Training modules/Dealing with online harassment/slides/what-kind-of-support-can-the-wikimedia-foundation-offer

Providing support and advice: What kind of support can the Wikimedia Foundation offer?

The Wikimedia Foundation's Support and Safety team ("SuSa") is always available as a resource to both you and harassment targets. However, while SuSa is always happy to provide advice, it can only take action in the most severe of cases. This can include cases where a community has already taken unsuccessful steps to resolve the harassment or cases of harassment serious enough that the community cannot resolve it themselves. Here are a few types of help the Wikimedia Foundation can offer:

• Emergencies: If a threat to someone's real-life safety has been made on a Wikimedia project (for instance, a harasser threatening to find someone's home and hurt them), you should immediately report that threat (including diffs) to the Support & Safety team's emergency email hotline (emergency@wikimedia.org). While the Support & Safety team is multilingual and will do their best to handle reports in any language, you may feel that it would be more useful to reach out directly to your or the target's local authorities. We encourage you to do so – especially in combination with reporting to SuSa. This hotline is monitored 24 hours a day, and the staff who monitor it are able to quickly pass such situations on to law enforcement or others who can help ensure the safety of the threatened person.
• Terms of Use violations: Though many activities that violate Wikimedia's Terms of Use can be and usually are handled by local communities (for instance, undisclosed paid editing), the Wikimedia Foundation is the primary line of defence between communities and more severe violations such as threats, privacy violations, and injection of malicious software. In these cases, and when the situation is not a safety emergency that should go through the "Emergency hotline", you should reach out to the Support & Safety team at ca@wikimedia.org with details of the case. SuSa will review the situation and pursue appropriate solutions.
  • Please note: If you pass an investigation to the Wikimedia Foundation, you will not be given details of their subsequent investigation. While the Support & Safety team will try to keep you informed of the status of the case, investigation details are considered confidential.
• Target support: The Support & Safety team exists to assist and protect our users, and team members are available to offer support to targets of harassment. In the past this has included things like providing letters of good standing for harassment targets to give to employers who are receiving negative contact about them, connecting targets to non-Wikimedia resources that may help them, and simply being a sympathetic ear. If you feel actions of this type are needed in a case, please direct the person who needs assistance to ca@wikimedia.org.
  • Please note, however, that Wikimedia Foundation staff are neither social workers nor trained mental health professionals. For the safety of all involved, staff cannot provide counseling or emotional support, though they can direct community members in need to other available resources for these things.
• Legal support: The Wikimedia Foundation's Legal staff, under United States ethics guidelines, cannot offer legal advice to individual community members. However, when an eligible community member is the subject of a legal threat or lawsuit, the Wikimedia Foundation's Legal Fees Assistance Program may be able to help them locate and pay for their own counsel. In these situations, please contact the Legal team directly at legal@wikimedia.org.