Introduction about the Arabic Wikipedia Community edit

The Arabic version of Wikipedia was first launched on July 9th 2003. Since then, 2,054,554 users have registered, but only 6,612 users are considered active (with one edit in the past 30 days); the number of admins is 27.

As of today, March 31st 2021, Arabic Wikipedia has about 1,109,257 articles and 7,231,761 pages; it ranks 8th in terms of depth (223.98), and the 17th edition by article count, where it exceeded 1 million articles on Nov. 17th, 2019, to be the first Semitic language to reach this target.

Facilitation Process edit

Similar to any other community, Arab wiki contributors use different communication channels to collaborate with one other, although many of the channels are unofficial. This includes social media channels, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. The only official channels are Wikipedia itself (i.e. Village pump and talk pages).

Facilitation was mainly done in two tracks:

Meta page: Where participants directly replied to the provided questions. Summaries of in-person talks and summaries of group discussions are added below. 8 significant questions were posted during the consultation, which guided participants to specific focal points, such as safe reporting, enforcement pathways and responsibilities, and required implementation support.
Survey: The survey included questions that collected participants' opinions on implementing the current policies, Arabic administration performance, and required enhancements needed to guarantee successful implementation of the UCoC. The summary is provided.

Facilitation Plan edit

1. Target Audience: edit

My plan was to try to reach the largest number of categories of users so that I achieve a comprehensive representation of the entire community; for example, users having special rights on the projects, administrators, senior editors, new participants; users identifying with different genders; and users with varying levels of experiences.

2. Communication: edit

I decided to limit the use of official channels because I wanted my message to be more friendly rather than official. Hence, I started adding messages in the social media channels that are most used by Arab Wikipedians.

Local Facebook chat group (Wikimedians of the Levant), in which I am active, includes participants from 4 countries. I focused on this group for two reasons- easier accessibility and deeper engagement from members. Most active participants in Arabic Wikipedia are part of this group and are often more responsive to messages. Two meetings were conducted with this group.
Facebook page (Arabic Wikipedia Group): The page has thousands of followers, many are Wikipedians. One general meeting was conducted with this group, in addition to announcements.
Whatsapp Admins Group: Includes 24 of the Arabic Wikipedia Admins.
On-Wiki: Announced about the process in the Noticeboard twice. Also used the talk pages of individuals to send messages and link to surveys.
Personal Invitations and in-person discussions: I contacted many people personally by email or by dropping a message on their Facebook chat pages. This included female participants, where the messages I wrote for these had a special message explaining why their opinion is valuable.

Response Rate: edit

I can tell that I am satisfied with my community’s response rate compared to my efforts. The total number of responses I obtained from the overall communications is 132. This sample represents the entire community, where participants included Admins, editors, newcomers, males and females, and different types of experiences.

Summary of Survey edit

The survey was sent to 164 active members starting 08/02/2021 to 18/02/2021. Most of the members received the invitation to take the survey on their talk pages in the Arabic Wikipedia, either through direct emails or through mass messaging. A special invitation was sent to females (28 active members) using the Wiki-Email feature. The message included a statement that we need to hear from females specifically because they are among the most vulnerable to harassment. These messages were sent on 08/02/2021 to monitor the responses of that day before the second bunch is sent. The assumption is that responses from females all in all were about 20 as of 02/26/2021.

The participants’ experience varies; some contribute since less than a year, and others’ contributions extend to more than 10 years. This is summarized as follows:

Participants by Years of contribution
# Years	# Participants
< 1 year	18
3-5 years	22
5-10 years	21
> 10 years	16
Total	92

On the other hand, the participants’ privileges vary from “no privileges” to “Admins”. Two or three admins have also “check users” and “Bureaucrat” privileges. The distribution is as follows:

Participants by Privileges
Level	# Participants
No access	10
Admins	9
Editors	53
Auto Confirmed	7
Auto Review users	13
Total	92

In addition to the Arabic Wikipedia, participants also claimed that they participate in other projects, including other languages. The distribution is as follows:

Participants by Project
Areas of Contribution	# Participants
Arabic Wiki	90
English Wiki	25
French Wiki	5
Wiki Commons	32
Wikidata	34
Other Projects	19

Analysis of Responses edit

Current Situation

Responding to the question “Have you ever faced/knew about any of the following unaccepted behaviours in Wikipedia or any other projects you are involved with”, 55% (51) of the participants claimed that they never faced problems with anyone, 38% (35) of the participants faced some type of unacceptable behaviour, while 6.5% (6) didn’t respond to this question.

