Talk:Wikimedia LGBT+/email

My thoughts

Hey, thank you dear Fæ for putting this together. Here my thoughts on improving this:

• First of all we need to determine how we want to advertise about this. i.e. if someone feels harassed in Chinese Wikipedia or someone wants to work on LGBT-related articles in Greek Wikipedia but doesn't know anyone. How This person would know about this help desk?
• I think we need exclude junk e-mails (spam or non-spam) from Transferring queues part. What do you think?
• We need to determine on what languages people can send e-mail. Just English? or any languages that volunteers know? the latter sounds better but it would make some problems like answering late, or not getting enough attention for sensitive material because of language. My suggestion is to tell any language from the list is okay but English is highly encouraged.
• The most important issue: What is the use of this queue? We need to determine that very clearly. it will help us to know how we want advertise or make the inquiry flow chart. I add some use cases please add any thing you like:
  • Take action against any type of LGBT-related cyberbullying and harassment in WMF projects. The flow chart for this type of request is at first contact the related users like admins, oversights and if local admins are not willing to take action contact WMF.
  • A hub to Wikimedia LGBT in actions like linking people to each other for similar actions. like: if we got a message like "I'm an editor in German Wikipedia and want to make same-sex marriage article featured but I don't know anyone. Can you help me?" we find some people in Wikimedia LGBT who know German and willing to help and link these people to work together on the article. I think this part needs to be expanded.
  • Answering general LGBT-related questions.

Again, thank you for doing this. Best Amir (talk) 20:36, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

• There are probably a few hurdles to pass through before advertising, however once we are ready to go, mentioning the new 'channel/queue' on OTRS noticeboard headers and dropping a few notes in village pumps is probably a good start. Discussing adding a link to the general safe space policy or more specific diversity policies would be an idea, as interested users might be looking in those places too. Once we are well underway, such as 3 months in, we might want to get a Wikimedia blog post together to relay what sorts of questions are being raised behind the scenes and the value of the queue.
• Yes with regard to spam. Some automatic identification goes on and any spam can be knocked out by allocating it as spam.
• I would like us to offer as many languages as possible. We might want to list out publicly what languages our active volunteers can handle, this might also entice more multilingual volunteers to join in.
• I suspect that the hounding/bullying issue will end up being only a small component of emails we get. I'll return to the flowchart, but so long as the email is not an emergency, our first response is to listen. I would be cautious about encouraging or taking action unless there is a long term pattern; most often any issue is simple vandalism (we get a lot of "X is gay!" or "X sucks cock!" and this rarely turns out to be more than childish vandalism using throw-away sock accounts or IP addresses). Many Wikimedians who feel hounded or have the impression that they are being discriminated against, might be better off in the long term by not making any public response. Project policies will probably be sufficient to address any issue, though if something deeper comes up, for example a credible claim that a project is itself systematically biased, we might actually be in a better position to encourage change through discussion than the WMF, as their own policies make it impossible to be seen to control content.
• I agree with expanding being a content hub, feel free to add to the document if I don't get to it first. Though email might be a starting point, I would hope that anything along these lines could be publicly discussed on meta or similar.

--Fæ (talk) 10:28, 19 August 2014 (UTC)