Persian Wikipedia was started on December 19, 2003 and it is currently the 18th largest Wikipedia with 724,070 articles. The following table is showing some useful data about Persian Wikipedia as of May 10, 2020:
First phase of consultations took place on Persian Wikipedia’s Village Pump and it was also offered to users to contact me privately if they were not able to write their opinions publicly for any reason. Several users contributed to the discussion on the Village Pump and also several emails were received from users/admins as well as messages on Telegram and WhatsApp.
Persian - Rating of current behaviour policies
For the second phase of consultations, the community was asked if there is any consensus for a site notice including a link to a survey for UCoC. Consensus was reached by the community and the link to the survey was on top of all Persian Wikipedia pages for 4 days.
Response rate:
There were totally 9 feedbacks from the users on the Village Pump, 8 feedbacks by email, and 909 feedbacks on the survey.
Policies that need improvement
Since users do not feel comfortable to state their position in public, it was offered to them to contact me by email as well. Although the result was great and many users engaged the discussions, a survey was also put on the site notice to have more contributions by users.
Community’s feedback
Users had almost no problems with having a UCoC on their Wiki, however, more than half of concerns were in regards to two topics: No Personal Attacks (including Civility) and Privacy. The community also provided suggestions for the UCoC including:
The UCoC must be clear and transparent completely, it must explain all the details of civility, personal attacks, etc.
The UCoC is better to be translated to different languages, in that case users will not have to refer themselves to the English version and there will not be arguments about a correct/incorrect translation of the UCoC.
There can be a separate team on Meta handling the issues related to UCoC. This team could have similar access to the admins and when there is an incident, users can be referred to them.
Accessing the Persian users’ personal information (including their IPs) should be limited only to the people overseas and due to the privacy concerns, no one in Iran should have that kind of access.
Persian UCoC local language consultation community feedbackAll emails should be confidential and no one can disclose emails unless under some circumstances, e.g. if both users are happy to disclose the emails or the ArbCom gives permission to disclose an email in an incident.
Outlier responses - responses that are relevant, but only given by a few people
There were two relevant responses which were not paid attention enough by the community:
A new independent group (e.g. on Meta or Foundation) must handle the incidents of the UCoC.
The UCoC must be translated in all languages with all details about each guideline (e.g. Civility criteria)
Positive feedback on UCoC
The UCoC should be general but clear and concise so that the definitions of applicable and measurable facts can be determined by using and expressing definitions so that a score can be given to each behavior. The UCoC should not make major decisions for individuals, but should be formulated in such a way that different people draw similar conclusions about whether or not they comply with the UCoC. It is important that the UCoC does not have a black or white output. To say that it is in accordance with the regulations or not, but to be able to determine to what extent a behavior is acceptable (for example, to score, whether quantitatively or descriptively), is not a perfect thing, and Wiki is not a court. The regulations will be a criterion for determining the progress of an article.
UCoC must be reviewed once in a while, for instance every five years
Concerns about UCoC
Is Wikipedia:Civility going to be a part of UCoC?
Every language/culture has their own interpretation and it cannot be something identical in all projects.
At the moment on Persian Wikipedia, it is common that admins block users because of Wikipedia:Civility. Is UCoC going to be a reference for admins to easily block users if they do not follow it?
Is there going to be a consensus on Meta or is it going to be an official action by the foundation?
Is every project going to have consensus on it separately?
How do you want to guarantee there is not going to be a gap between the community and the foundation like what happened with User:Fram?
Having a UCoC cannot help the admin or authority team by itself if admins do not know how to apply it. It is similar to approving a law for family violence, but the police do not know how to enforce the law and subsequently can make even more violence if they are not trained well. There should be a well-trained group who know how to apply the UCoC.
Interesting stories
Suggestion on reviewing body
One of the female users has an account with a male name and only a few users know this. She decides to create and edit with another account with a female name. She receives too many emails from male Wikipedians asking her if she needs any help. One of them tries to find her address, occupation, and her phone number as well. He insists to have a connection with her on a social network or in real life. She eventually stops editing with that account and decides to edit with her other account with a male name.
Conclusion
Consultations on Persian Wikipedia is showing that users on Persian Wikipedia have no issues with the UCoC, it means that they will follow it without any major problems. At the moment, the community translates the English Wikipedia’s policies/guidelines and follows them. They even update the translations or refer the users to read the original English page on English Wikipedia. Therefore, it is presumed that the community will be following the UCoC by default as well.
As a conclusion, it can be expected that there will not be any major concerns opposed to the UCoC from the Persian Wikipedia community and users will always respect the code of conduct.