Only 2 participants of the 38% who faced problems are considered newbies (i.e. participating since less than a year, while 7 participants participated for more than 10 years.

Digging into the type of unacceptable behaviour they faced, “Harassment” is the most selected behaviour participants claimed they met (26 times). However, 7 participants chose “Harassment” alone, while 19 participants chose harassment along with one or more other types. The “Personal Attacks” ranks second where 13 participants claimed they faced this behaviour, followed by “Legal threats”, where 12 participants claimed they faced this behaviour; 5 participants faced problems related to leaking their personal information. However, 15 participants chose that they faced “Other unacceptable behaviour” than the options provided.

Participants were asked to explain how they think they would react if they face unacceptable behaviour, 89 participants responded to this question.

64 chose that they would try to report what happens, 5 participants of the 64 chose that they would stop participating in Wikipedia and other projects and may stop entirely along with their try to report the incidents. However, the number of participants who claimed that they would stop and withdraw without reporting was 11 participants. While the number of participants who chose to forget about the incident was 33; the unpredictable replies were that 16 chose to forget about the incident and at the same time, they would try to report it, maybe they thought it depends on the case, and 4 chose to forget about it. At the same time, they would stop participating and may leave entirely.

The third question aims to determine the extent of the participants’ awareness of the policies and their knowledge. The results are depicted in the following graph:

The surprise here is that 6 participants claimed that they are not familiar with policies and never read them and already have at least 5 years of experience.

A question that aims to measure the extent of satisfaction about the implementation of the policies related behaviour in Arabic Wikipedia provided a meter from 1 to 5, where 1 means “not satisfied at all” and 5 means “Absolutely Satisfied”, the distribution of responses showed that 24 participates are neutral (i.e. average), 18 are below average and 45 above average. Looking at admins’ opinions who participated in the survey and who are usually responsible for implementing policies in Wikipedia, 3 out of 8 are either neutral or not satisfied.

Reporting edit

Reporting Channels

The participants were requested to choose one of the suggested reporting channels they would use to complain about an unaccepted behaviour; the responses varied a lot, which may indicate users are not aware of the appropriate channels they can use as online wiki volunteers; for example, 8 (9%) participants chose to contact T&S directly, and 1 decided to contact this team only in case of harassment. A good number of participants 19 (21.8%), thought they could complain in Wikipedia itself either directly to the admins either on the talk pages of admins or on pages where the problem occurred, 21 participants (24%) chose the talk page of an article or a page of a wiki special page such as the deletion discussions page;. In comparison, 5 (5.7%) participants preferred to report in a special reporting channel on-wiki. In Arabic Wikipedia, there isn’t a defined channel for complaints. Still, the village pump is usually used for complaints, where it’s divided into different sub-pages based on topic, e.g. technical, administration, etc.. However, 26 (30%) participants prefer reporting on the village pump or a specified noticeboard in the same context. On the other hand, 4 (4.5%) participants prefer to complain on social media channels related to Arabic Wikipedia.

54% of the participants thought they could report bad-behavioural issues to the administrators with complete confidence, while only 8% thought they cannot report issues to the administrators at all.

Similarly, the participants were asked to specify to what degree they can report a bad-behavioural issue in Wikipedia to WMF Teams:

21 (24%) participants chose that they cannot report to WMF at all or to a certain extent
20 (23%) participants were neutral and
45 (52%) participants are totally confident they can report to WMF. It has been noticed that most of the participants who claimed they are able to report to admins are the same who claimed they can report to WMF.

Privacy and Confidentiality

Participants were asked to prioritize the cases they thought should be reported privately. Of the provided options, 34 chose that all cases must be reported privately, while 11 participants thought that all reports must be handled publicly. However, opinions differed about the cases that must be handled privately, votes are as follows:

52 users chose that cases related to uncovering personal information or involve accessing private information should be handled privately
35 said that cases that involve abuse and harassment should be dealt with privately
38 users support private handling of the legal issues

It’s worth mentioning that 54 participants chose at least two of the five options, which means they can assess the cases which require private investigation.

