Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-09-30/From the editors

Wikipedia’s constitutional crisis may have come to an end.

The Wikimedia Foundation agreed that the English-language Arbitration Committee would have full power to review the one-year ban against administrator Fram. Three months later ArbCom unbanned Fram and removed his admin status while allowing him to apply for its reinstatement. The RfA failed and Fram withdrew. The details of the Fram case are covered in this month’s Special report. This article explores how we can address the underlying issues of the case moving forward.

At first glance, Wikipedia’s multilevel decision making process has shown that the en:Wiki community can protect its independence from the WMF, can make nuanced decisions about admin incivility and harassment, and protect editors against harassment once they file a complaint.

But on closer inspection, none of that was accomplished. The process was agonizingly slow, confused, and just ugly. The community did not come up with a method to minimize harassment in everyday practice. The difficulty of giving accused harassers enough information to defend themselves while protecting their accusers against potential further harassment was underlined. And any cooperation between the WMF and ArbCom or the community to prevent harassment was trashed as the WMF was routinely derided as the cause of the whole affair.

We believe that three issues must be addressed simultaneously before the constitutional crisis is resolved:

• How to protect editors against harassment? If we can’t protect our editors, we’ll lose our best and brightest. Wikipedia may become the playground of trolls.
• Can we find a reasonable method for accused harassers to defend themselves while still preserving the accuser’s ability to file a complaint without further harassment? and
• Can we cooperate using all the tools of the community, ArbCom, and the WMF to prevent harassment before it happens and deal effectively with it after a complaint is made? If we treat the WMF as the enemy, we’ll be losing many of the tools that can minimize harassment.

— The Signpost

A proposal that ignores one of the issues will ultimately fail on all three counts.