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What about the false accusation of a threat? Or of bullying? wikinerd and lifeisunfair have each accused Admins of "bullying" or "threatening" because the admins were attempting to enforce project rules. I think that these accusations constitute harassment. Should an RFC be made? Uncle Ed 01:19, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
I am underwhelmed. FuelWagon 04:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
"Wikistalking" will be an easy accusation to make and an almost impossible thing to easily defend yourself against, even if you're innocent. There is no objective, straightforward way to disprove you aren't "stalking" someone just because you edited the same pages as he did. FuelWagon 04:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
Say what? How is this different than "personal attacks"? FuelWagon 04:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
Isn't this already covered by policy? FuelWagon 04:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
Sure, fine. Call that the "No Personal Information" policy, not harrassment. FuelWagon 04:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
This is the main source of my underwhelming response. This is so vague as to be useless to real editors and a dangerous weapon to people looking to game the system. FuelWagon 04:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
Please merge this with Wikipedia:Stalking so that we don't have to repeat the discussion again. To reiterate, stalking is usually used as a synonym for reading through other people's contribution logs, and there is nothing wrong with that. If you don't want people to read your contribs, don't make any. If you don't want people to criticize you, don't make mistakes. R adiant _>|< 07:55, August 22, 2005 (UTC)
I agree with every word above by Radiant and Ed. Except better than merge, let's be bold and delete both proposals;) WAS 4.250 17:38, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
To people considering adding to this: Go nuts; do whatever you feel is appropriate. Just so long as you can point to solid policy concerns or precedents, and
Assume good faith.
Thanks,
Luc "Somethingorother" French
06:20, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
One of the important items I'd like to have here is cites in the precedents section; thus, my naming of KOAP, so that other users can see his behavior. If there exists a better refrence page to explain his ban then his user talk page, please, let me know. The case is, after all, an excelent illustration how harassment can be an aggravating factor, and only used as such.
Thanks,
Luc "Somethingorother" French
03:44, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
So, perhaps I have another example of this. Yesterday I reverted edits by this user to the Case Western Reserve University page and left a vandalism warning on his talk page. Then he came back and made edits like this ( [1]) and this ( http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Tanggula_Mountain_Pass&oldid=21758663) to pages that I had just written about on my user page. He was introducing inaccurate information into those pages. I suspect he was following me to pages I had recently written about editing, and harrassing me in retaliation for his vandalism warning.
What is the procedure I would follow to assert that he is Wikistalking me, according to this proposal? (I realize that this is still in development.) Mamawrites 04:19, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
Every contribution this person made that I looked at [2] was vandalism. Ignore the "stalking" assertion, and deal with the vandalism. WAS 4.250 05:45, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
I am new to this discussion, but does anyone know if the topic of posting sensitive information has been covered? Simply editing the article will not do, as the information exists in the history. Who can delete history entries? I am talking about something that is internal discussion, or perhaps someone who knows way* too much info about a person and has an ulterior motive. Gchriss 04:26, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
I see this project is being edited in different directions. Two quick points about some version that's in play:
"Against the rules" seems like a unnecessarily definite judgement for a project that does not have "rules".
"Stalk puppets" is a term that I've never heard of and that gets no Goggle hits. Is this a neologism? - Willmcw 23:34, September 1, 2005 (UTC)
A thought: In many ways, WikiNature is opposed to any emphasis of contributor egos or personalities. We do not sign our contributions to articles. There is no byline on Wikipedia articles or Wikinews stories. Unlike Everything2, we do not keep score of how many people like a particular editor's contributions. We tend to eschew the development of idiosyncratic writing styles; editors are encouraged to regularize others' writing to fit the Manual of Style.
There are relatively few spaces in which we emphasize individual views and personalities. The one rare positive way we systematically and procedurally single out editors is the adminship system, where we vote for those people whom we trust to have greater technical powers. We generally reject the idea that this means they are more worthy contributors of encyclopedia material -- rather, we take adminship to usually mean that we trust that they are not going to do something stupid or destructive with those powers. Usually, we single people out when there are negative reasons for doing so, such as an RfC or RfAr.
In other words, in many senses the "ideal Wikipedia" would be one wherein everyone agreed to contribute in as egoless a fashion as possible. This is perhaps only a slight exaggeration of what we mean by NPOV. The NPOV policy means that while we are free to focus our attentions on articles and topics that interest us, we agree to set aside our personal preferences or opinions and contribute text that enhances a neutral description of each subject.
The kinds of behavior that we typify as abusive and harassing are almost always ones which focus upon the personalities and persons of editors themselves. The most general example of this is the no personal attacks policy: when we disapprove of a contribution, we're supposed to direct our disapproval at the text, not at the person. Personal attacks are ad hominem -- literally, against the person.
The kind of conduct which we call harassment is nothing but an exaggeration (almost to the point of self-parody) of ad hominem attack. It goes beyond remarking upon another's personality, to the point of attempting to provoke or harm that person themselves. Harassment is the logical end of the conduct which is (so badly!) described as "POV-pushing". It is the logical opposite of WikiNature.
Thus, perhaps we can deter harassment by deëmphasizing ego and personality throughout Wikipedia. We should perhaps refocus some of the administrative actions so that rather than labeling people as problems, they lock down and address problems with articles. We could discourage the formation of "interest groups", such as WikIProjects which focus upon pushing a particular view about sex or inclusionism or whatever. We could spread out administrative powers more, and discourage the present "thin blue line" attitude in which administrators are sometimes given undue assumption of correctness when in conflict with others.
In short, I suspect that anything we can do to promote a more relaxed and less egotistical WikiNature here, will do a great deal to deter harassment. -- FOo 01:04, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
"A atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways." I think we need to be careful in the creation of rules which may inhibit useful techniques in removing spam, POV pushing, and vandalism. In the past when I've been editing or RC patroling and run into a clearly bad edit, I usually check the submitters history and clean up all simmlar instances. There have been multiple times where I've encountered longstanding vandalism where a review of the submitters has shown that someone removed the same vandalism performed on a popular article but didn't bother to check the submitters history and clean up the rest. So contribution checking is something we should encourage. Then we come around to SPAM... if someone adds a external of low quality to an article, it is nearly impossible to tell in that one edit if the user is attempting to advertise via Wikipedia or if they just missed the fact that Wikipedia is not a link directory, only by reviewing their contributions can you find that they've submitted 20 externals to the same site to as many articles, and from that point the only sane course of action is to remove all of them.
So, of course, none of these activities would be against a rule which only forbed wikistalking when the individual edits made as a result of the wikistalking are within the rules... But that would make the wikistalking rule pointless, since we would only need such a rule to make forbidden acts which alone would be acceptable.
The problem here is that what we need is a rule that says "wikistalking is permitted unless it is in bad-faith", since there is no simple pattern of edits which would be acceptable alone but are not acceptable togeather. I think that because of this there is no way to create a working anti-stalking rule, because there is no wait to codify the determination of good vs bad faith. As a result the use of such rule will always require good judgement and consideration on the part of Wikipedia editors. ... Which is what we already have without a special rule. The users of Wikipedia always reserve the right to impose sanctions on anyone who we determine as acted against the interest of the project, rules broken or not.
If there is a percieved need for some kind of anti-stalking rule, then perhaps what is really needed is some cleanup and fleshing out of material in Wikipedia:Harassment so that there a nice soundbite for people to wikilink to when they are chastising another user for wikistalking. -- Gmaxwell 19:11, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
-- Cool Cat Talk 15:38, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
(This was originally posted to the main page; I have moved it here, since it appears to have nothing to do with the proposed policy per se.
Thanks,
Luc "Somethingorother" French
21:56, 16 September 2005 (UTC))
From [3] "# 16:15, 16 September 2005 (hist) (diff) Pornography in Japan (-verify tag) (top)
Each edit is removing a verify (reference) flag I placed there. This follows his spamming my talk page (I spammed him back) after he deleted a contribution I made that removed part of a contribution by FeloniousMonk to Fine-tuned universe. FeloniousMonk and I have had differences. (See the page where people voted to make FeloniousMonk an admin.) WAS 4.250 21:09, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
Wrong. The issue the flag deals with is VERIFY-ABLILITY not accuracy. Adding the flag causes two things to happen:
I believe that if this policy goes into effect, the #1 most common invocation of this policy will be by editors who feel the urgent need to insert POV edits into political articles. Let's call them bad editors. These editors will insert POV in such an inappropriate way that other editors — let's call them good editors — will feel compelled to check the edit history to see if similar damage has been done to other political articles. Then, as soon as a good editor removes POV edits from more than one article by the bad editor, the bad editor will cry out "I am being stalked by a liberal/ conservative/ green/ radical/ reactionary editor who is persecuting me for my political beliefs" and run to the court to plea for relief under "Harassment".
This harassment policy should state explicitly that the above corrective conduct is OK and is not harassment. It's reasonable to assume you're going to be watched like a hawk (as distasteful as it is to be corrected by people with other political views than you) if you make bad POV edits.
Anyway, this can be made explicit and not implicit by inserting "or violations of Wikipedia policy" in the last line of the wikistalking definition, viz:
I think this will cut down on 'harassment' complaints by 50%.
That said, I'm not happy with the fact that "disruption" isn't defined here, since it's highlighted as the important part of the policy against wikistalking. Can we have a definition? Tempshill 23:07, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
A recent Arbitration Committee decision adopted as a principle a proposal on stalking. I have added it to Assume Good Faith, as the formulation relates to that guideline, with a view to adopting it as good practice. Future arbitration cases are likely to revisit this principle. Please review and comment, and modify if required. -- Tony Sidaway Talk 13:11, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
Gave partial execution to the points above (while someone had already erased the "Stalk" connections from WP:AGF), please check whether I did a good job! -- Francis Schonken 12:08, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
Is it just me, or is this page missing any suggestions on what to do in case of harrassment? -- InShaneee 00:49, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
I strongly feel harrasment should be considered as a type of personal attack given one pursuing another is as personal as an attack can get :/ -- Cool Cat Talk| @ 13:22, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
I agree with Lubaf. It's certainly possible to harass without engaging in personal attacks. Any action taken for the purpose of making it unpleasant for someone to contribute could be harassment. For instance, following someone around and reverting perfectly good contributions would likely be harassment as well as an abuse of reverting. I don't want to enumerate a whole bunch of types of harassment because I don't want to teach abusers how to stick beans up their noses. But if you think about it there are lots of ways of bugging the hell out of someone besides calling them a jerk-off Nazi buttface. -- FOo 02:52, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
The case of FuelWagon should be added to the list of precedents involving harassment. FuelWagon's pattern of criticism of SlimVirgin for several months after a series of edit wars resulted in a six-month ban. While any one of FuelWagon's criticisms of SlimVirgin might not have been considered a personal attack, the overall pattern was one of harassment. Robert McClenon 19:18, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
What's not to say that for fear of being accused of stalking, people are effectively scared away from discussion pages where "opponents" are "hanging out" (whose subjects not coincidentally often happens to be part of that person's interests)? Either this policy is redundant in light of other policies and therefore not necessary or opens up a new avenue of Kafkaesque situations (dare I say abuse?) where whoever happens to be the most respected at the moment "wins". The definition of "wiki-stalking" in particular takes the cake in this regard:
So now we're down to looking in somebody's head to determine whether somebody is "intending of causing annoyance or distress to another contributor"? Unless it's even worse and we simply go by the "feelings" of the "plaintiff"! I already accepted that Wikipedia can be a harsh place at some times (see in that regard Wikipedia:Staying cool when the editing gets hot) and I welcome any proposal that can make this place have a more friendly atmosphere, but I'm not interested in submitting to a tyranny of crybabies at the expense of NPOV considerations, because that's what a person whose only argument is "wiki-stalking", is, a crybaby.
And I don't recall this ever being put up to a consensus vote. It seems more that it's simply " case law" as the result of Arbitration Committee rulings. -- Dissident ( Talk) 01:52, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Before you change the definition of Harassment, consider the following:
I can explain the reasoning behind each of these, if somebody cares to ask. Thanks, Luc "Somethingorother" French 02:32, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
And how do you establish mens rea from behind the computer? -- Dissident ( Talk) 04:15, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Lubaf restored the reference to intentions, saying he had explained on talk, but there is no explanation here, so I have deleted it again. SlimVirgin (talk) 03:59, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
I believe this issue is already well addressed by the page, but there does appear to be some disagreement here. See Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Blocked_User:Mccready_for_Wikistalking for discussion of whether or not this edit should be considered stalking. Friday (talk) 17:07, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
I've just stumbled on this sad little tale again. No one ever provided evidence of the claim that I in any way harassed anyone. This was simply and edit war with Slim Virgin refusing to discuss her edits then being backed up by the block from her friend. QED. Mccready 07:31, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
For instance, if I detect what appears to be a POV vandal who is going around editing any article which refers to public figure x to call that public figure a name or misrepresent public figure x's views, is it wikistalking for me to use that vandal's contribs page to quickly find and revert all these vandalisms (as long as I do so within the limits of 3RR)? Kasreyn 18:27, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
A user or group of users has repeatedly pasted the contents of my userpage to various articles. I consider this a personal attack since it targets me directly and would seem to "us[e] [my] affiliations [viz Mexican American ethnicity] as a means of dismissing or discrediting [my] views", but the action described does not seem to fit any of the categories of personal attacks, and so seemed to be better classified as harassment. The edits in question are the following: [4] by 64.12.116.70, [5] by 64.12.116.6, [6] by 64.12.117.11. There may be more that I haven't discovered.
Similar vandalism was made to my userpage by 205.188.116.195.
So the question is, does this qualify as harassment? If so, where do I report it? And what can be done about it? Most of the vandals are AOL IPs. Is there positively no way to block them for more than 15 minutes? This is causing me some wiki-stress, and any help would be greatly appreciated.-- Rockero 18:09, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
Hi, I'm an user with a stalker bothering me. The user has:
He has at least touched (most time uncalled for) every single article I create while I refuse to follow him and do the same to him. I want him out of wikipedia. Where should I go, What should I do. Is there a format to present the evidence in a way to show there is no doubt he is stalking me in the same fashion of users previously banned for the same reason? -- T-man, the wise 04:55, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
Here you have a brief example, out of 11 contribs I made last 20 hours, he followed me to 9. He broke the 3 reverts rule twice, and it's not the first. Everyday is like that to me.
he followed me here, a page where we both have never been before yesterday
-- T-man, the wise 02:47, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
Question, it says Harassment is defined as a pattern of disruptive behavior that appears to a reasonable and objective observer to have the purpose of causing negative emotions in a targeted person or persons
Well, what if I have no emotional response to harassment like behaviour but it still distracts me? Say I am a Vulcan and do not feel emotions, yet the behavior is still disruptive to me, does it still meet the definition of harassment? Not trying to disprupt things to make a point, just wondering. HighInBC 17:35, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
As part of an overall effort to simplify and streamline policy, I've boldly replaced the policy tag with a guideline tag. There are several reasons.
The policy tag was added less than a year ago without a clear consensus.
This page is disjointed and is more of an essay than a statement of policy. Much of the reason it is disjointed is that there isn't any real consistent policy on harassment. The AC cases that are identified in the page were the sort of cases that produce unclear precedent because there were so many problems being addressed at once. The most serious problems of harassment we have had are not mentioned here; they have involved sexual innuendo, threats of physical violence, and deliberate disclosure of personal information. That this sort of behavior is inappropriate at Wikipedia is so clear that no policy is necessary.