However, for the privately reported cases, 96% of the participants thought not everyone should be able to view the private cases, while only 3% thought it can be seen by everyone-volunteers and staff. This indicates that participants are fairly aware of the importance of privacy, and that they trust administrators, who usually handle the cases on-wiki. The opinions varied as depicted by this graph:

Administration and Administrators

Another question of the survey revealed that 60% of the participants think that the probability of handling reported cases by administrators is very high or high; 26% were neutral, while 14% thought that the probability is weak or minimal and 4% didn’t respond to this question.

In addition, participants were asked to evaluate their satisfaction degree about how well the cases are handled by administrators- 18 (20%) participants were dissatisfied, 42 (46%) participants were satisfied, 28 (30%) were neutral and 4 participants didn’t respond to this question.

It has been noticed that of the 53 participants who thought that the probability of handling reported cases by administrators is high, only 2 participants were dissatisfied about how well those cases are handled by administrators.

Answering the question “Have you ever decided not to report a problem that could have been reported?”, 31 (34%) participants stated that they did not report an issue that should have been reported. Linking this to a previous question about what they would do in case they face bad-behavioral situations, it has been found that those who didn’t report would either stop participating even completely (4), they would try to report what happened and at the same time they would stop participating (4). Only 2 users said that they would totally forget about it and at the same time they would stop participating and 14 thought they would totally forget about it.

However, the 31 participants tried to justify why they wouldn’t report the problems, and their justifications were either related to non-confidence on the administration or that they don’t wish to get into serious troubles especially if the problems diverge or expand. At times, this is also to avoid long and useless debates which waste their time. Others didn’t really care or claimed they are busy and have no time to report or follow up.

The following summarizes the other justifications as explained by participants: Nothing would happen to stop or govern the annoying behaviors especially when there are relations between those who behave unacceptably and the admins. The community of administrators in the Arabic Wikipedia is harsh and limited in terms of diversity of viewpoints and in number. Some exercise authority as an unquestionable administrative authority. The admins themselves create, interpret, and implement policies so that they have a level of freedom to play down problems as appropriate for themselves. Absence of a clear policy which defines the behavioral problems and suggests solutions. The communication channels with the admins are not effective nor practical; most of the behavior problems are caused by newcomers because they lack the knowledge of policies (unintentionally).

Admins from specific countries take sides with each other, especially from Arab Mashreq countries in general, and the Gulf countries in particular. The sensitivity of the topic also plays a role in the bias as most of the editors of the Arab Wikipedia support a certain stream of thought and are not neutral. Many admins do not have confidence in the transparency of dealing with behavioral problems.

Enforcement of UCoC edit

84% of the participants think that the implementation of the UCoC will not contradict with the local policies, 11% think it will contradict, while 5% haven’t expressed their opinions. The participants who think the implementation of UCoC will contradict with the local policies were asked to suggest solutions to prevent the probable contradiction. As expected, in the context of the responses to the previous questions, most of the participants agreed that adjusting and/or changing the local policies in line with UCoC is the solution as long as it considers the details and frameworks of behavioural issues.

68 participants provided some thoughts to implement the UCoC. These thoughts mainly focused on the following:

