselves and each other to behave in and around Wikidata.

Regarding coming up with a policy, I see three main options:

Option 1: Start fresh: Draft an original policy edit

Pros: Organically constructed policy that is owned by the Wikidata community, and ideally encapsulates the unique needs and character of our community.

Cons: Long process, many opportunities for disagreement. The Wikimedia movement has already spent a lot of time and energy drafting policies for this sort of thing; starting fresh would partially duplicate effort. Requires dedicated contributors willing to invest time in composition and discussion.

Option 2: Adapt and combine from a variety of existing policies edit

Pros: We can identify parts of existing movement policy we find well written and well suited to our community. These parts can be combined into a comprehensive policy. More efficient than starting from scratch, and allows us to utilize past efforts and combine the best elements. As we Wikidatans have experience with a wide range of other Wikimedia projects, we are well-positioned to contrast and compare what has already been written.

Cons: Could still be a long process with fair amounts of opportunities for disagreement. Requires a wide range of input to gain a good spectrum of policy wording options. May create opposition from some of us who do not want to see policy imported from projects we feel are poorly governed.

Option 3: Adapt and refine an existing movement (or external) policy edit

Pros: Efficient, allows us to debate specific language and adapt it as needed. Builds on previous movement work, sparing the Wikidata community some time investment. Allows us to work with a policy that has been used and applied, meaning that its limitations, strengths and challenges are better known.

Cons: May reduce our sense of community autonomy. No policy in our movement is without critics; these critics might strongly oppose using a base policy they see as problematic.

Enforcement edit

Without assuming much about the policy we end up with, there are perhaps two main approaches to enforcement, both known from quite a few wikis:

Lightweight and diffuse edit

Enforcement is up to all Wikidata admins. Some would be more active in enforcement than others, naturally, but all could do it. There is no guarantee of consistency or timeliness, but also low risk of burnout.

Concentrated and accountable edit

Enforcement is up to a selected committee. Committee members are expected to commit to a minimum level of responsiveness, and are entrusted with day-to-day policy enforcement. This frees up (other) admins to do other admin work, and perhaps make adminship less risky to hand out. Committee members have higher risk of burnout. This adds "bureaucracy", and makes fewer people responsible for these norms.

What now? edit

I would like your feedback on this meta-proposal, i.e. the proposal to begin work on formulating and committing to behavioral norms on Wikidata.

I am sure we can rely on help and advice from the Trust and Safety team, and I am counting on thoughts from the WMDE Wikidata team, but obviously, the most important participant in this conversation is you. Asaf Bartov (talk) 17:21, 14 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]