I note that several attempts to generate consenus for a "wikistalking" policy have failed to gain much support.
The Uninvited Co., Inc. 17:04, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
After re-reading the page, I also support your action. Thanks for doing this. JesseW, the juggling janitor 02:34, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
When I looked at a user's contributions page, I saw several articles (about Italian models, if you want to know) that had a couple of minor formatting and capitalisation errors, so I went to those articles and fixed them. Would that be considered Wikistalking, though not harmful? -- Gray Porpoise 19:17, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
I have had questions about the identity of a particular user and whether or not he is a person about whom a Wikipedia article is written. When I asked this question, he told me I had to remove it as it represented a form of harassment. I don't think that the policy states that it is a form of harassment to ask the question whether a particular user is actually the subject of an article, especially if that user is editting that article (and then there is question of violation of WP:AUTO). Please see the related discussion on my talkpage and give me some guidance. -- ScienceApologist 19:48, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
A few people have been harassing me after I made a change to Treaty of Nöteborg. First some guy shows up claiming I'm some other user and posting things on my page. Then another guy shows up threatening me with blockage and stalking me half way across Wikipedia (undoing something that doesn't make any sense). I then took to see who this person and undid one of his edits (something that didn't make any sense to me). Then he comes back calling me names, claiming I should be blocked for stalking him (HE WAS THE ONE STALKING ME!). I left a message on this guys page telling him not to stalk me, but he removed the message saying "plonk".
Why am I being harassed and how come no one is doing something about it?
Atabata 12:01, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Copied from WP:COI If this has already been covered, please direct me to the relevant conversation, but: doesn't this policy conflict a bit with user's right to privacy? In other words, it is it possible to suggest to someone that they are violating this policy without yourself violating the policy, in particluar "Posting another person's personal information (legal name, home or workplace address, telephone number, email address, or other contact information, regardless of whether or not the information is actually correct) is harassment, unless that editor voluntarily provides or links to such information himself or herself." IronDuke 20:50, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
This is similar to the situation above. We have an articles on a company and its owner/CEO. Over time there have been several registered users and IPs who have identified themselves as the owner or officers of the company. Overall, they appear to be just one editor. One account was banned for legal threats but several of them posted threatening or intimidating language. The editor engaged in various edits which represented conflicts of interest, such as promoting the company in other articles, removing information from the articles of competitors, and trying to settle scores. In addition to violating WP:COI and WP:NLT, the editor has repeatedly violated other policies and guidelines, such as WP:POINT, WP:COPYVIO, etc.
A new account claims to have no relation to the company or its owner. However his editing patterns, spelling mistakes, interests, etc, clearly show it to be the same editor as before. Outside information, such as the content of a MySpace account, further supports the theory that the new editor is the owner of the company. Proving the connection to the owner serves to prove that the editor has a conflict of interest and that he is the same editor as previous usernames. So, to recap, is it legitimate to reveal a user's probable real name in interest of enforcing wikipedia rules? - Will Beback · † · 00:03, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
Since Wikipedia has pages on many real life people, places, and even businesses, what is it considered when people bring real life conflicts and start placing them onto Wikipedia? For example: an argument between two people, at least one of whom has a Wikipedia article about them, or also, a business that has an article and an employee/ex-employee that is angry at the business.
I have seen a specific instance of the latter where an employee from a company has gone onto the Wikipedia article of the company and posted various defamatory statements about real people that work at the company. Is this vandalism, harassment, or perhaps something else?
This brings to mind a second problem. What happens when sensitive information is posted onto a Wikipedia article? Due to the way the Wiki system works, any content that is posted is technically there forever. It may not be on the official page, but it will exist in the pages history indefinity as far as I know. What if, say, someone at KFC decided to post the complete KFC chicken seasoning recipe, or maybe every last piece of personal data they could find about the CEO? I suppose information of that nature would not be verifiable, but it should probably be removed somehow from the history. Sahuagin 01:21, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
I would like to report a case of harassment by User:Artaxiad. He has been following my edits, to identify myself with certain other physical identity without any proofs at hand. My creation and editing of this page [9] of a poet who lived in early 20th century, served as a faulty ground for User:Artaxiad to claim my identity based on false name associations and some information he found on Internet about a certain individual in California. His first case of intimidation was here [10]. User:Artaxiad further pursued harassment, trying to associate again User:Atabek with someone else and use an article on Internet as a basis for claiming that someone else as friend of another Wikipedia contributor User:AdilBaguirov right here [11]. I will not add extra evidence on User:Artaxiad following my edits to pursue revert warring, all of this evidence is well summarized at [12], [13], [14]. I am just wondering when negligence of disruptive behavior of this user is going to end. While being an experienced user, he walks away free with confirmed sockpuppets [15], gets involved in heavy revert warring, which is presented in ArbCom case [16], clear attempt to remove all of the images related to a certain country admitted here [17], accusing others of "lying" [18], and now clear case of harassment and stalking. How long this is going to go on? Atabek 11:55, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
The most common shortcut reference to this page seems to be WP:STALK. I see that a couple people (including myself) have tried adding it to the top of the page, but someone else keeps removing it saying it's unneeded. It's so commonly-used though, I think it's worth including. Anyone else have an opinion? -- El on ka 20:25, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
The following text was deleted:
It was unimaginable to me, inserting this note, that this familiar point could be controversial, yet an editor suppressed this text— under the edit summary of making a "suggestion." Whether or not a few second-rate editors speciously accuse one another of "vandalism' in edit wars, this is not a sensible motivation for forbidding a guideline that concerns pursuing authentic vandals. On rare occasions I have been accused by vandals of "stalking" them. Surely this distinction needs to be made clear somewhere at Wikipedia, and this is the natural page. -- Wetman 14:33, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
I have edited the section about posting editors' personal details, following discussion here and here. It needs to be very clear that posting addresses of websites that publish or speculate on editors' real names is forbidden per Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/MONGO#Outing_sites_as_attack_sites (and per common sense). ElinorD (talk) 08:30, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Lately I've noticed something of an increase in legal threats. To make sure the implications of such threats are clear I changed the language "may be blocked" to the stronger "will typically be blocked" that appears in WP:NLT. It's a word-for-word copy from WP:NLT so I assume it's uncontroversial, but am mentioning it here in case anyone objects. Raymond Arritt 12:48, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Requesting comments on a proposal for a guideline on Wikipedia:Personal security practices that I've been working on, mainly out of the discussion on this thread at Wikipedia_talk:No_personal_attacks#Part_two. Any comments or concerns would be appreciated. Thanks,— ACADEMY LEADER FOCUS! 00:34, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
In light of the very sad situation regarding User:H, there needs to be more teeth not only in this policy, but WP:NPA#Off-wiki personal attacks to ensure there isn't a next time for this outrage. It's simple common sense--we have every expectation to be safe editing here. Blueboy 96 13:07, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
The term "wiki-stalking" has been coined to describe following a contributor around the wiki, editing the same articles as the target, with the intent of causing annoyance or distress to another contributor.
This does not include checking up on an editor to fix errors or violations of Wikipedia policy, nor does it mean reading a user's contribution log; those logs are public for good reason. Using the edit history of users to correct related problems on multiple articles is part of the recommended practices both for Recent changes patrol (RCP) and WikiProject Spam. The important part is the disruption - disruption is considered harmful. Wikistalking is the act of following another user around in order to harass them.
An editor should not be constantly followed by a single editor "to fix errors or violations of Wikipedia policy". If someone is repetitively violating wikipedia policies, the person should be either blocked (to prevent further disruption), or the issue should be brought to community attention (if it isn't a clearcut case). If the person is really being disruptive, community would agree with it. Following an allegedly disruptive user for months is particularly unhelpful.
People stalking had been using "violations of Wikipedia policy" as a justification of causing distress by interpreting means to stalk from a policies/guidelines.
-- Cat chi? 08:47, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I think there needs to be more clarity in the definition of Wikistalking. People are being indef-banned based primarily on accusations of stalking, and it seems to me that there is significant gray area as to what it is and what it isn't. The current definition makes it clear that following another user's contribs "to fix errors or violations of WP policy" is okay, while doing it "with the intent of causing annoyance or distress to another contributor" is is stalking. But intent is hard to prove, especially when the actions involved are reverting edits and disputing on talk pages, rather than explicit PAs. Hypothetically, what if I come to the conclusion that another editor holds certain views that I believe erroneous, and I think it would be good for WP if I look for other places where that editor has advanced those views so that I can oppose them? Is this stalking? Does particular misbehavior need to be demonstrated, or is it always wrong to revert an edit or participate in a discussion that you found through someone's contribs page? I can see an argument for either side, and it seems to me that some people are confused as to just what is acceptable. Perhaps such situations need to be addressed specifically in the policy. -- BlueMoonlet 06:14, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
As I mentioned before, the WP:STALK policy is rather vague around the middle ground between researching a user's contribs to judge their RfA or to hunt down a vandal (obviously okay) and following them around to make personal attacks (obviously not okay). What I'm trying to address are accusations of this form (exaggerated somewhat to make the point): "This guy has opposed me on other topics, and he never edited on this new topic until I did. That's stalking and he should be banned!" The following is how I would write the policy if it were up to me, but what is really important to me is that the vague area be addressed in some form.
Current version:
Wikistalking refers to the act of following an editor to another article to continue disruption.
The term "wiki-stalking" has been coined to describe following a contributor around the wiki, editing the same articles as the target, with the intent of causing annoyance or distress to another contributor.
This does not include checking up on an editor to fix errors or violations of Wikipedia policy, nor does it mean reading a user's contribution log; those logs are public for good reason. Using the edit history of users to correct related problems on multiple articles is part of the recommended practices both for Recent changes patrol (RCP) and WikiProject Spam. The important part is the disruption - disruption is considered harmful. Wikistalking is the act of following another user around in order to harass them.
Proposed version:
Wikistalking refers to the act of following an editor to another article to continue disruption.
The term "wiki-stalking" has been coined to describe following a contributor around the wiki, editing the same articles as the target, with the intent of causing annoyance or distress to another contributor.
Reading another user's contribution log is not in itself harassment; those logs are public for good reason. In particular, proper use of a user's edit history includes (but is not limited to) fixing errors or violations of Wikipedia policy, or correcting related problems on multiple articles (in fact, such practices are recommended both for Recent changes patrol (RCP) and WikiProject Spam). The important part is the disruption — disruption is considered harmful. If "following another user around" is accompanied by tendentiousness, personal attacks, or other disruptive behavior, it may become a very serious matter.
Comments? -- BlueMoonlet ( t/ c) 14:48, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
Would "outing people without their consent" be defined as harassment? Say Hillary Clinton comes on to Wikipedia and edits as User:HillaryClinton. She goes on all the consumer rights pages and makes edits that she feels are NPOV. She edits articles related to the Senate and health care, et. al. She adds quotes and links to her own websites and published work. She makes some edits to the Rudolph Giuliani articles. Then she decides she wants to be known as User:HRCL because people keep bringing up she is Hillary Clinton and she doesn't like that. She'd prefer to edit without that bugaboo hanging over her. Then Rudolph Giuliani catches on and mentions on his website that Hillary Clinton is editing his articles as User:HRCL. When we have public figures, who espouse their views publicly in all sorts of venues, come on to Wikipedia, is it "outing them"? Are there any considerations for COI and POV to not mention that User:HRCL is Hillary Clinton? The ultimate question is: is RudolphGiuliani.com "outing a person without their consent" as defined in the guidelines as they are being drawn? If a person operates publicly saying the same things they say on Wikipedia, is it "outing" them? This question needs to be taken into consideration, since our influence has increased to a point where influential people edit us. --David Shankbone 18:12, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
The ultimate fate of Durova an myself are trivial questions. The larger concern is how will Wikipedia handle cyberstalking and harassment. We have one group of editors who use this site for trolling. Another group has formed to hunt the trolls. Unfortunately, this leads to vigilante style justice, with mistakes like the one that happened with Durova and !!. Troll hunting also creates a caustic, non-collegial environment.
The most direct solution for this problem is to route significant cyberstalking and harassment problems to the Foundation Office where they can be investigated and dealt with by volunteers under strict supervision of competent legal staff.
The advantages of this solution include:
That's my proposal. Hopefully we can all learn something from this dispute and make Wikipedia a better place. Let's not use Durova as a scapegoat for a problem that is much larger than her own activities. - - Jehochman Talk 04:40, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
I propose renaming "Wikistalking" to "Wikitrailing". Stalking in real life is a very big deal and we ought not to cheapen actual instances of harassment and stalking by using a powerful term too loosely. Durova Charge! 01:54, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
There's been an interesting discussion over at Conflict of Interest about when (or whether) it's appropriate to reveal an editor's employment when it provides evidence of Conflict of Interest. The issue arose because of a perceived conflict between the Harrassment and Conflict of Interest guidelines. I'm of the opinion that posting employment information to demonstrate Conflict of Interest does not constitute what is meant by harrassment, and therefore a limited exception should be provided in this article.
I suggest adding the following to the section on posting of personal information:
Please add your comments. -- SteveMcCluskey ( talk) 15:14, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
I just edited my own text. -- SteveMcCluskey ( talk) 15:24, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Random832 has added the following bolded sentence to this section, which significantly changes the guideline, so I've moved it here for discussion:
Posting another person's personal information (legal name, date of birth, social security number, home or workplace address, telephone number, email address, or other contact information, regardless of whether or not the information is actually correct) is harassment, unless that editor voluntarily provides or links to such information himself or herself. This is because it places the other person at unjustified and uninvited risk of harm in "the real world" or other media. This applies whether or not the person whose personal information is being revealed is a Wikipedia editor. It also applies in the case of editors who have requested a change in username, but whose old signatures can still be found in archives. This does not apply to mere identification of who is suspected of having a conflict of interest in the course of the normal operation of the conflict of interest noticeboard.
SlimVirgin (talk) (contribs) 22:05, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
It is typical at Wikipedia to assert that policy is "what we do" or in some cases (BLP) "what we agree we should do" ("best practice"). What we do is to reveal real life identities when a COI violator is an outsider; but to protect real life identities when a COI violator is an insider. Deal privately with those who are our friends but deal publicly with strangers. There is some degree of sense to it. Also we are moving in the direction of offering to strangers the option of privately handling COI investigations. It is a well known conundrum of our governance. WAS 4.250 ( talk) 06:26, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
Kendrick7 removed the section called Private correspondence. I believe it was informative, and suggest it be restored. Rejected proposals tell us something, and so does the Arbcom decision that was mentioned. If this paragraph isn't useful then Wikipedia:Perennial proposals isn't either. EdJohnston ( talk) 01:33, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
This is clearly a policy, not a guideline: there are no situations where true harassment is warranted. Shoemaker's Holiday ( talk)
So let it be written, so let it be done. (You guys figure out if it was the right thing to do. ;-) ) -- Kim Bruning ( talk) 23:29, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Thoughtcrime? I looked at the page and it says nothing about Wikiharassment. (a protologism I know)
Lu na ke et 23:56, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
There are several problems with this section:
As such, this section needs rewritten and renamed. I'd suggest that we either use soft redirects as per WP:VANITY to handle the renaming, or, as we'll be rewriting the policy anyway, set up a page at Wikipedia:Wikistalking labelled as a historic policy, and giving the reasons for the change in name, and link to the new policy. Shoemaker's Holiday ( talk) 17:31, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
I suggest the recommendation concerning OTRS be removed - ie or to contact the Arbitration Committee or OTRS if needed.. It appears not to be true. -- Matilda talk 01:45, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
I think the nutshell should be slightly amended to account for the distinction of necessary, purpose- and useful contacts on the one hand from unuseful contacts on the other. A given message may annoy the addressee, but it may nevertheless be justified by its content.