Accessibility and Awareness: Once approved, the UCoC has to be published for all communities in the main page of Wikipedia in a simplified way, and a permanent link has to be available in the side-bars of the platform interface of all projects and it can be highlighted in the upper banner from time to time as a reminder so that everyone can be aware of it. Establish a designated page for the UCoC inside Wikipedia, that can be easily accessed, this page should include a statement about its importance, that it’s there to protect participants and prevent bad behaviour. Permanent links to that page (maybe a sub-village pump) should be available either in a banner or in the footer. Other pages for reporting and for inquiries and FAQ should be made accessible too. In addition, the UCoC must be announced for newcomers who register for the first time during the registration process and periodically in the village pump and should be linked to the local policies. Implementation has to be done firmly, fairly, securely, in a timely manner and neutrally.
Reporting: Clarify the reporting mechanism using videos and infographics, share it using social media channels, and send it to the talk pages of all participants. The UCoC should include guidelines for users to be able to identify the accepted and unaccepted behaviour. The easier the reporting is, the more powerful the UCoC will be. Add an option to report unacceptable actions and harassment in a flexible and easy way whether to the admins or to WMF. Educate individuals about the importance of reporting harassment and bullying they may face and teach them how to report. Behavioral problems should be directly reported to the foundation because local admins are not cooperative. Clarify the cases when the cases can be published as lessons learned.
Administration and Local Policies: Discussions and performance of admins must be monitored, and they have to be trained to implement the UCoC. Admins have to be open-minded and accept discussions and opinions specially with newcomers, ready to clearly explain and justify actions; they have to be trained to manage reports professionally based on trusted references regardless of the involved people with the problem. The governance structure in Arabic Wikipedia must be reviewed. Enhance communication channels with administrators as it needs to be more flexible and easier.
Enforcers: The complaints should be handled by trusted people from the community who fairly manage situations without bias. Reports should be handled by teams and not individuals. Members of such teams should discuss the reports and solutions as groups. A separate team should be formed to be responsible for the enforcement of UCoC without affecting or being affected by the administrators. Local Policies and governance ways must be changed and enhanced in line with UCoC as long as it considers details and the frameworks of the proper handling of behavioural problems. it must be enforced in a way that minimizes useless debates. Assign a designated team (can be annually elected team) to monitor the implementation and effectiveness of implementation.
Revisions: The UCoC should be monitored and updated periodically to fill any probable gaps, and add clarifications to terms as needed. Revisions should involve open and continual discussions with communities to guarantee the needed enhancements take place.

Finally, participants were asked to define the support the community will need to implement the UCoC effectively. The responses mainly focused on making the UCoC accessible and easy to be read and comprehended. Users said that there is a need to increase awareness and enhance the platform itself and trusted references are provided. Collaboration should be encouraged so that less problems will arise and more respect will be noticed. Specialized elected teams and intermediaries should be elected between the community and the foundation. This is mostly for moral support. The implementation should be gradual, the results won’t be instant. There is also a need to increase the number of admins with different backgrounds and experiences, which will create the required balance that enhances the entire ecosystem.

Summary of Meta Discussions edit

The meta page is the landing page where consultees provided their feedback directly and feedback collected in meetings was added. To make it easy for the consultees, 8 questions were formed as guidelines; The questions aim at collecting thoughts about:

The challenges the Arabic community faces in implementing the local policies to control behavior of participants.
Safe reporting: means to ensure that participants can report bad behavior in a way that guarantees their safety and protection.
How local capacities can be developed in terms of advocating legal and regulatory frameworks that our communities need
What should be done to ensure that the UCoC does not conflict with the policies currently implemented in the community?
Reporting ways that protect privacy and ensure a sense of security, while at the same time transparency and accountability are considered when managing reports.
The means that should be followed to ensure the optimal and efficient implementation of the UCoC.
Support that WMF may need to provide to ensure effective implementation of the UCoC in the Arabic community.
Responsibilities related to the implementation of the Code.

The following summarizes the cumulative replies of participants to the core questions:

Challenges edit

Challenges Arabic Wikipedia community face regarding the implementation and execution of policies in order to govern the behaviour of individuals and groups who participate in enriching the Wikipedia content, online:

