Project
Wikimail Harassment
An analysis of community initiatives regarding Wikimail abuse over the past five years and general perspectives on harassment.
Overview
Wikimail is the system used by volunteers on WMF projects to send e-mail to each other by means of an online messaging interface. Users have repeatedly complained that by disclosing their private e-mail address via Wikimail they open themselves to the risk of abuse by harassers sending unsolicited messages or hackers targeting their e-mail provider. This core problem has inspired a range of anti-harassment proposals over the past five years.
Top High Level Takeaways:
- The Wikimedia community reacts to online harassment as if it were an unavoidable force of nature. The anti-harassment proposals from the past five years collectively represent a defensive community mindset. The improvements would help victims to evade Wikimail harassment but do nothing to address the abusive behavior itself.
- Wikimail abuse has never been addressed by name in a survey. This makes it difficult to judge the extent of the problem or how widespread the problem is across language communities.