Wikimedia Ethics/Participants and objectives

People resources

 * WAS 4.250 — Role: Project Organizer and Coordinator
 * Gregory Kohs — Role: Adjunct communications and public relations advisor
 * Fiery Angel — Role: Keeping it real, Devil's advocate and court composer
 * --SB_Johnny | talk (temporarily on break from this project).
 * Dzonatas -- Ethical Management of the English Language Wikipedia/Ethics and MediaWiki
 * Anonymous101 I am a Wikinews admin so I am particularly interested in contributing to the sections of this resource related to Wikinews
 * Centaur of attention. I'm a Wikipedian in good standing who's sole goal here is to ensure a fair and balanced presentation of Wikipedians and that links to sites outing Wikipedians are not added by anyone.
 * Dtobias (Dan T.). I'm a Wikipedian in good standing whose primary goal here is to ensure a fair and balanced presentation of Wikipedians and that the censorious and ridiculous BADSITES pseudo-policy is not applied or enforced in any way on this project, but I'm not a "single purpose account" with a monomanaical obsession, so I'll try to participate constructively in other aspects of the project as well.
 * Sxeptomaniac I've been looking in on the project, and it does have some interesting goals, so I'll see what I can do. (I'm also a Wikipedian in good standing, but my participation carries no particular goals at this time)
 * User:JWSchmidt - I'm late, but I'm trying to catch up!
 * John Vandenberg - I plan to help monitoring/moderating this learning project, provided all participants are OK with that (lets review this in a week).

Background
A substantial number of current and former participants of the English Wikipedia community have lamentably noted an increasing incidence of ethical lapses in the management of that project's mission. Some of these incidents have been discussed in Criticisms of Wikipedia, including some issues laid at the feet of Jimmy Wales. But more importantly, there seems to be a broad, systemic breakdown within the socio-cultural and political architecture of the Wikipedia community, as evidenced by incidents such as WP:BADSITES, botched rulings from the Arbitration Committee, and perhaps most importantly, serious errors and ethical irregularities with biographies of living persons.

To some extent these same concerns apply to Wikinews as well.

Objectives of the participants
You can add your own vision of goals for the project (make it as similar as you can or you might as well just create your own separate project) and then create subpages as you need them. Remember that original research backed up by evidence is allowed here, but the end goal is creating useful learning resources. Go for it. Bring your friends and become involved. This project exists in the spirit of cooperation.

Please add or move content created in good faith. Try not to delete things unnecessarily.

WAS 4.250 (specific)

 * Identify ethical practises that should be followed and can be objectively measured with available resources and can be improved by a learning resource at Wikiversity
 * Carry out practical objective evaluation of ethical management of the English language Wikipedia
 * Create learning resource to help with identified problems
 * Promote use of that learning resource and adjust according to feedback

Gregory Kohs
Adds "or an active existing organization, community, or corporation" to the end of Moulton's first paragraph:

The primary objective of this project is to promote the achievement of a respectable level of accuracy, excellence, and ethics in online media, especially when the subject at hand is an identifiable living person or an active existing organization, community, or corporation.

Laughs out loud that someone on the Foundation-l mailing list is already calling this project an "attack vector". Sigh.


 * Fascinating, eh? Note that fascination comes from fascinare meaning to bewitch.  There is a strange and uncanny connection to Fascinus a Roman deity symbolized by a phallus (think WP:DICK).  The word is not related to Fascism (but probably should be, in this context).  Compare scientific fascination with ridiculous fascination.  —Moulton 00:38, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Why would fascinare (from fascinum (spell, witchcraft)) be related to fasces? Why would anyone think it was? DutchHarbor 22:17, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

The Fieryangel (specific)
The Fieryangel thinks that WP is like Christianity, in that if the principles of Christianity were ever completely implemented in the World, everything would be fine. However, it would seem that people only pretend to be "Christians" and only pretend to be "Wikipedians".

The Fieryangel thinks that the solution to all of this nonsense lies in the confrontation between what is said and what is done. In other words, if people actually followed WP policy to the letter, these problems would cease to exist...

Anonymous101 (general)
As with Moulton, I think the primary objective of this project is to promote the achievement of a respectable level of accuracy, excellence, and ethics in online media and journalism, especially when the subject at hand is an identifiable living person. I also believe that this project should consider the different systems and which would be best for achieving the greatest level of ethics.

Discussion of differences
Moulton wishes a broader approach with an initial inclusion of Wikinews. Note that Wikinews started to craft a Wikinews Code of Ethics in January 2005, but the effort stalled out after about 2 years and languished until recently.

WAS 4.250 is more concerned with keeping it focused on immediate specific attainable activities to produce learning resources that admins at the English language Wikipedia will find useful.

Gregory Kohs wishes BLP level sensitivity to groups of humans. An arbcom member proposed that at Wikipedia also, so it is well within mainline thought.

The Fieryangel wishes that people would get real, for a change.... If people were honest, then these problems wouldn't happen.