Interest and awareness: Lack of interest, carelessness towards solving the problems, not only from editors but also from Admins. The role of the community is not effective. Many newcomers, even many editors, are not really aware of the existence of these policies and codes of conduct, including knowledge about the foundation, its teams, roles, operations and its laws; many volunteers do not know whom to reach out to in the foundation, when needed; even if they would know, there are many linguistic and cultural gaps that prevent many volunteers from reaching out and understanding/sharing their experiences. Finally, many volunteers don’t accept policies; there are incorrect assumptions about how administrators implement policies.
Implementation Mechanisms: Lack of clear mechanisms to enforce legal policies, how complaints are handled, starting with receiving the complaint to the conclusion; many times, handling problems is not being done fairly. Lack of clear text, that guides admins, causes long time-wasting discussion to achieve a concord on things that everyone agrees on; this makes long delays instead of moving fast to protect users.
Administrators: The community highlighted many problems related to admins themselves, such as lack of specialization and experience, being obstinate, implementation of policies is subject to personal opinions; there have been incidents where specific admins tried to thwart suggestions proposed by specific users due to personal disagreements; and there are incidents where implementation was not fair because parties tried to get even with each other concerning previous issues. Lack of impartiality and professionalism because of personalization on one hand and courtesy on the other hand; implementing policies is guided by personal relations and levels of power. Some admins don’t really understand the policies, and many times they just overlook them; some interpret and implement policies in a way that serves their goals or tendencies, intentionally or unintentionally.; On the other hand, administrators suffer from how volunteers view some cases in which the administrator participates in implementing a certain policy. Administrators also suffer from the anxiety of being attacked or the dire consequences of intervening against potentially harmful parties like those who write on political or controversial issues. It is sometimes easy to locate an administrator because he/she is well known in the community and his/her personal information is known, so avoiding harm cannot be guaranteed.
Policies: Policies are not inclusive, simplified and suffer from deficiency, and therefore they need permanent and continuous development. Behavioural policies need a lot of enhancements in order to cover all possible and required rules and principles. Focus on policies that aim to control how people should deal with each other, personal attacks, and harassment. Policies still lack details and guidelines on how to deal with those who violate behavior intentionally, especially users of sock-puppets and IP addresses specifically to cause harm and harassment.
Reporting: Users may decide not to report a problem, if they are afraid of psychological or social repercussions of the complaint or its impact on their life. On the other hand, the challenge relates to the persons who will investigate and handle the complaint is transparency, integrity and impartiality, as personal relations and attempts to influence the parties to arbitration often interfere with the strict implementation of the codes and governing policies; reporting pathways should be made generic so that the reported issues are presented without uncovering personalities, which may guarantee that Judgement is personal.
Threats: There are possibilities that implementation of policies on the ground, may cause harm to the complainant or to the person applying the policy. How users can be protected from moral and physical threats is a challenge. In most countries, one cannot seek assistance from state government institutions. Civil community organizations can assist in legal advocacy, but this is actually ineffective in our region, so the Foundation must find adequate and feasible solutions to this problem, by partnering or communicating with these institutions and providing financial support for advocacy, by resorting to legal agencies to protect users.

Unlike online volunteers, members who participate in affiliate’s projects on-ground have their identities known/disclosed and are more exposed to different threats.

Safe Reporting edit

Define the reporting pathways, through which participants can safely report problems and incidents related to behavior, so that the person who report a problem feels safe and protected:

Awareness

Participants who provided feedback think that more work should be done to educate volunteers about their rights and to introduce policies and codes of conduct easily, such as posting short educational videos or quizzes (for example, automatically inviting newcomers on Wikipedia to watch them) or hiring local groups to conduct training for all members. Volunteers should be aware that the Code of Conduct is there to protect them and address their behavior related problems.

Reporting Pathways

The following different ideas were provided:

Participants must be able to report problems anonymously without needing to disclose their identity; participants must have the choice to share with trusted contacts from their communities and other trusted employees in WMF as medium.
Protect people against false accusation, and that can happen if the accused person is reached out to and questioned. There are cases when people received warning by T&S in response to complaints without knowing anything about the accusation and without defending themselves. This causes distrust and affects the roles T&S is supposed to play.
Create a space for free expression that provides individuals with several options simultaneously and without complication, including confidentiality in extreme cases
Designate a special email for reporting such problems that hinder the development of Wikipedia Arabic to the Foundation. Activate the role jury again.
Design a system similar to OTRS, where victims can add tickets. This would make it easier to track and organize complaints, and at the same time cannot be accessed but only by persons who have special authority. Complaints must be specified by a timeframe within which investigation and solution should be offered, because many problems get aggravated because of slow responses and sense of ignorance.
Link the UCoC and the reporting system to the existing OTRS, because currently, many complaints are being sent there.
Design a formal reporting form or a template, where the complainant chooses to include or exclude the personal data; the form can help the complainant identify a category of the complaint. This includes adding complaints about a process for example, not necessarily against a person. The proposed form should include yes/no questions that help categorize the problem and write the complaint itself. This will encourage reporting violations.
By adding an on-wiki link to report sensitive issues that cannot be reported to the public. The tool can be developed in a smart way to forward the report to the related authorities based on the type of complaint.
Provide several reporting pathways, where one can choose the easiest and safest way, whether it's an email or a dedicated bot that gathers complaints through social media, these pathways should guarantee that complaints are dealt with confidentiality and seriously. Pathways should allow complaints to be assigned to specialized teams without providing details about the complainants, the team has to be reliable and neutral to increase effectiveness.
Volunteers should be aware of how to report problems in a certain sequence; that is, problems related to Wikipedia and articles should be communicated with administrators, while problems that involve threats and violate the person's security must be reported to the foundation; this could increase the degree of safety.
Affiliates should be trained to manage contradictions and have clear pathways about whom to contact in case of a needed escalation, or when they are not able to solve problems themselves. Currently, most of the community members are lost, and therefore either they do not care about these issues, or they leave the movement after giving up, either because their words are not heard, or they were accused without proofs.