All input appreciated. user: Everyme 15:12, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
In the section on outing, we need to explain how a users can talk about conflict of interest editing without violating this policy. For example, there may be circumstantial evidence that an editor is writing about themselves and linking to their own work for the purpose of promotion. How is a user supposed to deal with that potentially serious damage to Wikipedia without outing? Jehochman Talk 13:20, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
While WP:OUTING addresses the serious issue of stalking, as currently written, it renders WP:COI and aspects of WP:NOR (specifically WP:COS) unenforceable. Any good-faith attempt to identify a user as having a COI (e.g., WP:COI/N#COI with Rjm7730) usually necessitates some degree of real-life identification. Typically, the user name is a give-away, but otherwise only an intentional or inadvertent admission by a registered or anonymous user is usable evidence – and the problems are mostly with editors who do not want to have their COI edits exposed as such or are unfamiliar with WP:COI in the first place. I feel that the community needs to discuss whether WP:Outing trumps WP:COI and WP:COS (which should then be degraded or eliminated [to include the WP:COI/N noticeboard]) or else needs to accommodate legitimate, good-faith enforcement of these policies and guidelines (thereby perhaps making WP:Outing more in line with WP:STALK, the problem which originated). While the issues have been raised here, there has been no resolution, and that lack of resolution is beginning to hamper the work of enforcing WP:COI. Askari Mark (Talk) 15:34, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Semitransgenic, ArbCom has made rulings specifically stating that outing another editor onsite is unacceptable unless the editor has disclosed his or her identity onsite voluntarily, no matter how well know this identity is elsewhere in the Web. Now that doesn't stop you from presenting the relevant evidence to administrators or to ArbCom if there's a need; it's a matter of compliance with the Foundation privacy policy. You can view this as a tradeoff. So yes, it's possible to exploit the privacy policy in order to circumvent the COI guideline, but people who do that assume a risk for themselves and their employers. Sometimes the press catches onto that stuff and when that happens it does not look good at all. Durova Charge! 23:38, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
I dislike the idea of calling out a particular individual to this extent on a policy page, unless it's coupled with a link to the relevant arbitration case that followed. Your posts are likely to give passers-by an impression that this individual's conduct has not been scrutinized. It has, and he is currently a named party in a second arbitration case. If you have substantial information to bring to bear that the arbitration committee has not already considered, please raise the matter there. Nothing good can come of further steps down the present path: either he behaves appropriately, in which case this is unfair to him; or he behaves inappropriately, in which case the arbitrators ought to receive whatever you have to say directly. In general the site runs better when people handle such things in a direct way. Best wishes, Durova Charge! 01:01, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
Thank you for your responses, but so far I’ve seen little discussion about the conflict between the “current editions” of WP:OUTING and WP:COI. Please keep in mind that WP:COI was established before such serious stalking problems arose that the formulation of WP:OUTING was found necessary. The establishment of WP:OUTING (as it currently exists) quite essentially changes Wikipedia from an environment in which privacy of identity was not a “given”. If we are to maintain WP:OUTING in its present formulation, then something has to give with regard to WP:COI (and WP:COS) – or vice versa.
Since identifying someone as having a COI is tantamount to “outing” them, if WP:OUTING is to be maintained and enforced as it currently stands, without any nuance of qualification or exception, then there is no point in having COI/N at all – for the majority of COI problems are not with conflicted editors who have revealed their COI and are working as requested by the guideline; furthermore, the archives must be reviewed and any past outings oversighted. In fact, retaining COI/N for the sake of problems with “known unknowns” begs for problems with well-meaning editors who don’t re-read a policy or guideline every time they rely on it to see what has changed since they first read it months or weeks ago. Inadvertent outings are inevitable, so COI/N would require more watching by admins.
Gordonofcartoon raises a further important point not defined in WP:HARASS: Just what constitutes “outing” (an unfortunate choice of words given the term’s normative cultural meaning which is unrelated to what’s going on here). Ignoring the trivial cases, what happens when someone makes the obvious connection that User:FOO may have a COI with his peacocking in the article on Dr. Foo? Are logical deductions from an obvious user name relationship “outing”? If so, why? How is it any different than when a user name is the editor’s real-life name? Furthermore, how does one “legally” approach a user suspected of having a COI when the very suggestion essentially constitutes an outing? If WP:OUTING is to be a no-exceptions policy (as it is currently), then WP:COI and WP:OUTING both need to be revised with guidance on how to do what they encourage editors without accidentally crossing the line. Askari Mark (Talk) 21:15, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
Someone reverted what I thought was a quite reasonable change to “Posting of personal information” (WP:OUTING)
The section currently says “Posting another person's personal information … is harassment, unless that editor voluntarily posts this information, or links to this information, on Wikipedia themselves”
The “unless” clause creates quite a loophole legitimising actions that should be considered blatant outing, on the basis that information posted was derived from editor posts. Editors who wish to be anonymous, even moderately so, should be allowed to participate under their chosen handles without having to worry that every edit will be scoured for information for a protected outing. Additionally, a user who once posted personal information, should be allowed to return to anonymity, and this policy should encourage all editors to protect the anonymity of all other users in cases such as these.
The appropriate place to collect information about yourself is on your userpage (or a user subpage). The first sentence of this section should reflect this. Posting personal information about another user should only be allowed if that user currently discloses the information in their userspace, where they control it. There’ll surely be ambiguous cases, but the posting of information collected from obscure locations, edit histories, third party userspace, etc, without good reason, should definitely be consider WP:OUTING, and should be discouraged as a matter of policy. The important issue here, as I see it, is WP:Editors matter, and the need for wikipedia contributors to feel safe within our community. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 00:41, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
This is an unsettled point that's worth discussing. Some of the site's most persistent and damaging long term vandals have been thwarted because of early self-disclosures. I don't think it's necessary to hamstring the conflict of interest noticeboard and other necessary site maintenance functions in order to supply a reasonable leeway for editors who AGF with ScienceApologist. Three principles can cover the situations:
So to take an actual example, a certain editor had been indefinitely blocked and a later account was accused of being his sockpuppet. On his original account he had disclosed his own name early in his editing career. He was a writer in real life and had often edited Wikipedia to add citations to offsite material he had written. For COI, POV, and other problems he earned an indefinite block. Several months afterward a new account appeared, which often cited articles by the same author and claimed to be a fan of his. The original account had been dormant for too long to checkuser. Yet Wikipedians who checked the new account's edits noticed that the new account had attributed the original author by name at an Wikipedia article, and used a citation to a source article that lacked any byline. Only the the original editor or someone who knew him personally could have known that he was author of that source. Based upon that, the second account was linked to the original account and the editor got community banned. (I know who this fellow's name is, but as you can see I'm not using it because because it isn't absolutely necessary in this post). Later actions and checkusers confirmed that this conclusion had been correct. Durova Charge! 01:02, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
I understand the points made, but there is still plenty of room for improvement in the text of WP:OUTING. At the moment, the language is very harsh about a very narrowly defined meaning of outing. I believe that what Elonka did was wrong (debatably), that many would consider “outing” to be the applicable term, but that the action does not meet the more restrictive definition accepted by others, and the action was not at the level to warrant something like an “immediate block”.
The unstated but partially accepted definition of “outing” seems to be “the original publication of another’s personally identifying information”.
A softer definition would be “the repetition, or drawing attention to, another’s personally identifying information, whether that information was released by another party, accidentally by the subject, or previously but now with regret by the subject.
I think that WP:OUTING should state that the softer version of outing should be avoided. An exception can be made for good faith contributions to a WP:COI debate. However, when such cases are closed, the identifying information should be removed.
The intention is to support the anonymity of users who wish to be anonymous, including where a past disclosure was accidental or is later regretted. This intention should be supported by advice in this policy, not by threat of punishment over small infringements, and should not be taken to limit focused discussion with respect to WP:COI cases. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 02:38, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
While it's good courtesy to refrain from repeating information about somebody that they don't wish to publicize and might consider to be harassing in nature (or to aid stalkers/harassers), unless there's a really good reason that overrides this, it's probably a bad idea to have a hard and fast policy that strictly prohibits all such mentions; the overextension of this concept has caused much mischief in the past. People have sometimes insisted on draconian efforts to shut the barn door after the horse has left, to suppress "personal information" that's already appeared on Slashdot or The Register. The "BADSITES wars" of last year were about some people declaring all links to certain critics' sites to be inherently wrong because those sites might just possibly "out" somebody. *Dan T.* ( talk) 00:05, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
It's high time we phased out 'wikistalking' from site jargon: the word confuses minor onsite irritation with an actual real world felony. I've been bold; we got WP:VANITY out of our jargon and that was much less a problem than this. Durova Charge! 02:15, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
I've just used "wikistalking" in a proposed arbitration decision and no one seems to have minded.... Newyorkbrad ( talk) 15:40, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
Okay, I was wondering at the outset how much to post onsite. It doesn't surprise me that someone came along to pooh-pooh the change; what does surprise is to see it coming from Newyorkbrad (who is usually adept at taking a hint and withholding judgment until the appropriate time). I've just sent him an e-mail and any other trusted Wikipedian is welcome to write me and find out what other reasons I have. Yeah, they're strong reasons. And yeah, they're the sort of thing best left offsite (hint: an FBI case I opened this year has something to do with it). Brad, consider yourself heartily trout slapped.Wikipedians who wonder where this move for a change is coming from are encouraged to contact me.
Durova
Charge!
18:13, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
There might be other synonyms that are better than " hound", but this is certainly better than "stalk". Support this change. Cirt ( talk) 20:45, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
Harassment of editors on-wiki, such as by following them around and tampering with their edits for the purpose of annoying them, can be a significant issue. Harassment of editors in real life, such as by threats of violence, defamatory statements to employers, unwelcome sexual approaches, and the like, is obviously a very grave and substantially more serious problem. Certainly nothing that I said above was meant to suggest or imply in any way that the seriousness of the former is on the same level as that of the latter, nor have I ever suggested or meant to suggest any such thing. Newyorkbrad ( talk) 00:06, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
To return to the matter of language, "pest" is what I used to call my sister when she did this kind of thing, not sure if this is any more pleasing than "hound" although - Durova's crucial point aside - we are talking about something unpleasant. We may need to use a neologism ... I am sure if it is clearly defined, after a few months people will get the idea of what it means ... Slrubenstein | Talk 02:08, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
Not sure I disagree with the premise here, but I'm a bit concerned about "hound" here - in my experience, it can be used as a slang term with sexual connotations. Shell babelfish 05:58, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
I support this change of wording. More respectful, more accurate in most cases I would hope, less likely to escalate disputes; if it's criminal stalking we can call the police. Sticky Parkin 01:01, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
It's so funny, that we don't stalk anymore! I'm of mixed feelings about this change. On the one hand, I've long opposed the tendency of people here to form opposing cliques and camps, and accuse those in the "enemy camp" of the vilest crimes, using all sorts of inflammatory language of which "stalking" is just one of the terms. On the other hand, I've never liked " PC" renaming of long-established terminology just because somebody, somewhere, might be offended by it. I recall that now-banned user Jon Awbrey once made a big fuss about how Wikilawyering absolutely had to be changed to "Wikicaviling" because the term was defamatory to lawyers... that was swiftly reversed and was the last straw that got him banned, as I recall. *Dan T.* ( talk) 12:36, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
...instead of being a lame duck. Before we begin, yes, I know, "zomg Sceptre's trying to start up drama". And yes, I know I got blocked for "harassment". Now we've got over that, I want to say: I've got serious problems about this policy. It was well-intentioned to begin with. But these days, it makes no distinction between Amorrow's behaviour (criminal harassment) and editing the same page as someone who doesn't like you (not harassment). Often people are blocked for the latter but not the former. So I propose that this policy be improved by:
Thoughts? Sceptre ( talk) 17:13, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
Has there been any discussion about adding one's IP address to the list of personal information prohibited by WP:OUTING. In many cases, an IP address could help geo-locate a user, narrow a user down to a particular school or business, and, when compared to other edits, could indeed be identifiable information. EU regulators have gone so far as to state outright that an IP should be treated personal information. I suggest we consider adding it to WP:OUTING. (My asking this was prompted by this ANI thread, but I'm not looking for any specific or immediate remedy in that case). -- ZimZalaBim talk 14:51, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
This is an important section, and I suggest adding to it one's job, although I'm not sure of the best wording. It currently says "workplace address", but in my view that is not enough. If a Wikipedia editor is outed as, for the sake of argument, Google's Chief Engineer for World Domination, then it doesn't really matter if the name, ID number, car license plate, email address, etc. is given. Arguably, not even a specific job title but a general job role is also identifying information. If an editor is outed as a nurse, it doesn't matter so much, but if she is outed as a pediatric nurse at hospital XYZ, then it becomes quasi-personally identifying. Thoughts? BrainyBabe ( talk) 16:25, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
So I used to have my name on my user page, and that was fine by me. Then another editor decided to use my name in edit comments, as a way of deriding me. I would like to prevent this in the future, and to that end, have de-published the mention of my name on my user page. I am not overly concerned with trying to keep my wikipedia activities unconnected to my real-life identity, but I would like to not have my name be a part of other editor's commentary. so WP:OUTING performs a useful function in that regard, even for people like me who are not overly concerned about secrecy of their wikipedia/real-name connection. So my question is, is my removal of my name from my own user page sufficient to achieve the result I want, which is simply for it to become once again prohibited for other users to make use of my real-world name in their comments. Tb ( talk) 10:53, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
Actually, I think this is an important point that doesn't seem to be covered in article. I use my real name and used to have link to my page but people would search around and find some opinion of mine and use it out of context (or claim I was "self-promoting"), so I took off my link. Now editors just google me, find some opinion, (usually take it out of context) and use it against me as proof of whatever. I've been calling this WP:Harassment but when looked at this article page now didn't see it as clearly described as outing as I thought it was. So I think both User:TB and I have issues here that need to be addressed. Thanks CarolMooreDC ( talk) 14:25, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
As this is a templated reason for blocking, I copied part of the "consequences" section of the NPA page here, editing appropriately. I thought this was on this page already, but perhaps someone edited it out. Editors who are pointed to this page should be made aware of the potential consequences of their actions. KillerChihuahua ?!? 21:49, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
What are peoples' thoughts for this policy including something about what is not harassment? This is, with no exaggeration, the most abused policy on Wikipedia. It started out with good intentions: to protect victims of genuine harassment. But it's being used by most editors to mean "someone disagrees with me!" Which belittles and cheapens the horror of genuine harassment. The exact reason why we renamed wikistalking to wikihounding. Sceptre ( talk) 23:21, 14 April 2009 (UTC)
I was bold and fixed it. Anyone can claim a warning is "valid" while still making it for ulterior purposes. An arguably valid warning isn't enough if it was presented in a way to be harassing. Warnings should be worded civilly and try to resolve conflict instead of egging it on. Also, saying it's not harassment unless it causes a great amount of distress is really just bizarre. So someone harassing someone else but not being good enough at it to cause full on emotional anguish is A-OK? No, the intent to harass (or lacking intent originally but continuing just the same when it's pointed out that the target objects) is the problem. Whether the harassment works or not isn't the issue. DreamGuy ( talk) 21:00, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
I would like to point out that User:ChrisO, a wikipedia administrator, recently attempted to change the wording of this policy [25]. He is currently involved in an arbitration case for issues of misconduct and abuse of administrative rights [26]. People have indicated that some of his edits might constitute or be bordering WP:OUTING [27], so editing the very policy he is accused of violating could be seen as gaming the system: "Editing a policy to support your own argument in an active discussion may be seen as gaming the system, especially if you do not disclose your involvement in the argument when making the edits." [28]. It goes without saying that I oppose his change. -- Radjenef ( talk) 14:36, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
There is a new option under Special:Preferences that says Reveal my e-mail address in notification e-mails. Do we need to add a note somewhere letting people know that if they click that, other people can see their email, or is it self evident? MBisanz talk 16:40, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
I think the "Posting of personal information" section needs some clarification. Does a very trivial Google search (not a sophisticated one) based on the information provided on one's userpage constitute "Posting of personal information"? For instance if I say on my userpage that "I am Mr.X living in Y", and someone googles my name and very easily finds out the university I go to, would that constitute OUTING or "Posting of personal information"? I don't think so. Of course, one may use this information (or those on the userpage) in an ironic manner to harass another editor, but this is not WP:OUTING. It is another type of harassment, which goes beyond a simple "Posting of personal information" that the particular subsection describes. I would like to clarify the text if there is no objection. -- DoostdarWKP ( talk) 19:16, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Discussion about policy subcategories for several pages, including this one. As far as I know, this doesn't make any difference, except as a help to people trying to browse policy. - Dank ( push to talk) 03:18, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
In video game lingo, " griefing" is a term used for players who annoy and disturb other players. How about moving the page to Wikipedia:Griefing? Ciarlone ( talk) 21:46, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
A previously indefinitely blocked editor has been following another editor around to AFDs for several months. Calling him names in the AFD like troll, which has been reverted by a friendly admin when this personal attack has been removed.
