User talk:YWelinder (WMF)

Welcome to Meta!

Hello, YWelinder (WMF). Welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). Happy editing!

-- Meta-Wiki Welcome (talk) 19:50, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Thank you

		The Special Barnstar
		Thank you for everything you did to help the Wikivoyage logo selection procedure of 2013 run as smoothly as possible, up to and including getting up insanely early in Hong Kong to complete the legal review on schedule and completing the final legal review ahead of time, permitting the community time to adjust to results. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:46, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

question

Hello YWelinder, could you please tell me how the Child protection policy protects children from being bullied on the sites that belong to the WMF? 67.169.10.206 16:36, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Child protection

Hi Yana. I appreciated your commentary here on child protection issues. My children are almost of age now but I was always concerned about them using the internet. I have a few questions.

1. You say that the Terms of Use "prohibit solicitation of personally identifiable information from children for any illegal purpose". How is this monitored? I mean, how do you monitor whether English or other Wikipedia users are soliciting personally identifiable information with that purpose? If you do, how do you determine whether that is the purpose? Surely any such person would deny any such purpose. Do you use behavioural criteria? Is it OK to solicit personally identifiable information without such a purpose, or without the apparent purpose?
2. This rules applies to the soliciting of ' personally identifiable' information. Does this include email addresses of children when (like many email addresses) they do not containing identifying information other than the email address itself?
3. I have been using Wikipedia (on and off) for more than 10 years. I never heard of the emergency@wikimedia.org address. Are there plans to make this more visible to vulnerable users?
4. You say " If a threat is determined to be credible". How do you determine if it is credible? See my point above about determining whether a user has an 'illegal purpose' or not.
5. I recently wrote a piece about the importance of protecting whistleblowers. Many people (see the comments) objected that this person was not a whistleblower but a troll. How do you apply the w:Precautionary principle in such cases? The principle dictates there is a doubt about whether child safety is at stake, or whether the whistleblower is a troll, you err on the side of safety. In my country, the gas company will investigate a reported leak, and the fire brigade will turn up to a reported fire, even when there is a strong suspicion that the reports are false. N.B. I discussed the case offline with the whistleblower and he assures me he made every effort to alert the En arbitration committee, but he was ignored.
6. Again, if it is known that whistleblowing in such borderline cases will lead to a block or a ban (as in this case), how do you mitigate the deterrent effect this will have on other people who have concerns?
7. I raised concerns about other children who had been contacted by the suspicious user with Arbcom, with Jimmy and with several different departments of the WMF. All the emails were ignored and left strictly unanswered. One of them was to Michelle Paulson. (Geoff was away last week). This was even when I had been advised by the teacher of one of the boys (the only person I was able to contact in this case) to call the UK police.
8. When I called the British police, they said they could not take action unless they knew the identity of the children. I replied that, because of the 'don’t ask don’t tell' policy of Wikipedia, I did not know the identities of the children. They said they could not investigate without knowing identities, and advised contacting 'Wikipedia'. However (see above) my emails were not replied to. How do you advise reporting this issue, as the police have suggested?

Peter Damian (talk) 19:21, 4 September 2013 (UTC)