Processes

Feedback also included some thoughts about the assumed reporting and investigation processes. This included:

It’s better not to inform the defendant unless the victim (i.e. complainant) approves that, to avoid revenge or retaliate the victim.
To build trust, communications with the victim should be done in the language he/she prefers using the medium he/she wants (e.g. voice, in writing, etc.)
The investigation of the matter must be confidential.
Protect people who report by not declaring their identities or any related information to the public, and sometimes, identities should be kept confidential during the investigations.
The fair handling of complaints must be ensured by informing the complainant about the progress of the investigation being done, starting from receiving the complaint, through initial opinions and decisions, investigations made, ending with the final discussions and solutions including any options available to resolve the dispute.
Each report should be accompanied with written, audible or visual evidence to ensure none accuses others falsely.

It is very important to define the problem away from any elastic terminology, for example, the term harassment is socially linked in our heritage to sexual harassment, but language may mean harassment by verbal harassment without necessarily a sexual connotation, so the reporting methods must include a full explanation of the complaint so that the description is accurate and does not cause embarrassment to the parties to the conflict.

Responsibilities

Reporting is not only related to the pathways, but also to the persons who will be responsible for receiving and handling the reported cases and complaints. Basically, three types of teams are suggested:

Provide a dedicated investigation team, who should be committed to submit reports about the investigation results including the communications made, in order to ensure transparency and confidence.
Appointing one or more neutral observers with administrative authority to monitor how reported problems are solved.
Appointing an impartial arbitration panel that is highly accepted by the community, who would apply the code without favoring a group or an individual over others, to which complaints can be escalated in case issues are not resolved by mutual consent, or to report to in case of administrative complaints.

Advancing Local Capacity of Community to support legal and organisational frameworks needed to develop projects edit

How can the local capacity of the community be advanced to supporting the legal and organizational frameworks that our communities need to develop our projects?

Not all replies were related to the question directly, but the focus was mainly on raising awareness and engaging participants in general; for example, they have to participate in discussions that lead to decisions and to the future of Wikipedia, which would empower and motivate them to participate broadly and would increase the capacity. This also requires educating volunteers about their rights and responsibilities, and that should help them confront any activity that may affect their contribution by reporting violation and unaccepted behaviour, regardless of the power the person who violates rules has.

Of the proposed practices:

to regularly start thorough and open discussions that include WMF, where realistic problems are discussed with communities, this can be designated to qualified people too; intensify special training courses;
or supervise a special group on social media for education and for published lessons learned from serious cases that were managed by UCoC;
developing a package for all communities can be beneficial, in general, and then digging into the specifications of legal frameworks of countries will help in harmonising the UCoS systems with the policies of Wikipedia and legal frameworks of WMF on the one hand, and the applicable bylaws and regulations on the other hand;
create an introductory guide to policies and UCoC;
appoint persons to observe the implementation;
raise awareness through bulletins, interviews and videos that provide advice, or develop tools that help publish guidelines in the users’ talk pages.

Communities can initiate projects to develop and implement these tools and resources within a project that’s supported financially by WMF; a grant can help hire implementation specialists.

In addition, there is a need for active partnerships with legal institutions, specialists and consultants who are interested and may work with charitable, non-profit parties to defend human rights issues related to complaints that affect the safety of individuals; whether, in our case, these complaints are reported through Wikipedia or in case any Wikipedian receives external threats.