Unfortunately the editors who are supposed to stop this abuse, the previously indefinitely blocked editor has done a lot of work for them, so they look the other way. This emboldens the editor, making him harass/stalk this editor even more. It has gotten to the point that the majority of the AFDs that this editor has gone to the previously indefinitely blocked editor follows.
RfC seems out of the question, because of the drama that it will cause and the attacks that this editor will have to endure. ANI has not worked for the same reason.
Writing this, I think I found my solution: compile the evidence, and give it to a uninvolved admin to sternly warn this previously indefinitely blocked editor that if it continues he will be blocked.
What do you all think? What other options do I have? Ikip ( talk) 14:39, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Several editors have alleged that one editor has pages about themselves on main space. These editors continue to say that this editor is the editor in the main space pages.
The only case I am aware of similar to this is another editor, who changed his username, and everyone no longer can call him by his name, etc, and he continues to edit pages within his sphere of work. It appears like he has some strong admins which support him. Absent strong admins buddies, what can I do?
Can't these edits be removed immediately and reported to WP:Oversight? I see this is not a 3rr exception. Wikipedia:3rr#Exceptions_to_3RR.
How does WP:COI fall into all this? Ikip ( talk) 17:28, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
The essay Wikipedia:WikiBullying needs to be improved and expanded. -- Atomic blunder ( talk) 13:29, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
The section just added Wikipedia:Harassment#Bullying seems to go too far. The evaulation of whether something is a warning or a threat as well as the evaluation of whether a block is unjustified are far too subjective, and far too easy to game. Admins can, and should, give warnings about behavior. Nine times out of ten, the person warned is going to see the warning as "unjustified" and is going to reply unhelpfully (it takes a big person to realise they erred, for a more typical example encounter, see [29] :) ). If the matter is taken to AN/I and the warning or block endorsed, that's that. If it isn't, this page's statements aren't going to help. That's not to see that there isn't misuse of tools by admins, up to and including harassment of folk, which needs attention. Just that I don't see this section as helpful. ++ Lar: t/ c 13:09, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
“ | "Posting another person's personal information is harassment, unless that person voluntarily had posted one's own information, or links to such information, on Wikipedia oneself. Personal information includes legal name, date of birth, identification numbers, home or workplace address, job title and work organisation, telephone number, email address, or other contact information, whether any such information is accurate or not. Posting such information about another editor is an unjustifiable and uninvited invasion of privacy and may place that editor at risk of harm outside of their activities on Wikipedia. This applies to the personal information of both editors and non-editors. It also applies in the case of an editor who has requested a change in username, but whose old identifying marks can still be found. Any edit that "outs" someone must be reverted promptly, followed by a request for Oversight to delete that edit from Wikipedia permanently." | ” |
Over the past few years I have seen WP:OUTING being unevenly applied. For example, a certain editor I talked with a few months ago, no one can mention his old name. In other cases, editors regularly out other editors with no repercussions.
Take for example [32] posted today. A Nobody has repeatedly asked editors to stop calling him by his previous user name. There was some real world harassment when he used this name, which DGG is aware of, and which I am sure that A Nobody can share with other admins on request.
Protonk, one of the 3 authors of this RFC wrote: "The WP:Right to vanish thing isn't too important. It plays a role in the RfC insofar as it marks the watershed of past bad behavior, but the purpose of this RfC is not to rap his knuckles about that issue." [33]
I requested that the creators of this RFC to remove this section. [34]
Protonk, responded, saying
I asked Protonk to give me the "the cat is out of the proverbial bag." policy. i.e. you can out someone when everyone knows their old name.
I think in the previous case, like many cases here, this editor has powerful friends, like an arbcom member to enforce his OUTING concerns, A Nobody doesn't so the outing continues.
I just removed this section, and I would like editors comments on this. [36] Ikip ( talk) 02:14, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
Not commenting on the specifics of this case, but I think the need to have a discussion about agreed norms concerning outing is clear, as illustrated by the recent disagreement surrounding Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/DJ Pusspuss (2nd nomination) and related pages. Skomorokh 03:22, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
One point I should make. Once the RfC is closed, it can be courtesy blanked. As I noted on the RfC and the RfC talk page the reason the old username is used is to eliminate confusion and offer a clear delineation of actions. Once it is no longer needed then the rationale for showing it disappears. I am also willing to {{ hat}} it if there is consensus to do so on the RfC talk page. Protonk ( talk) 03:27, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
The explanation is here: Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/A_Nobody#Description and the response to the original concerns are Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/A_Nobody#WP:OUTING there. Protonk ( talk) 03:29, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
You can't out what's public. The other account is here and links to A Nobody's page [37]. It did not vanish. NVO ( talk) 04:01, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
That's a very bizarre example, people who are worried about real world harassment vanish - they don't run a renamed account, carry on acting in the same way as they did previously and interacting with the same people who knew who they were before. That would be akin to someone standing in the town square shouting "don't look at me, don't look at me" via a megaphone and then complaining to the police that people are staring at them. I can't take that seriously as a sensible example of the sort of cases this policy applies to. -- Cameron Scott ( talk) 12:31, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
I suggest adding: sexual orientation, religious belief and political affiliation (read "or lack of" in each case). — Alan ✉ 14:16, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
An interpretation question:
Is it still OUTING when no personal information is directly revealed, but specific Google search terms are given that directly lead to finding the personal information?
Manning (
talk)
01:38, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
Please see WT:NLT#Moving one section. - Dank ( push to talk) 21:56, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Reading over the enforcement policy pages WP:VANDAL, WP:BLOCK and WP:BAN, I'm seeing more overlap with this page than overlap from WP:CIVILITY. We're having an RfC at the Village Pump on what sidebars to put on policy pages, and I think that makes it more important to put things in the right subcats, so that readers will be encouraged to contrast and compare pages within the same policy subcat. Are there any objections to moving this page to the enforcement cat? I'm about to start a related discussion at WP:NPA. The main point is that, with the exception of WP:HARASS#Dealing with harassment (which could perhaps be merged with WP:CIVIL#Dealing with incivility), everything this page discusses is block- or ban-worthy. - Dank ( push to talk) 17:56, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
In case anyone is interested, I've kicked off discussion about an idea I've had about incivility blocks. Currently it's hard to get a consistent blocking policy in terms of warnings and blocking times, I'm hoping that this proposal can get some traction to make this more clear. - Tbsdy (formerly Ta bu shi da yu) talk 06:15, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
I have just seen this (see 1st comment) and am aware of other instances where this has happened to me. We really should find a way of doing something about this kind of behaviour. NBeale ( talk) 07:56, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
An editor has posted a legal threat on my talk page. I sent him a warning but other than that I am not certain where to take this. If this person proceeds with this I will walk away from Wikipedia completely as this is not worth it. The issue at hand is the user attempting to insert himself into various articles including Gene Clark. Although there is some evidence that he was a session musician for Clark in 1968, beyond that I am uncertain about his notability as there are few reliable sources. I have only dealt with the Clark article although he has inserted himself into a number of others as well. I haven't edited the Clark article since Aug. 2009 and the editor's name still does appear in the article, so I'm not certain what his issue is. In any case, I would like to either take this to the proper channels or ignore it completely but I'm not certain where to take this. freshacconci talktalk 17:37, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
Is connecting personally identifiable informations that already publicly available on and off-wiki to identify a person a form of outing? PII can be a simple username. Sole Soul ( talk) 11:04, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
Am I the only one who finds it odd that the shortcuts leading here include HA and HAR - also known as onomatopoeia for laughter? Just sayin.-- Tznkai ( talk) 22:26, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
I would like to draw your attention to a wikiharassment tactic that is not a problem (so far as you know) yet; organized wikistalking/wikiharassment.
Drawing parallels with the non-wiki phenomenon which Wikipedia refuses to acknowledge the existence of, organized wikiharassment would be wikiharassment performed by a large group of people, such that no one person appears to be engaged in wikiharassing behavior. So a large group of people would take turns vandalizing the edits of a single user, for example.
Do you think this is a problem, or might be a problem in the future? How would you deal with it? Jeremystalked ( talk) 03:21, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
This is currently not covered under WP:OUTING - threats to "out" another editor, such as this edit. I've warned that editor not to repeat such threats or they will be blocked. Are such threats generally treated the same way as the offence itself? The section needs a slight reword to make it clear that threatening to out an editor is also unacceptable. Mjroots ( talk) 05:52, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
The relationship status of a couple of editors has come up in a couple recent ANI threads. There has been some concern about outing, and I think it would be helpful if this was clarified in the policy essay. Assuming that this information was not provided on wikipedia, if someone discovered that one user was married to another user, would that information be considered Personal Information for the purposes of outing? If so, could this be explicitly added to WP:OUTING? If not, could this be clarified in some way in the essay? aprock ( talk) 21:04, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
Out of curiosity, if a contributor edits an organization article under a "real name" registered identity and an individual with that same name is on the organization's employee roster, is it outing to note that? What if phrased simply to mark upon the coincidence without drawing conclusions? It seems by the letter of the law that it would be so (can't reveal job titles and work organisation), but I rather wonder if it's against the spirit if there seems to be no effort whatsoever to avoid self-disclosure. (Cannot supply a diff, because it didn't happen. Well, rather, I'm sure it has happened. But not that I'm aware of. :)) -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 15:04, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
Under posting personal informationm, it includes: "It also applies in the case of an editor who has requested a change in username, but whose old identifying marks can still be found." Why is this protected? This seems easy to abuse, where the new user could agree with his old comments, especially e.g. regarding policy, style guides, etc. which often refer back to older material and precedent. Was stalking the main issue? Argel1200 ( talk) 21:57, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
What's the proper procedure to raise the issue of possible Conflict of Interest of a user without Outing them in anyway, since a particular user may edit under a pseudonym? Just wandering. radek ( talk) 00:06, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
I appreciate that this is a bean-sy comment, but the horse has already bolted on that front. This page makes no mention of what happens to banned users engaging in harrassment. -- W F C-- 05:42, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
During the discussion of a proposed move of Talk:Plymouth, one user has added up what they believe are the nationalities of contributors (it is unclear on what basis this has been done) and posted these numbers, this has then been used as a factual statement by others in the discussion. Is there any established consensus on how far we can go with synthesizing user pages? I have highlighted this as a possible breach of WP:PRIVACY, on the basis that this highlights minority nationalities, puts pressure on users to declare their nationality or constrain discussion contribution based on nationality. I have drawn a parallel with how limiting discussion to contributions from users based on race or nationality would be unacceptable and counting !votes in this way may result in the same type of marginalization. Thanks, Fæ ( talk) 12:02, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
I added a section [38] on accusing others of harassment, adapted from WP:AOBF. Rd232 talk 02:03, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
When does posting results from WikiScanner conflict with WP:OUTING?
-- Kevinkor2 ( talk) 16:52, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
I can see we don't get a lot of responses here on these questions. Is there a better forum? After all, how can one get in trouble if one asked and never got an answer?? :-)
Anyway, what if a possible former editor (a banned user, an AnonIP, someone who edited briefly with a user name, someone who claimed to have quit but may have legitimately changed user names because they edited under their real name and are well known, or sockpuppets of any of the above) is harassing you anonymously "off wiki" through various nasty blogs, etc. Is it illegitimate to use evidence from their history of editing or editing comments here as (a small) part of the "off wikipedia" evidence they are now harassing an editor "off wikipedia" and/or smearing other people, etc.? CarolMooreDC ( talk) 23:52, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
This is sort of a question in form of a proposal. KimVdLine, who also uses her real name, wrote: "He edited wikipedia under his own name (not anonymous), so using that info is fine. That is not outing, that is sharing public information." The question is, for those volunteer (not paid or professional) editors who either naively or consciously use their real name (whether or not they post any off wiki links to themselves at any time past or present): Can people then just do a bunch of "opposition research" on them to harass them about any edit they don't like in an article, as an excuse to start screaming "POV" or some other policy violation (besides obvious WP:COI) about it. It's happened to me with a few obnoxious people on particularly controversial articles, but it really is annoying. And it has been considered either irrelevant or harassment by other users, even at WP:ANIs, yet no one is ever sanctioned for it.
I would propose a short second paragraph to this section that bounces off the first sentence of the section which reads: Posting another person's personal information is harassment, unless that person voluntarily had posted his or her own information, or links to such information, on Wikipedia. It would read something like:
Thoughts? CarolMooreDC ( talk) 04:12, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
What's the current policy regarding outing in the context of an SPI or COI allegation? (as a not-disinterested party at the moment) Daniel Case ( talk) 05:12, 11 February 2011 (UTC)
It sure can. There's nothing at SPI either. Daniel Case ( talk) 05:29, 11 February 2011 (UTC)
I've become confused with the policy on outing and I need clarification on a few points.
