Community Safety
Welcome!
The Community Safety survey is being conducted to understand contributors’ sense of safety on different wiki spaces, and how it changes over time. This anonymous survey provides communities and the Wikimedia Foundation with data to support and measure whether activities related to the 2030 Movement Strategy recommendation to "Provide for Safety and Inclusion" are effective in changing experiences of safety in Wikimedia spaces.
The data will be reported back to surveyed communities on the Reports tab of this Meta portal.
The survey is being administered by the Global Data and Insights team, with technical support for Quick Surveys from the Trust and Safety tools team. In using Quick Surveys, our goal is to make this survey anonymous, so that nobody can know who was asked the question, who answered it, or how they answered on an individual or small group level. The survey privacy statement and Frequently Asked Questions tab provide more information about the data we collect, share, and process and report.
Read the Frequently Asked Questions for more information about this survey, and ask questions and provide your feedback on our Talk Page!
What does it mean to feel unsafe or uncomfortable while contributing?
The Foundation acknowledges that feeling unsafe is shaped by culture, language, and context. As a complex movement, we cannot define for any single individual what it means to feel unsafe, because we cannot tell anyone how they feel.
As a basic starting point, we might say that feeling unsafe could be feeling that your physical, mental, or general sense of well-being is threatened as a result of your involvement with or contributions to a particular community.
Examples of why one might be made to feel unsafe include (but are not limited to):
- Fear of or harm resulting from being doxxed (having your identity revealed) by another user or group of current or former users.
- Fear of or harm resulting from another user or group threatening you or harassing you, whether online or off-line.
- Fear that your contributions to controversial pages or discussions may result in, or have resulted in, negative personal, social, or political repercussions.
- Fear that your contributions to controversial pages or discussions may result in, or have resulted in, retaliation from an individual, group, organization, and/or state.
- Fear that the disclosure of a specific identity category you inhabit (for example, gender identity, ethnicity, nationality, race, among others) could result in, or has resulted in, you being harassed or targeted by other users.
Feeling unsafe or uncomfortable could also include other aspects of contributing that cause one to feel fearful or avoidant to continue contributing, such as frequent talk page conflict leading to stress, anxiety, and risks to mental well-being that cause a person to want to "escape" the situation.
If you have been harassed and would like to report an incident, or would like more resources, please check out the local community processes on your wiki. For further information on Foundation T&S services, see the Trust and Safety portal.
Please remember to not post personal experiences regarding safety and harassment on the Community Safety survey talk page, and instead bring them to the attention of the relevant local self-governance processes.