Commons talk:Harassment

Proposal: remove exceptions for COI and paid editing under "Posting of personal information"

Having been copied from English Wikipedia, this new policy has some exceptions that don't really make sense here. Notably, Commons has a policy of not requiring disclosure of paid editing and no policy on conflicts of interest (COI), so it's unnecessary to have exemptions from the harassment policy to allow people to report these. So I propose that the following sentences be removed: "There are job posting sites where employers publicly post advertisements to recruit paid Wikimedia Commons editors. Linking to such an ad in a forum is not a violation of this policy. Also, if individuals have identified themselves without redacting or having it oversighted, such information can be used for discussions of conflict of interest (COI) in appropriate forums. If redacted or oversighted personally identifying material is important to the COI discussion, then it should be emailed privately to an administrator—but not repeated on Wikimedia Commons: it will be sufficient to say that the editor in question has a COI and the information has been emailed to the appropriate administrative authority. Issues involving private personal information (of anyone) could also be referred by email to a member of the functionaries team." Similarly, the words "conflict of interest or paid editing, in the previous paragraph should be removed. Would there be agreement to do that? --bjh21 (talk) 13:12, 1 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would keep this but change it from investigation of COI to investigations of possible copyright violations. GPSLeo (talk) 13:52, 1 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think we should have some kind of exception for reporting copyright violations, but I think it would be better written from scratch rather than by modifying enwiki's COI processes. Not to mention, the above text is pretty badly written. We can do better. I might suggest something once this proposal passes or fails. --bjh21 (talk) 09:46, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Contacting administrators privately

Commons:Harassment#Off-wiki harassment says "Users who experience inappropriate off-wiki contact should report occurrences privately to any administrator." Did all Commons administrators here sign up for this? It might actually be a good idea to do so, but I haven't seen it discussed as a well-established sysop duty in places like RFA. (But I can imagine such practice might exist while not being well known.) whym (talk) 10:19, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For on-wiki cases it is already a common practice to contact an admin you know and trust directly through non public channels in such cases and even more in cases of accidentally published private information. I think this is also the way to go for harassment via email. Only for offline events Commons admins are usually not the correct one to address. For offline events there are the organisers of the event or the T&S team. GPSLeo (talk) 13:20, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like we can just point readers to m:Friendly space policies for offline issues. Commons could have its own guidance on some Commons specific issues (unwanted disclosure of location information comes to my mind), but I don't think we have established one for now. whym (talk) 10:48, 14 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

My understanding is that this section says that regular users are not expected to receive private communication from other users by default, but administrators are expected to do so. Don't we have to add a few words about that in Commons:Administrators, and inform (or remind?) existing administrators? I'm not sure unwritten agreement is good enough for this. whym (talk) 10:56, 14 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think Commons:Guide to adminship adequately covers the expectation that admins will be able to receive email. Notably, it says "Make sure you have enabled email in your preferences" and "Have your email confirmed, so blocked users can contact you". I expect the guide will be updated to specifically cover private harassment reports once admins have some experience of them. --bjh21 (talk) 13:16, 14 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Editors do not own their files"?

What possibly can this mean where it says "Editors do not own their files"? If I upload a file under a CC-BY or CC-BY-SA, I continue to own copyright on that file. I continue to have the right to be attributed if it is reused, or if derivatives are made. Commons itself certainly "owns" nothing by hosting it. We have a pretty strong statement in COM:OVERWRITE that there are few circumstances should be overwriting it with significant changes without my consent. So what exactly is it that this asserts I don't "own"? - Jmabel ! talk 18:39, 6 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've slightly boldly updated the words "not own" to link to Commons:Ownership of pages and files rather than Commons:Licensing, which I think provides a rather better indication of what is meant. On the other hand, that page also disagrees with COM:OVERWRITE, so possibly it needs some work too. --bjh21 (talk) 20:45, 6 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing there says the copyright-holder does not own the contents of the file. In fact, quite the opposite, in that it emphasizes the importance of keeping the original version in the file history.
I would add another thing I believe the copyright-holder "owns": the attribution that goes with a CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, or similar license. No one else is entitled to say something like "Oh, no, it's OK if you just credit Wikmedia Commons."
Yes, there are parts of Commons:Ownership of pages and files that absolutely contradict COM:OVERWRITE. I'd say COM:OVERWRITE is far closer to the policy we enforce, and Commons:Ownership of pages and files should change accordingly. I'll bring that to the Village pump. - Jmabel ! talk 21:58, 6 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Banning