Any help on these questions would be most appreciated. - Thibbs ( talk) 15:41, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | → | Archive 5 |
What about the false accusation of a threat? Or of bullying? wikinerd and lifeisunfair have each accused Admins of "bullying" or "threatening" because the admins were attempting to enforce project rules. I think that these accusations constitute harassment. Should an RFC be made? Uncle Ed 01:19, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
I am underwhelmed. FuelWagon 04:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
"Wikistalking" will be an easy accusation to make and an almost impossible thing to easily defend yourself against, even if you're innocent. There is no objective, straightforward way to disprove you aren't "stalking" someone just because you edited the same pages as he did. FuelWagon 04:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
Say what? How is this different than "personal attacks"? FuelWagon 04:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
Isn't this already covered by policy? FuelWagon 04:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
Sure, fine. Call that the "No Personal Information" policy, not harrassment. FuelWagon 04:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
This is the main source of my underwhelming response. This is so vague as to be useless to real editors and a dangerous weapon to people looking to game the system. FuelWagon 04:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
Please merge this with Wikipedia:Stalking so that we don't have to repeat the discussion again. To reiterate, stalking is usually used as a synonym for reading through other people's contribution logs, and there is nothing wrong with that. If you don't want people to read your contribs, don't make any. If you don't want people to criticize you, don't make mistakes. R adiant _>|< 07:55, August 22, 2005 (UTC)
I agree with every word above by Radiant and Ed. Except better than merge, let's be bold and delete both proposals;) WAS 4.250 17:38, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
To people considering adding to this: Go nuts; do whatever you feel is appropriate. Just so long as you can point to solid policy concerns or precedents, and
Assume good faith.
Thanks,
Luc "Somethingorother" French
06:20, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
One of the important items I'd like to have here is cites in the precedents section; thus, my naming of KOAP, so that other users can see his behavior. If there exists a better refrence page to explain his ban then his user talk page, please, let me know. The case is, after all, an excelent illustration how harassment can be an aggravating factor, and only used as such.
Thanks,
Luc "Somethingorother" French
03:44, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
So, perhaps I have another example of this. Yesterday I reverted edits by this user to the Case Western Reserve University page and left a vandalism warning on his talk page. Then he came back and made edits like this ( [1]) and this ( http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Tanggula_Mountain_Pass&oldid=21758663) to pages that I had just written about on my user page. He was introducing inaccurate information into those pages. I suspect he was following me to pages I had recently written about editing, and harrassing me in retaliation for his vandalism warning.
What is the procedure I would follow to assert that he is Wikistalking me, according to this proposal? (I realize that this is still in development.) Mamawrites 04:19, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
Every contribution this person made that I looked at [2] was vandalism. Ignore the "stalking" assertion, and deal with the vandalism. WAS 4.250 05:45, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
I am new to this discussion, but does anyone know if the topic of posting sensitive information has been covered? Simply editing the article will not do, as the information exists in the history. Who can delete history entries? I am talking about something that is internal discussion, or perhaps someone who knows way* too much info about a person and has an ulterior motive. Gchriss 04:26, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
I see this project is being edited in different directions. Two quick points about some version that's in play:
"Against the rules" seems like a unnecessarily definite judgement for a project that does not have "rules".
"Stalk puppets" is a term that I've never heard of and that gets no Goggle hits. Is this a neologism? - Willmcw 23:34, September 1, 2005 (UTC)
A thought: In many ways, WikiNature is opposed to any emphasis of contributor egos or personalities. We do not sign our contributions to articles. There is no byline on Wikipedia articles or Wikinews stories. Unlike Everything2, we do not keep score of how many people like a particular editor's contributions. We tend to eschew the development of idiosyncratic writing styles; editors are encouraged to regularize others' writing to fit the Manual of Style.
There are relatively few spaces in which we emphasize individual views and personalities. The one rare positive way we systematically and procedurally single out editors is the adminship system, where we vote for those people whom we trust to have greater technical powers. We generally reject the idea that this means they are more worthy contributors of encyclopedia material -- rather, we take adminship to usually mean that we trust that they are not going to do something stupid or destructive with those powers. Usually, we single people out when there are negative reasons for doing so, such as an RfC or RfAr.
In other words, in many senses the "ideal Wikipedia" would be one wherein everyone agreed to contribute in as egoless a fashion as possible. This is perhaps only a slight exaggeration of what we mean by NPOV. The NPOV policy means that while we are free to focus our attentions on articles and topics that interest us, we agree to set aside our personal preferences or opinions and contribute text that enhances a neutral description of each subject.
The kinds of behavior that we typify as abusive and harassing are almost always ones which focus upon the personalities and persons of editors themselves. The most general example of this is the no personal attacks policy: when we disapprove of a contribution, we're supposed to direct our disapproval at the text, not at the person. Personal attacks are ad hominem -- literally, against the person.
The kind of conduct which we call harassment is nothing but an exaggeration (almost to the point of self-parody) of ad hominem attack. It goes beyond remarking upon another's personality, to the point of attempting to provoke or harm that person themselves. Harassment is the logical end of the conduct which is (so badly!) described as "POV-pushing". It is the logical opposite of WikiNature.
Thus, perhaps we can deter harassment by deëmphasizing ego and personality throughout Wikipedia. We should perhaps refocus some of the administrative actions so that rather than labeling people as problems, they lock down and address problems with articles. We could discourage the formation of "interest groups", such as WikIProjects which focus upon pushing a particular view about sex or inclusionism or whatever. We could spread out administrative powers more, and discourage the present "thin blue line" attitude in which administrators are sometimes given undue assumption of correctness when in conflict with others.
In short, I suspect that anything we can do to promote a more relaxed and less egotistical WikiNature here, will do a great deal to deter harassment. -- FOo 01:04, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
"A atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways." I think we need to be careful in the creation of rules which may inhibit useful techniques in removing spam, POV pushing, and vandalism. In the past when I've been editing or RC patroling and run into a clearly bad edit, I usually check the submitters history and clean up all simmlar instances. There have been multiple times where I've encountered longstanding vandalism where a review of the submitters has shown that someone removed the same vandalism performed on a popular article but didn't bother to check the submitters history and clean up the rest. So contribution checking is something we should encourage. Then we come around to SPAM... if someone adds a external of low quality to an article, it is nearly impossible to tell in that one edit if the user is attempting to advertise via Wikipedia or if they just missed the fact that Wikipedia is not a link directory, only by reviewing their contributions can you find that they've submitted 20 externals to the same site to as many articles, and from that point the only sane course of action is to remove all of them.
So, of course, none of these activities would be against a rule which only forbed wikistalking when the individual edits made as a result of the wikistalking are within the rules... But that would make the wikistalking rule pointless, since we would only need such a rule to make forbidden acts which alone would be acceptable.
The problem here is that what we need is a rule that says "wikistalking is permitted unless it is in bad-faith", since there is no simple pattern of edits which would be acceptable alone but are not acceptable togeather. I think that because of this there is no way to create a working anti-stalking rule, because there is no wait to codify the determination of good vs bad faith. As a result the use of such rule will always require good judgement and consideration on the part of Wikipedia editors. ... Which is what we already have without a special rule. The users of Wikipedia always reserve the right to impose sanctions on anyone who we determine as acted against the interest of the project, rules broken or not.
If there is a percieved need for some kind of anti-stalking rule, then perhaps what is really needed is some cleanup and fleshing out of material in Wikipedia:Harassment so that there a nice soundbite for people to wikilink to when they are chastising another user for wikistalking. -- Gmaxwell 19:11, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
-- Cool Cat Talk 15:38, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
(This was originally posted to the main page; I have moved it here, since it appears to have nothing to do with the proposed policy per se.
Thanks,
Luc "Somethingorother" French
21:56, 16 September 2005 (UTC))
From [3] "# 16:15, 16 September 2005 (hist) (diff) Pornography in Japan (-verify tag) (top)
Each edit is removing a verify (reference) flag I placed there. This follows his spamming my talk page (I spammed him back) after he deleted a contribution I made that removed part of a contribution by FeloniousMonk to Fine-tuned universe. FeloniousMonk and I have had differences. (See the page where people voted to make FeloniousMonk an admin.) WAS 4.250 21:09, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
Wrong. The issue the flag deals with is VERIFY-ABLILITY not accuracy. Adding the flag causes two things to happen:
I believe that if this policy goes into effect, the #1 most common invocation of this policy will be by editors who feel the urgent need to insert POV edits into political articles. Let's call them bad editors. These editors will insert POV in such an inappropriate way that other editors — let's call them good editors — will feel compelled to check the edit history to see if similar damage has been done to other political articles. Then, as soon as a good editor removes POV edits from more than one article by the bad editor, the bad editor will cry out "I am being stalked by a liberal/ conservative/ green/ radical/ reactionary editor who is persecuting me for my political beliefs" and run to the court to plea for relief under "Harassment".
This harassment policy should state explicitly that the above corrective conduct is OK and is not harassment. It's reasonable to assume you're going to be watched like a hawk (as distasteful as it is to be corrected by people with other political views than you) if you make bad POV edits.
Anyway, this can be made explicit and not implicit by inserting "or violations of Wikipedia policy" in the last line of the wikistalking definition, viz:
I think this will cut down on 'harassment' complaints by 50%.
That said, I'm not happy with the fact that "disruption" isn't defined here, since it's highlighted as the important part of the policy against wikistalking. Can we have a definition? Tempshill 23:07, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
A recent Arbitration Committee decision adopted as a principle a proposal on stalking. I have added it to Assume Good Faith, as the formulation relates to that guideline, with a view to adopting it as good practice. Future arbitration cases are likely to revisit this principle. Please review and comment, and modify if required. -- Tony Sidaway Talk 13:11, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
Gave partial execution to the points above (while someone had already erased the "Stalk" connections from WP:AGF), please check whether I did a good job! -- Francis Schonken 12:08, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
Is it just me, or is this page missing any suggestions on what to do in case of harrassment? -- InShaneee 00:49, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
I strongly feel harrasment should be considered as a type of personal attack given one pursuing another is as personal as an attack can get :/ -- Cool Cat Talk| @ 13:22, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
I agree with Lubaf. It's certainly possible to harass without engaging in personal attacks. Any action taken for the purpose of making it unpleasant for someone to contribute could be harassment. For instance, following someone around and reverting perfectly good contributions would likely be harassment as well as an abuse of reverting. I don't want to enumerate a whole bunch of types of harassment because I don't want to teach abusers how to stick beans up their noses. But if you think about it there are lots of ways of bugging the hell out of someone besides calling them a jerk-off Nazi buttface. -- FOo 02:52, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
The case of FuelWagon should be added to the list of precedents involving harassment. FuelWagon's pattern of criticism of SlimVirgin for several months after a series of edit wars resulted in a six-month ban. While any one of FuelWagon's criticisms of SlimVirgin might not have been considered a personal attack, the overall pattern was one of harassment. Robert McClenon 19:18, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
What's not to say that for fear of being accused of stalking, people are effectively scared away from discussion pages where "opponents" are "hanging out" (whose subjects not coincidentally often happens to be part of that person's interests)? Either this policy is redundant in light of other policies and therefore not necessary or opens up a new avenue of Kafkaesque situations (dare I say abuse?) where whoever happens to be the most respected at the moment "wins". The definition of "wiki-stalking" in particular takes the cake in this regard:
So now we're down to looking in somebody's head to determine whether somebody is "intending of causing annoyance or distress to another contributor"? Unless it's even worse and we simply go by the "feelings" of the "plaintiff"! I already accepted that Wikipedia can be a harsh place at some times (see in that regard Wikipedia:Staying cool when the editing gets hot) and I welcome any proposal that can make this place have a more friendly atmosphere, but I'm not interested in submitting to a tyranny of crybabies at the expense of NPOV considerations, because that's what a person whose only argument is "wiki-stalking", is, a crybaby.
And I don't recall this ever being put up to a consensus vote. It seems more that it's simply " case law" as the result of Arbitration Committee rulings. -- Dissident ( Talk) 01:52, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Before you change the definition of Harassment, consider the following:
I can explain the reasoning behind each of these, if somebody cares to ask. Thanks, Luc "Somethingorother" French 02:32, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
And how do you establish mens rea from behind the computer? -- Dissident ( Talk) 04:15, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Lubaf restored the reference to intentions, saying he had explained on talk, but there is no explanation here, so I have deleted it again. SlimVirgin (talk) 03:59, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
I believe this issue is already well addressed by the page, but there does appear to be some disagreement here. See Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Blocked_User:Mccready_for_Wikistalking for discussion of whether or not this edit should be considered stalking. Friday (talk) 17:07, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
I've just stumbled on this sad little tale again. No one ever provided evidence of the claim that I in any way harassed anyone. This was simply and edit war with Slim Virgin refusing to discuss her edits then being backed up by the block from her friend. QED. Mccready 07:31, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
For instance, if I detect what appears to be a POV vandal who is going around editing any article which refers to public figure x to call that public figure a name or misrepresent public figure x's views, is it wikistalking for me to use that vandal's contribs page to quickly find and revert all these vandalisms (as long as I do so within the limits of 3RR)? Kasreyn 18:27, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
A user or group of users has repeatedly pasted the contents of my userpage to various articles. I consider this a personal attack since it targets me directly and would seem to "us[e] [my] affiliations [viz Mexican American ethnicity] as a means of dismissing or discrediting [my] views", but the action described does not seem to fit any of the categories of personal attacks, and so seemed to be better classified as harassment. The edits in question are the following: [4] by 64.12.116.70, [5] by 64.12.116.6, [6] by 64.12.117.11. There may be more that I haven't discovered.
Similar vandalism was made to my userpage by 205.188.116.195.
So the question is, does this qualify as harassment? If so, where do I report it? And what can be done about it? Most of the vandals are AOL IPs. Is there positively no way to block them for more than 15 minutes? This is causing me some wiki-stress, and any help would be greatly appreciated.-- Rockero 18:09, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
Hi, I'm an user with a stalker bothering me. The user has:
He has at least touched (most time uncalled for) every single article I create while I refuse to follow him and do the same to him. I want him out of wikipedia. Where should I go, What should I do. Is there a format to present the evidence in a way to show there is no doubt he is stalking me in the same fashion of users previously banned for the same reason? -- T-man, the wise 04:55, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
Here you have a brief example, out of 11 contribs I made last 20 hours, he followed me to 9. He broke the 3 reverts rule twice, and it's not the first. Everyday is like that to me.
he followed me here, a page where we both have never been before yesterday
-- T-man, the wise 02:47, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
Question, it says Harassment is defined as a pattern of disruptive behavior that appears to a reasonable and objective observer to have the purpose of causing negative emotions in a targeted person or persons
Well, what if I have no emotional response to harassment like behaviour but it still distracts me? Say I am a Vulcan and do not feel emotions, yet the behavior is still disruptive to me, does it still meet the definition of harassment? Not trying to disprupt things to make a point, just wondering. HighInBC 17:35, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
As part of an overall effort to simplify and streamline policy, I've boldly replaced the policy tag with a guideline tag. There are several reasons.
The policy tag was added less than a year ago without a clear consensus.
This page is disjointed and is more of an essay than a statement of policy. Much of the reason it is disjointed is that there isn't any real consistent policy on harassment. The AC cases that are identified in the page were the sort of cases that produce unclear precedent because there were so many problems being addressed at once. The most serious problems of harassment we have had are not mentioned here; they have involved sexual innuendo, threats of physical violence, and deliberate disclosure of personal information. That this sort of behavior is inappropriate at Wikipedia is so clear that no policy is necessary.