UCoC and Local Policies edit

Will the UCoC Contradict with the local policies? How can this be guaranteed?

Almost all opinions agreed that the UCoC must comply with the local policies and must both be merged in away, and even if it doesn’t comply with the local policies, the policies need to be updated to be harmonised with the UCoC; this is the responsibility of the community. Accordingly, the UCoC won’t contradict with local policies as long as it’s not exploited to harm constants, and people won’t assume unacceptable cases because the UCoC allows interpreting things differently.

Participants stressed that the priority in implementation is for the local policies, in case of gaps, the implementers should refer to the UCoC. Others thought the UCoC should take precedence over the local policies; in the latest cases, someone mentioned that the team responsible for creating the code should understand the policies of communities, and cooperate with active users in activities to create new local policies, especially those related to legal issues. This requires multi-lingual support.

Effective Implementation edit

How can the UCoC be enforced and implemented effectively and fairly in our community?

Responses to this question didn’t differ from what the participants replied to the previous questions; for example, many thought that the key success factors of the implementation include: educating and raising awareness of volunteers continuously using simple material like videos and introductory courses and FAQ on-wiki pages, clear policies and enforcement mechanism and reporting pathways that everyone knows about and can access, continuous discussions about behaviour of community members, considering behavioural reports seriously and providing the required tools to protect people against Moral or physical harassment, establish qualified implementation teams which should monitor and guide the process of integrating the local policies with UCoC, and assign known neutral observers and an experienced intermediary between the community and the foundation who would cooperate in applying the code effectively, periodic reviews including asking volunteers about how much they know about it and about the policies.

The ideas about the foundation role varied, as some participants though that the role of WMF should be clear and limited to guidance and consultation, while ownership and the implementation should be left to the community; while others thought reports should be directed or forwarded to the foundation based on the nature of the problems, however, there is a great need to build better trust between teams such as T&S and the community, this is crucial as this team specifically is the initiator of the "regulations" which will be enforced.

Comment for Drafting Committee: more interactive discussions should be organized with communities, especially video calls and office hours where people can directly meet the writers/decision-makers and engage with them.

Support Needed edit

What ways and means of support may WMF be required to provide to ensure an effective and practical enforcement of the UCoC in our community?

The support needed from the WMF is all about creating educational content in all languages in different formats such as videos, help established cohesive local policies that integrate with UCoC, conduct periodic sessions to raise awareness of how to implement UCoC that targets all communities, share real case studies that have been thoroughly studied that include the types of serious harassment that must be reported and how these cases are handled securely, help establish specialised diverse teams that consider diversity, cooperate with the communities in publishing the mechanism and reporting systems in all social media pages and on-wiki, seek periodic feedback after the implementation for evaluation and enhancement purposes; help establishing good relationships and communication with law authorities which should support individuals in turn in case of serious cases like harassment, and in case of threats from external parties against individuals or affiliates, designated specialised teams to support the local communities and train the persons who’ll be responsible for implementation; assign trained officers to work with the communities that require support, and finally there will be need for technical and financial support to help the communities generate the required material and tools.

Implementers and Responsible Users edit

What thought can you share with us regarding who will be responsible for implementing the UCoC?

Global council that may include those who participated in the drafting committees, a committee that consists of diversity of users half elected and half appointed.

Some preferred that the committees should include the admins and stewards, but it should also include other levels of users in condition that all are reliable, serious, experienced, trusted and accepted by the community, however, the committee must be empowered and supported to be able to protect users and encourage them to report the unaccepted cases they face; in all cases, WMF must cooperate with the community to find the reliable members who are willing to take the responsibility by doing intensive investigation about the nominees and must provide them with the required training.

However, other participants prefer that WMF assign officers who don’t relate to communities because they will be able to protect users and preserve their confidentiality; and finally some opinions suggest teams that include a mix of trusted community members who have a good history along with officers from the foundation. In addition, some participants thought that Arbcom team must be activated, with support from other arbcom teams who are willing to share their experience that can be adapted by other groups.

Universal Code of Conduct/2021 consultations/Enforcement/Arabic community

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