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Grants talk:IdeaLab/Community review for potentially toxic users

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Latest comment: 6 years ago by Tafkira2

I appreciate very much the effort here, particularly to spread wider the community capacity to flag users as toxic. This is very important to avoid a few users blacklisting or tarnishing a user's reputation. However, I'm concerned that the system proposed here could still be used by a coordinated group to unfairly target someone as "toxic." There are lobbies in the Wikipedia community that are purely political and for whom the presumption of good will and good faith suggested in this proposal is simply not justified.

Here I'm thinking specifically of the Israel lobby, which regularly mobilizes thousands of people to pitch in on any issue relevant to Israel, by censoring and gate-keeping contributions. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about a constituency of people who feel strongly about Israel. I'm talking about a global network that is guided and sometimes funded by the Hasbara branch of Israel's Foreign Ministry, that assumes the guise of individual initiatives. There is nothing more "toxic" for objective discussion on Wikipedia than this kind of unnprincipled behavior.

On the other hand, if this proposal could help identify and restrict the impact of such front-voices for Israel, as for other special interests, I'd be greatly in favor. Could the question of bad-faith actors be addressed more explicitly in the proposal Tafkira2 (talk) 21:51, 28 July 2018 (UTC)Reply