I note that several attempts to generate consenus for a "wikistalking" policy have failed to gain much support.
The Uninvited Co., Inc. 17:04, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
After re-reading the page, I also support your action. Thanks for doing this. JesseW, the juggling janitor 02:34, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
When I looked at a user's contributions page, I saw several articles (about Italian models, if you want to know) that had a couple of minor formatting and capitalisation errors, so I went to those articles and fixed them. Would that be considered Wikistalking, though not harmful? -- Gray Porpoise 19:17, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
I have had questions about the identity of a particular user and whether or not he is a person about whom a Wikipedia article is written. When I asked this question, he told me I had to remove it as it represented a form of harassment. I don't think that the policy states that it is a form of harassment to ask the question whether a particular user is actually the subject of an article, especially if that user is editting that article (and then there is question of violation of WP:AUTO). Please see the related discussion on my talkpage and give me some guidance. -- ScienceApologist 19:48, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
A few people have been harassing me after I made a change to Treaty of Nöteborg. First some guy shows up claiming I'm some other user and posting things on my page. Then another guy shows up threatening me with blockage and stalking me half way across Wikipedia (undoing something that doesn't make any sense). I then took to see who this person and undid one of his edits (something that didn't make any sense to me). Then he comes back calling me names, claiming I should be blocked for stalking him (HE WAS THE ONE STALKING ME!). I left a message on this guys page telling him not to stalk me, but he removed the message saying "plonk".
Why am I being harassed and how come no one is doing something about it?
Atabata 12:01, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Copied from WP:COI If this has already been covered, please direct me to the relevant conversation, but: doesn't this policy conflict a bit with user's right to privacy? In other words, it is it possible to suggest to someone that they are violating this policy without yourself violating the policy, in particluar "Posting another person's personal information (legal name, home or workplace address, telephone number, email address, or other contact information, regardless of whether or not the information is actually correct) is harassment, unless that editor voluntarily provides or links to such information himself or herself." IronDuke 20:50, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
This is similar to the situation above. We have an articles on a company and its owner/CEO. Over time there have been several registered users and IPs who have identified themselves as the owner or officers of the company. Overall, they appear to be just one editor. One account was banned for legal threats but several of them posted threatening or intimidating language. The editor engaged in various edits which represented conflicts of interest, such as promoting the company in other articles, removing information from the articles of competitors, and trying to settle scores. In addition to violating WP:COI and WP:NLT, the editor has repeatedly violated other policies and guidelines, such as WP:POINT, WP:COPYVIO, etc.
A new account claims to have no relation to the company or its owner. However his editing patterns, spelling mistakes, interests, etc, clearly show it to be the same editor as before. Outside information, such as the content of a MySpace account, further supports the theory that the new editor is the owner of the company. Proving the connection to the owner serves to prove that the editor has a conflict of interest and that he is the same editor as previous usernames. So, to recap, is it legitimate to reveal a user's probable real name in interest of enforcing wikipedia rules? - Will Beback · † · 00:03, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
Since Wikipedia has pages on many real life people, places, and even businesses, what is it considered when people bring real life conflicts and start placing them onto Wikipedia? For example: an argument between two people, at least one of whom has a Wikipedia article about them, or also, a business that has an article and an employee/ex-employee that is angry at the business.
I have seen a specific instance of the latter where an employee from a company has gone onto the Wikipedia article of the company and posted various defamatory statements about real people that work at the company. Is this vandalism, harassment, or perhaps something else?
This brings to mind a second problem. What happens when sensitive information is posted onto a Wikipedia article? Due to the way the Wiki system works, any content that is posted is technically there forever. It may not be on the official page, but it will exist in the pages history indefinity as far as I know. What if, say, someone at KFC decided to post the complete KFC chicken seasoning recipe, or maybe every last piece of personal data they could find about the CEO? I suppose information of that nature would not be verifiable, but it should probably be removed somehow from the history. Sahuagin 01:21, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
I would like to report a case of harassment by User:Artaxiad. He has been following my edits, to identify myself with certain other physical identity without any proofs at hand. My creation and editing of this page [9] of a poet who lived in early 20th century, served as a faulty ground for User:Artaxiad to claim my identity based on false name associations and some information he found on Internet about a certain individual in California. His first case of intimidation was here [10]. User:Artaxiad further pursued harassment, trying to associate again User:Atabek with someone else and use an article on Internet as a basis for claiming that someone else as friend of another Wikipedia contributor User:AdilBaguirov right here [11]. I will not add extra evidence on User:Artaxiad following my edits to pursue revert warring, all of this evidence is well summarized at [12], [13], [14]. I am just wondering when negligence of disruptive behavior of this user is going to end. While being an experienced user, he walks away free with confirmed sockpuppets [15], gets involved in heavy revert warring, which is presented in ArbCom case [16], clear attempt to remove all of the images related to a certain country admitted here [17], accusing others of "lying" [18], and now clear case of harassment and stalking. How long this is going to go on? Atabek 11:55, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
The most common shortcut reference to this page seems to be WP:STALK. I see that a couple people (including myself) have tried adding it to the top of the page, but someone else keeps removing it saying it's unneeded. It's so commonly-used though, I think it's worth including. Anyone else have an opinion? -- El on ka 20:25, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
The following text was deleted:
It was unimaginable to me, inserting this note, that this familiar point could be controversial, yet an editor suppressed this text— under the edit summary of making a "suggestion." Whether or not a few second-rate editors speciously accuse one another of "vandalism' in edit wars, this is not a sensible motivation for forbidding a guideline that concerns pursuing authentic vandals. On rare occasions I have been accused by vandals of "stalking" them. Surely this distinction needs to be made clear somewhere at Wikipedia, and this is the natural page. -- Wetman 14:33, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
I have edited the section about posting editors' personal details, following discussion here and here. It needs to be very clear that posting addresses of websites that publish or speculate on editors' real names is forbidden per Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/MONGO#Outing_sites_as_attack_sites (and per common sense). ElinorD (talk) 08:30, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Lately I've noticed something of an increase in legal threats. To make sure the implications of such threats are clear I changed the language "may be blocked" to the stronger "will typically be blocked" that appears in WP:NLT. It's a word-for-word copy from WP:NLT so I assume it's uncontroversial, but am mentioning it here in case anyone objects. Raymond Arritt 12:48, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Requesting comments on a proposal for a guideline on Wikipedia:Personal security practices that I've been working on, mainly out of the discussion on this thread at Wikipedia_talk:No_personal_attacks#Part_two. Any comments or concerns would be appreciated. Thanks,— ACADEMY LEADER FOCUS! 00:34, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
In light of the very sad situation regarding User:H, there needs to be more teeth not only in this policy, but WP:NPA#Off-wiki personal attacks to ensure there isn't a next time for this outrage. It's simple common sense--we have every expectation to be safe editing here. Blueboy 96 13:07, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
The term "wiki-stalking" has been coined to describe following a contributor around the wiki, editing the same articles as the target, with the intent of causing annoyance or distress to another contributor.
This does not include checking up on an editor to fix errors or violations of Wikipedia policy, nor does it mean reading a user's contribution log; those logs are public for good reason. Using the edit history of users to correct related problems on multiple articles is part of the recommended practices both for Recent changes patrol (RCP) and WikiProject Spam. The important part is the disruption - disruption is considered harmful. Wikistalking is the act of following another user around in order to harass them.
An editor should not be constantly followed by a single editor "to fix errors or violations of Wikipedia policy". If someone is repetitively violating wikipedia policies, the person should be either blocked (to prevent further disruption), or the issue should be brought to community attention (if it isn't a clearcut case). If the person is really being disruptive, community would agree with it. Following an allegedly disruptive user for months is particularly unhelpful.
People stalking had been using "violations of Wikipedia policy" as a justification of causing distress by interpreting means to stalk from a policies/guidelines.
-- Cat chi? 08:47, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I think there needs to be more clarity in the definition of Wikistalking. People are being indef-banned based primarily on accusations of stalking, and it seems to me that there is significant gray area as to what it is and what it isn't. The current definition makes it clear that following another user's contribs "to fix errors or violations of WP policy" is okay, while doing it "with the intent of causing annoyance or distress to another contributor" is is stalking. But intent is hard to prove, especially when the actions involved are reverting edits and disputing on talk pages, rather than explicit PAs. Hypothetically, what if I come to the conclusion that another editor holds certain views that I believe erroneous, and I think it would be good for WP if I look for other places where that editor has advanced those views so that I can oppose them? Is this stalking? Does particular misbehavior need to be demonstrated, or is it always wrong to revert an edit or participate in a discussion that you found through someone's contribs page? I can see an argument for either side, and it seems to me that some people are confused as to just what is acceptable. Perhaps such situations need to be addressed specifically in the policy. -- BlueMoonlet 06:14, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
As I mentioned before, the WP:STALK policy is rather vague around the middle ground between researching a user's contribs to judge their RfA or to hunt down a vandal (obviously okay) and following them around to make personal attacks (obviously not okay). What I'm trying to address are accusations of this form (exaggerated somewhat to make the point): "This guy has opposed me on other topics, and he never edited on this new topic until I did. That's stalking and he should be banned!" The following is how I would write the policy if it were up to me, but what is really important to me is that the vague area be addressed in some form.
Current version:
Wikistalking refers to the act of following an editor to another article to continue disruption.
The term "wiki-stalking" has been coined to describe following a contributor around the wiki, editing the same articles as the target, with the intent of causing annoyance or distress to another contributor.
This does not include checking up on an editor to fix errors or violations of Wikipedia policy, nor does it mean reading a user's contribution log; those logs are public for good reason. Using the edit history of users to correct related problems on multiple articles is part of the recommended practices both for Recent changes patrol (RCP) and WikiProject Spam. The important part is the disruption - disruption is considered harmful. Wikistalking is the act of following another user around in order to harass them.
Proposed version:
Wikistalking refers to the act of following an editor to another article to continue disruption.
The term "wiki-stalking" has been coined to describe following a contributor around the wiki, editing the same articles as the target, with the intent of causing annoyance or distress to another contributor.
Reading another user's contribution log is not in itself harassment; those logs are public for good reason. In particular, proper use of a user's edit history includes (but is not limited to) fixing errors or violations of Wikipedia policy, or correcting related problems on multiple articles (in fact, such practices are recommended both for Recent changes patrol (RCP) and WikiProject Spam). The important part is the disruption — disruption is considered harmful. If "following another user around" is accompanied by tendentiousness, personal attacks, or other disruptive behavior, it may become a very serious matter.
Comments? -- BlueMoonlet ( t/ c) 14:48, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
Would "outing people without their consent" be defined as harassment? Say Hillary Clinton comes on to Wikipedia and edits as User:HillaryClinton. She goes on all the consumer rights pages and makes edits that she feels are NPOV. She edits articles related to the Senate and health care, et. al. She adds quotes and links to her own websites and published work. She makes some edits to the Rudolph Giuliani articles. Then she decides she wants to be known as User:HRCL because people keep bringing up she is Hillary Clinton and she doesn't like that. She'd prefer to edit without that bugaboo hanging over her. Then Rudolph Giuliani catches on and mentions on his website that Hillary Clinton is editing his articles as User:HRCL. When we have public figures, who espouse their views publicly in all sorts of venues, come on to Wikipedia, is it "outing them"? Are there any considerations for COI and POV to not mention that User:HRCL is Hillary Clinton? The ultimate question is: is RudolphGiuliani.com "outing a person without their consent" as defined in the guidelines as they are being drawn? If a person operates publicly saying the same things they say on Wikipedia, is it "outing" them? This question needs to be taken into consideration, since our influence has increased to a point where influential people edit us. --David Shankbone 18:12, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
The ultimate fate of Durova an myself are trivial questions. The larger concern is how will Wikipedia handle cyberstalking and harassment. We have one group of editors who use this site for trolling. Another group has formed to hunt the trolls. Unfortunately, this leads to vigilante style justice, with mistakes like the one that happened with Durova and !!. Troll hunting also creates a caustic, non-collegial environment.
The most direct solution for this problem is to route significant cyberstalking and harassment problems to the Foundation Office where they can be investigated and dealt with by volunteers under strict supervision of competent legal staff.
The advantages of this solution include:
That's my proposal. Hopefully we can all learn something from this dispute and make Wikipedia a better place. Let's not use Durova as a scapegoat for a problem that is much larger than her own activities. - - Jehochman Talk 04:40, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
I propose renaming "Wikistalking" to "Wikitrailing". Stalking in real life is a very big deal and we ought not to cheapen actual instances of harassment and stalking by using a powerful term too loosely. Durova Charge! 01:54, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
There's been an interesting discussion over at Conflict of Interest about when (or whether) it's appropriate to reveal an editor's employment when it provides evidence of Conflict of Interest. The issue arose because of a perceived conflict between the Harrassment and Conflict of Interest guidelines. I'm of the opinion that posting employment information to demonstrate Conflict of Interest does not constitute what is meant by harrassment, and therefore a limited exception should be provided in this article.
I suggest adding the following to the section on posting of personal information:
Please add your comments. -- SteveMcCluskey ( talk) 15:14, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
I just edited my own text. -- SteveMcCluskey ( talk) 15:24, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Random832 has added the following bolded sentence to this section, which significantly changes the guideline, so I've moved it here for discussion:
Posting another person's personal information (legal name, date of birth, social security number, home or workplace address, telephone number, email address, or other contact information, regardless of whether or not the information is actually correct) is harassment, unless that editor voluntarily provides or links to such information himself or herself. This is because it places the other person at unjustified and uninvited risk of harm in "the real world" or other media. This applies whether or not the person whose personal information is being revealed is a Wikipedia editor. It also applies in the case of editors who have requested a change in username, but whose old signatures can still be found in archives. This does not apply to mere identification of who is suspected of having a conflict of interest in the course of the normal operation of the conflict of interest noticeboard.
SlimVirgin (talk) (contribs) 22:05, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
It is typical at Wikipedia to assert that policy is "what we do" or in some cases (BLP) "what we agree we should do" ("best practice"). What we do is to reveal real life identities when a COI violator is an outsider; but to protect real life identities when a COI violator is an insider. Deal privately with those who are our friends but deal publicly with strangers. There is some degree of sense to it. Also we are moving in the direction of offering to strangers the option of privately handling COI investigations. It is a well known conundrum of our governance. WAS 4.250 ( talk) 06:26, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
Kendrick7 removed the section called Private correspondence. I believe it was informative, and suggest it be restored. Rejected proposals tell us something, and so does the Arbcom decision that was mentioned. If this paragraph isn't useful then Wikipedia:Perennial proposals isn't either. EdJohnston ( talk) 01:33, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
This is clearly a policy, not a guideline: there are no situations where true harassment is warranted. Shoemaker's Holiday ( talk)
So let it be written, so let it be done. (You guys figure out if it was the right thing to do. ;-) ) -- Kim Bruning ( talk) 23:29, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Thoughtcrime? I looked at the page and it says nothing about Wikiharassment. (a protologism I know)
Lu na ke et 23:56, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
There are several problems with this section:
As such, this section needs rewritten and renamed. I'd suggest that we either use soft redirects as per WP:VANITY to handle the renaming, or, as we'll be rewriting the policy anyway, set up a page at Wikipedia:Wikistalking labelled as a historic policy, and giving the reasons for the change in name, and link to the new policy. Shoemaker's Holiday ( talk) 17:31, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
I suggest the recommendation concerning OTRS be removed - ie or to contact the Arbitration Committee or OTRS if needed.. It appears not to be true. -- Matilda talk 01:45, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
I think the nutshell should be slightly amended to account for the distinction of necessary, purpose- and useful contacts on the one hand from unuseful contacts on the other. A given message may annoy the addressee, but it may nevertheless be justified by its content.
