> Comparing judicial systems with ability to use a platform is like comparing apples and oranges. In a democratic society, people have (civil) rights and governments can't take them away easily. In wikis, we don't have such rigorous protection of users. That's why "There is no justice" and "Wikipedia is not a democracy" exist.
foundation:Policy:Human Rights Policy is an official WMF policy. Surely that trumps random essays on english wikipedia?
There is still the question of how it applies here, after all, WMF is not the crown, and while i might argue that CoCC is a "tribunal" it certainly is not a state court. However, we seem to be interpreting the human rights policy quite liberally - there are conversations about how the right to equality, education, and freedom from discrimination implies we need to spend more effort improving the mobile site (don't get me wrong, definitely a worthy goal, but to get there from UNDHR demonstrates how liberally the rights are being interpreted). With that in mind, i struggle to understand how CoC as is could be considered in compliance with article 14, which starts with:
"Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations..."
> Lots of cases are handled without public disclosure, T&S office bans are among them.
And how is that working out for them? I dont think anyone won during fram-gate. Certainly not the victim.
> Our CoC also handles cases of sexual harassment. Do you want us to publicly mention them to the harasser?
well i would first of all say that, maybe we should not use the same procedure for things that are literal crimes as we do for things that boil down to being rude to someone on the internet.
However ultimately yes (to the extent neccesary). It is a super common trolling tactic on the internet to impersonate someone else and do hateful things in their name. I would generally expect that a comittee of this nature check to see if the alleged perpatrator is actually the person who did the thing - which seems like it would require contacting the perpertrator. Now every situation is different, and that might not always apply, sexual harrasment is complicated, there are no easy answers.
the question remains, what percentage of cases actually involve sexual harrasment? Especially outside of in-person events. I took a look the the role account's block log. It seems like in the entirety of the committee's existence, mzmcbride is the only member of the developer community to ever be blocked (most everyone else are random wikipedians,most having enough public context to make it obvious why they were blocked). I might be wrong, but i would assume that sexual harrasment would take place between members of our community, and not from random outsiders. It honestly makes me wonder if there has ever even been a case of sexual harrasment that resulted in on-wiki sanctions. If not, this feels a bit like bringing out the boogey-man. If we are solely talking about things happening in in-person events with sactions extending only to such events, perhaps differing procedures are warranted for in-person events. Regardless, it seems like a small portion of cases, and certainly not the cases that are causing strife.
> WP:ANI's cases doesn't look like fair court either. Finding the balance is not easy.
Agreed.
To look at it from another perspective, one of the founding views for the CoC is that mediawiki should be considered a professional space and we should treat other contributors as if they are co-workers.
Perhaps we should take that metaphor further. A ban is sort of similar to firing someone for cause. Maybe we should treat it similar to how workplaces treat problematic employees. For example requiring that sanctioned people are (paraphrasing from ): told clearly what the reasonable standards are, told that they weren't meeting the standards, Had reasonable time and help to meet the standards, Was warned that they would be banned if they did not improve their behaviour and Still didn’t meet the standards after all of the above.
given that a significant portion of people blocked by the CoC claim they were not informed of the reason for their block, this does not seem to be taking place currently (if it was just one person saying that i would assume they were lying, but it seems a very common refrain).