Training modules/Dealing with online harassment/slides/what-does-appropriate-documentation-look-like

Investigating reports: What does appropriate documentation look like? edit

To a certain extent, what "appropriate documentation" looks like will depend on who is performing the investigation. If you are performing an investigation as part of a team (such as an Arbitration Committee), your team should:

  • Record a summary of your investigation on your team's private wiki, if appropriate based on that wiki's policies.
  • Record the names of those who investigated and/or voted on outcomes for the investigation.
  • Take screenshots or gather diff links of evidence that informed any eventual outcomes of the investigation. Store these somewhere accessible to your team, such as on a private wiki or in an email to your team's secure, archived mailing list.

If you are evaluating an initial complaint before passing it on to users with advanced rights or to the Wikimedia Foundation's Support and Safety team, make sure that your communication to the other investigating group contains:

  • Contact information for you
  • Contact information for the reporting party and/or victim
  • A summary of the complaint
  • Functional links to any relevant URLs
  • Functional diff links to any specific on-wiki edits relevant to the complaint (if you have them)
  • A summary of any preliminary investigation work you may have done