All input appreciated. user: Everyme 15:12, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
In the section on outing, we need to explain how a users can talk about conflict of interest editing without violating this policy. For example, there may be circumstantial evidence that an editor is writing about themselves and linking to their own work for the purpose of promotion. How is a user supposed to deal with that potentially serious damage to Wikipedia without outing? Jehochman Talk 13:20, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
While WP:OUTING addresses the serious issue of stalking, as currently written, it renders WP:COI and aspects of WP:NOR (specifically WP:COS) unenforceable. Any good-faith attempt to identify a user as having a COI (e.g., WP:COI/N#COI with Rjm7730) usually necessitates some degree of real-life identification. Typically, the user name is a give-away, but otherwise only an intentional or inadvertent admission by a registered or anonymous user is usable evidence – and the problems are mostly with editors who do not want to have their COI edits exposed as such or are unfamiliar with WP:COI in the first place. I feel that the community needs to discuss whether WP:Outing trumps WP:COI and WP:COS (which should then be degraded or eliminated [to include the WP:COI/N noticeboard]) or else needs to accommodate legitimate, good-faith enforcement of these policies and guidelines (thereby perhaps making WP:Outing more in line with WP:STALK, the problem which originated). While the issues have been raised here, there has been no resolution, and that lack of resolution is beginning to hamper the work of enforcing WP:COI. Askari Mark (Talk) 15:34, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Semitransgenic, ArbCom has made rulings specifically stating that outing another editor onsite is unacceptable unless the editor has disclosed his or her identity onsite voluntarily, no matter how well know this identity is elsewhere in the Web. Now that doesn't stop you from presenting the relevant evidence to administrators or to ArbCom if there's a need; it's a matter of compliance with the Foundation privacy policy. You can view this as a tradeoff. So yes, it's possible to exploit the privacy policy in order to circumvent the COI guideline, but people who do that assume a risk for themselves and their employers. Sometimes the press catches onto that stuff and when that happens it does not look good at all. Durova Charge! 23:38, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
I dislike the idea of calling out a particular individual to this extent on a policy page, unless it's coupled with a link to the relevant arbitration case that followed. Your posts are likely to give passers-by an impression that this individual's conduct has not been scrutinized. It has, and he is currently a named party in a second arbitration case. If you have substantial information to bring to bear that the arbitration committee has not already considered, please raise the matter there. Nothing good can come of further steps down the present path: either he behaves appropriately, in which case this is unfair to him; or he behaves inappropriately, in which case the arbitrators ought to receive whatever you have to say directly. In general the site runs better when people handle such things in a direct way. Best wishes, Durova Charge! 01:01, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
Thank you for your responses, but so far I’ve seen little discussion about the conflict between the “current editions” of WP:OUTING and WP:COI. Please keep in mind that WP:COI was established before such serious stalking problems arose that the formulation of WP:OUTING was found necessary. The establishment of WP:OUTING (as it currently exists) quite essentially changes Wikipedia from an environment in which privacy of identity was not a “given”. If we are to maintain WP:OUTING in its present formulation, then something has to give with regard to WP:COI (and WP:COS) – or vice versa.
Since identifying someone as having a COI is tantamount to “outing” them, if WP:OUTING is to be maintained and enforced as it currently stands, without any nuance of qualification or exception, then there is no point in having COI/N at all – for the majority of COI problems are not with conflicted editors who have revealed their COI and are working as requested by the guideline; furthermore, the archives must be reviewed and any past outings oversighted. In fact, retaining COI/N for the sake of problems with “known unknowns” begs for problems with well-meaning editors who don’t re-read a policy or guideline every time they rely on it to see what has changed since they first read it months or weeks ago. Inadvertent outings are inevitable, so COI/N would require more watching by admins.
Gordonofcartoon raises a further important point not defined in WP:HARASS: Just what constitutes “outing” (an unfortunate choice of words given the term’s normative cultural meaning which is unrelated to what’s going on here). Ignoring the trivial cases, what happens when someone makes the obvious connection that User:FOO may have a COI with his peacocking in the article on Dr. Foo? Are logical deductions from an obvious user name relationship “outing”? If so, why? How is it any different than when a user name is the editor’s real-life name? Furthermore, how does one “legally” approach a user suspected of having a COI when the very suggestion essentially constitutes an outing? If WP:OUTING is to be a no-exceptions policy (as it is currently), then WP:COI and WP:OUTING both need to be revised with guidance on how to do what they encourage editors without accidentally crossing the line. Askari Mark (Talk) 21:15, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
Someone reverted what I thought was a quite reasonable change to “Posting of personal information” (WP:OUTING)
The section currently says “Posting another person's personal information … is harassment, unless that editor voluntarily posts this information, or links to this information, on Wikipedia themselves”
The “unless” clause creates quite a loophole legitimising actions that should be considered blatant outing, on the basis that information posted was derived from editor posts. Editors who wish to be anonymous, even moderately so, should be allowed to participate under their chosen handles without having to worry that every edit will be scoured for information for a protected outing. Additionally, a user who once posted personal information, should be allowed to return to anonymity, and this policy should encourage all editors to protect the anonymity of all other users in cases such as these.
The appropriate place to collect information about yourself is on your userpage (or a user subpage). The first sentence of this section should reflect this. Posting personal information about another user should only be allowed if that user currently discloses the information in their userspace, where they control it. There’ll surely be ambiguous cases, but the posting of information collected from obscure locations, edit histories, third party userspace, etc, without good reason, should definitely be consider WP:OUTING, and should be discouraged as a matter of policy. The important issue here, as I see it, is WP:Editors matter, and the need for wikipedia contributors to feel safe within our community. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 00:41, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
This is an unsettled point that's worth discussing. Some of the site's most persistent and damaging long term vandals have been thwarted because of early self-disclosures. I don't think it's necessary to hamstring the conflict of interest noticeboard and other necessary site maintenance functions in order to supply a reasonable leeway for editors who AGF with ScienceApologist. Three principles can cover the situations:
So to take an actual example, a certain editor had been indefinitely blocked and a later account was accused of being his sockpuppet. On his original account he had disclosed his own name early in his editing career. He was a writer in real life and had often edited Wikipedia to add citations to offsite material he had written. For COI, POV, and other problems he earned an indefinite block. Several months afterward a new account appeared, which often cited articles by the same author and claimed to be a fan of his. The original account had been dormant for too long to checkuser. Yet Wikipedians who checked the new account's edits noticed that the new account had attributed the original author by name at an Wikipedia article, and used a citation to a source article that lacked any byline. Only the the original editor or someone who knew him personally could have known that he was author of that source. Based upon that, the second account was linked to the original account and the editor got community banned. (I know who this fellow's name is, but as you can see I'm not using it because because it isn't absolutely necessary in this post). Later actions and checkusers confirmed that this conclusion had been correct. Durova Charge! 01:02, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
I understand the points made, but there is still plenty of room for improvement in the text of WP:OUTING. At the moment, the language is very harsh about a very narrowly defined meaning of outing. I believe that what Elonka did was wrong (debatably), that many would consider “outing” to be the applicable term, but that the action does not meet the more restrictive definition accepted by others, and the action was not at the level to warrant something like an “immediate block”.
The unstated but partially accepted definition of “outing” seems to be “the original publication of another’s personally identifying information”.
A softer definition would be “the repetition, or drawing attention to, another’s personally identifying information, whether that information was released by another party, accidentally by the subject, or previously but now with regret by the subject.
I think that WP:OUTING should state that the softer version of outing should be avoided. An exception can be made for good faith contributions to a WP:COI debate. However, when such cases are closed, the identifying information should be removed.
The intention is to support the anonymity of users who wish to be anonymous, including where a past disclosure was accidental or is later regretted. This intention should be supported by advice in this policy, not by threat of punishment over small infringements, and should not be taken to limit focused discussion with respect to WP:COI cases. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 02:38, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
While it's good courtesy to refrain from repeating information about somebody that they don't wish to publicize and might consider to be harassing in nature (or to aid stalkers/harassers), unless there's a really good reason that overrides this, it's probably a bad idea to have a hard and fast policy that strictly prohibits all such mentions; the overextension of this concept has caused much mischief in the past. People have sometimes insisted on draconian efforts to shut the barn door after the horse has left, to suppress "personal information" that's already appeared on Slashdot or The Register. The "BADSITES wars" of last year were about some people declaring all links to certain critics' sites to be inherently wrong because those sites might just possibly "out" somebody. *Dan T.* ( talk) 00:05, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
It's high time we phased out 'wikistalking' from site jargon: the word confuses minor onsite irritation with an actual real world felony. I've been bold; we got WP:VANITY out of our jargon and that was much less a problem than this. Durova Charge! 02:15, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
I've just used "wikistalking" in a proposed arbitration decision and no one seems to have minded.... Newyorkbrad ( talk) 15:40, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
Okay, I was wondering at the outset how much to post onsite. It doesn't surprise me that someone came along to pooh-pooh the change; what does surprise is to see it coming from Newyorkbrad (who is usually adept at taking a hint and withholding judgment until the appropriate time). I've just sent him an e-mail and any other trusted Wikipedian is welcome to write me and find out what other reasons I have. Yeah, they're strong reasons. And yeah, they're the sort of thing best left offsite (hint: an FBI case I opened this year has something to do with it). Brad, consider yourself heartily trout slapped.Wikipedians who wonder where this move for a change is coming from are encouraged to contact me.
Durova
Charge!
18:13, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
There might be other synonyms that are better than " hound", but this is certainly better than "stalk". Support this change. Cirt ( talk) 20:45, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
Harassment of editors on-wiki, such as by following them around and tampering with their edits for the purpose of annoying them, can be a significant issue. Harassment of editors in real life, such as by threats of violence, defamatory statements to employers, unwelcome sexual approaches, and the like, is obviously a very grave and substantially more serious problem. Certainly nothing that I said above was meant to suggest or imply in any way that the seriousness of the former is on the same level as that of the latter, nor have I ever suggested or meant to suggest any such thing. Newyorkbrad ( talk) 00:06, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
To return to the matter of language, "pest" is what I used to call my sister when she did this kind of thing, not sure if this is any more pleasing than "hound" although - Durova's crucial point aside - we are talking about something unpleasant. We may need to use a neologism ... I am sure if it is clearly defined, after a few months people will get the idea of what it means ... Slrubenstein | Talk 02:08, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
Not sure I disagree with the premise here, but I'm a bit concerned about "hound" here - in my experience, it can be used as a slang term with sexual connotations. Shell babelfish 05:58, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
I support this change of wording. More respectful, more accurate in most cases I would hope, less likely to escalate disputes; if it's criminal stalking we can call the police. Sticky Parkin 01:01, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
It's so funny, that we don't stalk anymore! I'm of mixed feelings about this change. On the one hand, I've long opposed the tendency of people here to form opposing cliques and camps, and accuse those in the "enemy camp" of the vilest crimes, using all sorts of inflammatory language of which "stalking" is just one of the terms. On the other hand, I've never liked " PC" renaming of long-established terminology just because somebody, somewhere, might be offended by it. I recall that now-banned user Jon Awbrey once made a big fuss about how Wikilawyering absolutely had to be changed to "Wikicaviling" because the term was defamatory to lawyers... that was swiftly reversed and was the last straw that got him banned, as I recall. *Dan T.* ( talk) 12:36, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
...instead of being a lame duck. Before we begin, yes, I know, "zomg Sceptre's trying to start up drama". And yes, I know I got blocked for "harassment". Now we've got over that, I want to say: I've got serious problems about this policy. It was well-intentioned to begin with. But these days, it makes no distinction between Amorrow's behaviour (criminal harassment) and editing the same page as someone who doesn't like you (not harassment). Often people are blocked for the latter but not the former. So I propose that this policy be improved by:
Thoughts? Sceptre ( talk) 17:13, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
Has there been any discussion about adding one's IP address to the list of personal information prohibited by WP:OUTING. In many cases, an IP address could help geo-locate a user, narrow a user down to a particular school or business, and, when compared to other edits, could indeed be identifiable information. EU regulators have gone so far as to state outright that an IP should be treated personal information. I suggest we consider adding it to WP:OUTING. (My asking this was prompted by this ANI thread, but I'm not looking for any specific or immediate remedy in that case). -- ZimZalaBim talk 14:51, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
This is an important section, and I suggest adding to it one's job, although I'm not sure of the best wording. It currently says "workplace address", but in my view that is not enough. If a Wikipedia editor is outed as, for the sake of argument, Google's Chief Engineer for World Domination, then it doesn't really matter if the name, ID number, car license plate, email address, etc. is given. Arguably, not even a specific job title but a general job role is also identifying information. If an editor is outed as a nurse, it doesn't matter so much, but if she is outed as a pediatric nurse at hospital XYZ, then it becomes quasi-personally identifying. Thoughts? BrainyBabe ( talk) 16:25, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
So I used to have my name on my user page, and that was fine by me. Then another editor decided to use my name in edit comments, as a way of deriding me. I would like to prevent this in the future, and to that end, have de-published the mention of my name on my user page. I am not overly concerned with trying to keep my wikipedia activities unconnected to my real-life identity, but I would like to not have my name be a part of other editor's commentary. so WP:OUTING performs a useful function in that regard, even for people like me who are not overly concerned about secrecy of their wikipedia/real-name connection. So my question is, is my removal of my name from my own user page sufficient to achieve the result I want, which is simply for it to become once again prohibited for other users to make use of my real-world name in their comments. Tb ( talk) 10:53, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
Actually, I think this is an important point that doesn't seem to be covered in article. I use my real name and used to have link to my page but people would search around and find some opinion of mine and use it out of context (or claim I was "self-promoting"), so I took off my link. Now editors just google me, find some opinion, (usually take it out of context) and use it against me as proof of whatever. I've been calling this WP:Harassment but when looked at this article page now didn't see it as clearly described as outing as I thought it was. So I think both User:TB and I have issues here that need to be addressed. Thanks CarolMooreDC ( talk) 14:25, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
As this is a templated reason for blocking, I copied part of the "consequences" section of the NPA page here, editing appropriately. I thought this was on this page already, but perhaps someone edited it out. Editors who are pointed to this page should be made aware of the potential consequences of their actions. KillerChihuahua ?!? 21:49, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
What are peoples' thoughts for this policy including something about what is not harassment? This is, with no exaggeration, the most abused policy on Wikipedia. It started out with good intentions: to protect victims of genuine harassment. But it's being used by most editors to mean "someone disagrees with me!" Which belittles and cheapens the horror of genuine harassment. The exact reason why we renamed wikistalking to wikihounding. Sceptre ( talk) 23:21, 14 April 2009 (UTC)
I was bold and fixed it. Anyone can claim a warning is "valid" while still making it for ulterior purposes. An arguably valid warning isn't enough if it was presented in a way to be harassing. Warnings should be worded civilly and try to resolve conflict instead of egging it on. Also, saying it's not harassment unless it causes a great amount of distress is really just bizarre. So someone harassing someone else but not being good enough at it to cause full on emotional anguish is A-OK? No, the intent to harass (or lacking intent originally but continuing just the same when it's pointed out that the target objects) is the problem. Whether the harassment works or not isn't the issue. DreamGuy ( talk) 21:00, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
I would like to point out that User:ChrisO, a wikipedia administrator, recently attempted to change the wording of this policy [25]. He is currently involved in an arbitration case for issues of misconduct and abuse of administrative rights [26]. People have indicated that some of his edits might constitute or be bordering WP:OUTING [27], so editing the very policy he is accused of violating could be seen as gaming the system: "Editing a policy to support your own argument in an active discussion may be seen as gaming the system, especially if you do not disclose your involvement in the argument when making the edits." [28]. It goes without saying that I oppose his change. -- Radjenef ( talk) 14:36, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
There is a new option under Special:Preferences that says Reveal my e-mail address in notification e-mails. Do we need to add a note somewhere letting people know that if they click that, other people can see their email, or is it self evident? MBisanz talk 16:40, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
I think the "Posting of personal information" section needs some clarification. Does a very trivial Google search (not a sophisticated one) based on the information provided on one's userpage constitute "Posting of personal information"? For instance if I say on my userpage that "I am Mr.X living in Y", and someone googles my name and very easily finds out the university I go to, would that constitute OUTING or "Posting of personal information"? I don't think so. Of course, one may use this information (or those on the userpage) in an ironic manner to harass another editor, but this is not WP:OUTING. It is another type of harassment, which goes beyond a simple "Posting of personal information" that the particular subsection describes. I would like to clarify the text if there is no objection. -- DoostdarWKP ( talk) 19:16, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Discussion about policy subcategories for several pages, including this one. As far as I know, this doesn't make any difference, except as a help to people trying to browse policy. - Dank ( push to talk) 03:18, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
In video game lingo, " griefing" is a term used for players who annoy and disturb other players. How about moving the page to Wikipedia:Griefing? Ciarlone ( talk) 21:46, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
A previously indefinitely blocked editor has been following another editor around to AFDs for several months. Calling him names in the AFD like troll, which has been reverted by a friendly admin when this personal attack has been removed.