Commons:Harassment talks about banning twice. Do we have banning? It looks like we don't have en:Wikipedia:Banning policy. Is it close to something written in Commons:Blocking policy? (Maybe "controversial blocks"?) whym (talk) 11:59, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Whym: As far as I know, Commons has no community ban process, so I'd suggest just removing mentions of bans. Concretely, that would be removing "and in extreme cases, banning" and "or being subjected to a community ban". --bjh21 (talk) 20:15, 10 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's been over a week an no-one has objected to the obvious fix, so I've updated the policy accordingly. Thank you Whym for spotting the problem! --bjh21 (talk) 22:39, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Outing of authors of files

The current policy under "Posting of personal information" forbids among other things posting the legal name of another editor except when they're disclosed it themselves on Commons. It also says that "This applies to the personal information of both editors and non-editors." That means that posting the legal name of any person who hasn't themselves mentioned it on Commons is not allowed. That would mean that a lot of our files would need to be deleted, because they're credited (as required by their licences) to the legal names of people who've never used Commons. As a concrete example, take this recent GeographBot upload. I can't find any existing exemption that allows it to stay on Commons. Have I missed something? If not, I think we might want to come up with some way to permit identifying authors of works. --bjh21 (talk) 23:07, 4 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Clearly the intention is to allow this, the statement is just poorly worded. By this standard, nearly every accurately attributed artwork from a museum, every signed government document, etc. would be a violation. - Jmabel ! talk 04:51, 5 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is a newly implemented policy that was copy-pasted from en-WP, afaik. The wording should be changed. We currently state: Posting another editor's personal information is harassment, unless that person has voluntarily posted their own information, or links to such information, on Wikimedia Commons.. The whole paragraph clearly refers to editors, and only mentions non-editors at the very end: This applies to the personal information of both editors and non-editors.

In my opinion, that final sentence needs to be struck, as non-contributors to Commons are a whole different thing from editors (the whole chapter is about editor privacy). However, we need a paragraph about non-editors in the chapter "Harassing those outside of the editing community":

"While contributing to Commons, editors are also required to be circumspect not to divulge personal information of non-contributors, where doing so would violate the personality rights of those non-contributors. It is usually okay to submit images that state the names of depicted people (for example those who agreed to be photographed and named; or are depicted in their public roles; or are people of public interest in general). File creators, who contributed their files into the public domain elsewhere and required name attribution, also need to be properly attributed as per the original license, even if that includes personal information. However, giving out non-contributor's personal information against their will, and especially their adresses, contact information or identification numbers, is an unacceptable behaviour. Non-contributors as well as editors may challenge contributions to Commons that unduly divulged personal information, in order to restore their personality rights.

The suggested addition does not promise anything concrete, but implies that challenges are to be handled on a case-by-case basis, as I think they should. I do remember a certain challenge like that: File talk:Guard fitness program shows results 140523-Z-ZZ999-011.jpg: The file is still on Commons, but the name of the drill sergeant who was photographed on-duty has now been suppressed. As far as I'm aware, Commons wouldn't have been required to do so (she was depicted in her official role as public servant), but doing so was a common sense decision anyway. --Enyavar (talk) 15:01, 21 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Seconding what Enyavar says here. Good approach. I'd say that unless someone disagrees within 72 hours, just make the edit; we can improve wording later if needed. Jmabel ! talk 17:44, 21 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]