Unfortunately the editors who are supposed to stop this abuse, the previously indefinitely blocked editor has done a lot of work for them, so they look the other way. This emboldens the editor, making him harass/stalk this editor even more. It has gotten to the point that the majority of the AFDs that this editor has gone to the previously indefinitely blocked editor follows.
RfC seems out of the question, because of the drama that it will cause and the attacks that this editor will have to endure. ANI has not worked for the same reason.
Writing this, I think I found my solution: compile the evidence, and give it to a uninvolved admin to sternly warn this previously indefinitely blocked editor that if it continues he will be blocked.
What do you all think? What other options do I have? Ikip ( talk) 14:39, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Several editors have alleged that one editor has pages about themselves on main space. These editors continue to say that this editor is the editor in the main space pages.
The only case I am aware of similar to this is another editor, who changed his username, and everyone no longer can call him by his name, etc, and he continues to edit pages within his sphere of work. It appears like he has some strong admins which support him. Absent strong admins buddies, what can I do?
Can't these edits be removed immediately and reported to WP:Oversight? I see this is not a 3rr exception. Wikipedia:3rr#Exceptions_to_3RR.
How does WP:COI fall into all this? Ikip ( talk) 17:28, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
The essay Wikipedia:WikiBullying needs to be improved and expanded. -- Atomic blunder ( talk) 13:29, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
The section just added Wikipedia:Harassment#Bullying seems to go too far. The evaulation of whether something is a warning or a threat as well as the evaluation of whether a block is unjustified are far too subjective, and far too easy to game. Admins can, and should, give warnings about behavior. Nine times out of ten, the person warned is going to see the warning as "unjustified" and is going to reply unhelpfully (it takes a big person to realise they erred, for a more typical example encounter, see [29] :) ). If the matter is taken to AN/I and the warning or block endorsed, that's that. If it isn't, this page's statements aren't going to help. That's not to see that there isn't misuse of tools by admins, up to and including harassment of folk, which needs attention. Just that I don't see this section as helpful. ++ Lar: t/ c 13:09, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
“ | "Posting another person's personal information is harassment, unless that person voluntarily had posted one's own information, or links to such information, on Wikipedia oneself. Personal information includes legal name, date of birth, identification numbers, home or workplace address, job title and work organisation, telephone number, email address, or other contact information, whether any such information is accurate or not. Posting such information about another editor is an unjustifiable and uninvited invasion of privacy and may place that editor at risk of harm outside of their activities on Wikipedia. This applies to the personal information of both editors and non-editors. It also applies in the case of an editor who has requested a change in username, but whose old identifying marks can still be found. Any edit that "outs" someone must be reverted promptly, followed by a request for Oversight to delete that edit from Wikipedia permanently." | ” |
Over the past few years I have seen WP:OUTING being unevenly applied. For example, a certain editor I talked with a few months ago, no one can mention his old name. In other cases, editors regularly out other editors with no repercussions.
Take for example [32] posted today. A Nobody has repeatedly asked editors to stop calling him by his previous user name. There was some real world harassment when he used this name, which DGG is aware of, and which I am sure that A Nobody can share with other admins on request.
Protonk, one of the 3 authors of this RFC wrote: "The WP:Right to vanish thing isn't too important. It plays a role in the RfC insofar as it marks the watershed of past bad behavior, but the purpose of this RfC is not to rap his knuckles about that issue." [33]
I requested that the creators of this RFC to remove this section. [34]
Protonk, responded, saying
I asked Protonk to give me the "the cat is out of the proverbial bag." policy. i.e. you can out someone when everyone knows their old name.
I think in the previous case, like many cases here, this editor has powerful friends, like an arbcom member to enforce his OUTING concerns, A Nobody doesn't so the outing continues.
I just removed this section, and I would like editors comments on this. [36] Ikip ( talk) 02:14, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
Not commenting on the specifics of this case, but I think the need to have a discussion about agreed norms concerning outing is clear, as illustrated by the recent disagreement surrounding Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/DJ Pusspuss (2nd nomination) and related pages. Skomorokh 03:22, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
One point I should make. Once the RfC is closed, it can be courtesy blanked. As I noted on the RfC and the RfC talk page the reason the old username is used is to eliminate confusion and offer a clear delineation of actions. Once it is no longer needed then the rationale for showing it disappears. I am also willing to {{ hat}} it if there is consensus to do so on the RfC talk page. Protonk ( talk) 03:27, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
The explanation is here: Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/A_Nobody#Description and the response to the original concerns are Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/A_Nobody#WP:OUTING there. Protonk ( talk) 03:29, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
You can't out what's public. The other account is here and links to A Nobody's page [37]. It did not vanish. NVO ( talk) 04:01, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
That's a very bizarre example, people who are worried about real world harassment vanish - they don't run a renamed account, carry on acting in the same way as they did previously and interacting with the same people who knew who they were before. That would be akin to someone standing in the town square shouting "don't look at me, don't look at me" via a megaphone and then complaining to the police that people are staring at them. I can't take that seriously as a sensible example of the sort of cases this policy applies to. -- Cameron Scott ( talk) 12:31, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
I suggest adding: sexual orientation, religious belief and political affiliation (read "or lack of" in each case). — Alan ✉ 14:16, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
An interpretation question:
Is it still OUTING when no personal information is directly revealed, but specific Google search terms are given that directly lead to finding the personal information?
Manning (
talk)
01:38, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
Please see WT:NLT#Moving one section. - Dank ( push to talk) 21:56, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Reading over the enforcement policy pages WP:VANDAL, WP:BLOCK and WP:BAN, I'm seeing more overlap with this page than overlap from WP:CIVILITY. We're having an RfC at the Village Pump on what sidebars to put on policy pages, and I think that makes it more important to put things in the right subcats, so that readers will be encouraged to contrast and compare pages within the same policy subcat. Are there any objections to moving this page to the enforcement cat? I'm about to start a related discussion at WP:NPA. The main point is that, with the exception of WP:HARASS#Dealing with harassment (which could perhaps be merged with WP:CIVIL#Dealing with incivility), everything this page discusses is block- or ban-worthy. - Dank ( push to talk) 17:56, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
In case anyone is interested, I've kicked off discussion about an idea I've had about incivility blocks. Currently it's hard to get a consistent blocking policy in terms of warnings and blocking times, I'm hoping that this proposal can get some traction to make this more clear. - Tbsdy (formerly Ta bu shi da yu) talk 06:15, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
I have just seen this (see 1st comment) and am aware of other instances where this has happened to me. We really should find a way of doing something about this kind of behaviour. NBeale ( talk) 07:56, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
An editor has posted a legal threat on my talk page. I sent him a warning but other than that I am not certain where to take this. If this person proceeds with this I will walk away from Wikipedia completely as this is not worth it. The issue at hand is the user attempting to insert himself into various articles including Gene Clark. Although there is some evidence that he was a session musician for Clark in 1968, beyond that I am uncertain about his notability as there are few reliable sources. I have only dealt with the Clark article although he has inserted himself into a number of others as well. I haven't edited the Clark article since Aug. 2009 and the editor's name still does appear in the article, so I'm not certain what his issue is. In any case, I would like to either take this to the proper channels or ignore it completely but I'm not certain where to take this. freshacconci talktalk 17:37, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
Is connecting personally identifiable informations that already publicly available on and off-wiki to identify a person a form of outing? PII can be a simple username. Sole Soul ( talk) 11:04, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
Am I the only one who finds it odd that the shortcuts leading here include HA and HAR - also known as onomatopoeia for laughter? Just sayin.-- Tznkai ( talk) 22:26, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
I would like to draw your attention to a wikiharassment tactic that is not a problem (so far as you know) yet; organized wikistalking/wikiharassment.
Drawing parallels with the non-wiki phenomenon which Wikipedia refuses to acknowledge the existence of, organized wikiharassment would be wikiharassment performed by a large group of people, such that no one person appears to be engaged in wikiharassing behavior. So a large group of people would take turns vandalizing the edits of a single user, for example.
Do you think this is a problem, or might be a problem in the future? How would you deal with it? Jeremystalked ( talk) 03:21, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
This is currently not covered under WP:OUTING - threats to "out" another editor, such as this edit. I've warned that editor not to repeat such threats or they will be blocked. Are such threats generally treated the same way as the offence itself? The section needs a slight reword to make it clear that threatening to out an editor is also unacceptable. Mjroots ( talk) 05:52, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
The relationship status of a couple of editors has come up in a couple recent ANI threads. There has been some concern about outing, and I think it would be helpful if this was clarified in the policy essay. Assuming that this information was not provided on wikipedia, if someone discovered that one user was married to another user, would that information be considered Personal Information for the purposes of outing? If so, could this be explicitly added to WP:OUTING? If not, could this be clarified in some way in the essay? aprock ( talk) 21:04, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
Out of curiosity, if a contributor edits an organization article under a "real name" registered identity and an individual with that same name is on the organization's employee roster, is it outing to note that? What if phrased simply to mark upon the coincidence without drawing conclusions? It seems by the letter of the law that it would be so (can't reveal job titles and work organisation), but I rather wonder if it's against the spirit if there seems to be no effort whatsoever to avoid self-disclosure. (Cannot supply a diff, because it didn't happen. Well, rather, I'm sure it has happened. But not that I'm aware of. :)) -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 15:04, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
Under posting personal informationm, it includes: "It also applies in the case of an editor who has requested a change in username, but whose old identifying marks can still be found." Why is this protected? This seems easy to abuse, where the new user could agree with his old comments, especially e.g. regarding policy, style guides, etc. which often refer back to older material and precedent. Was stalking the main issue? Argel1200 ( talk) 21:57, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
What's the proper procedure to raise the issue of possible Conflict of Interest of a user without Outing them in anyway, since a particular user may edit under a pseudonym? Just wandering. radek ( talk) 00:06, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
I appreciate that this is a bean-sy comment, but the horse has already bolted on that front. This page makes no mention of what happens to banned users engaging in harrassment. -- W F C-- 05:42, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
During the discussion of a proposed move of Talk:Plymouth, one user has added up what they believe are the nationalities of contributors (it is unclear on what basis this has been done) and posted these numbers, this has then been used as a factual statement by others in the discussion. Is there any established consensus on how far we can go with synthesizing user pages? I have highlighted this as a possible breach of WP:PRIVACY, on the basis that this highlights minority nationalities, puts pressure on users to declare their nationality or constrain discussion contribution based on nationality. I have drawn a parallel with how limiting discussion to contributions from users based on race or nationality would be unacceptable and counting !votes in this way may result in the same type of marginalization. Thanks, Fæ ( talk) 12:02, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
I added a section [38] on accusing others of harassment, adapted from WP:AOBF. Rd232 talk 02:03, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
When does posting results from WikiScanner conflict with WP:OUTING?
-- Kevinkor2 ( talk) 16:52, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
I can see we don't get a lot of responses here on these questions. Is there a better forum? After all, how can one get in trouble if one asked and never got an answer?? :-)
Anyway, what if a possible former editor (a banned user, an AnonIP, someone who edited briefly with a user name, someone who claimed to have quit but may have legitimately changed user names because they edited under their real name and are well known, or sockpuppets of any of the above) is harassing you anonymously "off wiki" through various nasty blogs, etc. Is it illegitimate to use evidence from their history of editing or editing comments here as (a small) part of the "off wikipedia" evidence they are now harassing an editor "off wikipedia" and/or smearing other people, etc.? CarolMooreDC ( talk) 23:52, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
This is sort of a question in form of a proposal. KimVdLine, who also uses her real name, wrote: "He edited wikipedia under his own name (not anonymous), so using that info is fine. That is not outing, that is sharing public information." The question is, for those volunteer (not paid or professional) editors who either naively or consciously use their real name (whether or not they post any off wiki links to themselves at any time past or present): Can people then just do a bunch of "opposition research" on them to harass them about any edit they don't like in an article, as an excuse to start screaming "POV" or some other policy violation (besides obvious WP:COI) about it. It's happened to me with a few obnoxious people on particularly controversial articles, but it really is annoying. And it has been considered either irrelevant or harassment by other users, even at WP:ANIs, yet no one is ever sanctioned for it.
I would propose a short second paragraph to this section that bounces off the first sentence of the section which reads: Posting another person's personal information is harassment, unless that person voluntarily had posted his or her own information, or links to such information, on Wikipedia. It would read something like:
Thoughts? CarolMooreDC ( talk) 04:12, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
What's the current policy regarding outing in the context of an SPI or COI allegation? (as a not-disinterested party at the moment) Daniel Case ( talk) 05:12, 11 February 2011 (UTC)
It sure can. There's nothing at SPI either. Daniel Case ( talk) 05:29, 11 February 2011 (UTC)
I've become confused with the policy on outing and I need clarification on a few points.
Any help on these questions would be most appreciated. - Thibbs ( talk) 15:41, 16 February 2011 (UTC)