Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 169

Background

Wikipedia policy prohibits linking to personal information posted off wiki and also prohibits connecting an editor to accounts in other places (e.g. Twitter) unless the editor has disclosed that onwiki. Historically this has meant that IRC logs of Wikipedians are oversighted if posted onwiki and are considered personal private information. Recently there have been questions about whether or not Discord logs on servers linked to from Wikipedia (e.g. WP:DISCORD, Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones, Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers) should be oversighted as well. A few key differences between IRC and Discord are that Discord logs are kept centrally by the service, anyone who joins a server may access these past logs, and several Wikipedia linked Discord servers explicitly note that they are public. Barkeep49 (talk) 14:07, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Question

When, if ever, should Discord logs be eligible for removal (up to and including oversight)?

Discussion (Discord logs)

• I don't believe options 1 & 2 could be viewed as reasonably complying with OUTING policy, and I certainly don't want to change that, so I think that leaves us with 3 & 4. Option 3 is, functionally speaking, the status quo, to the very limited degree that posting of Discord logs has happened, without it being directly stomped on. There is a question as to whether that is wise, as well as being somewhat anomalous compared to the major IRC channels. I'll have a think as to whether option 3 or 4 is best, but I would note that option 3 should probably be nuanced to something like "public channels", so as to exclude moderated comments and so on. [Disclosure: Discord mod] Nosebagbear (talk) 14:40, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

  To clarify my actual position, I think I shall support option 4, neutral option 3, and oppose 1 & 2 as against OUTING. That let's us be synced up with IRC (which may be advantageous if we split over a bunch of different off-wiki fora) and prevents some potential issues. Obviously if dubious stuff starts coming up then it should be taken to ARBCOM if it's bleeding onto Wikipedia. Nosebagbear (talk) 00:30, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

  It's not an authentication issue. We have cloaks on IRC, so you can verify you are the holder of a NickServ registered account, but still IRC logs cannot be posted. Whether a Discord account is authenticated or not is mostly irrelevant IMO. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:41, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

• I lean 4. As ProcrastinatingReader notes, IRC has an authentication method as well and doesn't change anything about posting of content from there. I recognize that IRC has had it's own history and issue over this topic, some of it predating WP:OUTING. WP:OUTING requires that such offsite connections be disclosed "on Wikipedia", bolded, in the first sentence. It goes further in paragraph 4, including that editing under your own name or other easily searched identifier does not allow for posting off-site opinions or doing opposition research. That may be a hard line black and white take of the current wording, but if I am posting publicly on Facebook about editing Wikipedia and link an example of one of my edits (Therefor identifying myself to FB readers), but have made no such disclosure on Wikipedia, it is my understanding it would be forbidden to link or quote publicly by WP:OUTING. That the Discord servers denote their public nature is a privacy warning, a critical one, but it doesn't change anything about OUTING in my view, anymore than the fact Twitter or Facebook have public posts. *deeeeeep breath* Furthermore, the use of direct links to specific Discord messages should likely be disallowed entirely, as even if the particular message was posted by someone who has publicly disclosed their Discord account on Wikipedia, it will by nature expose comments from users who have not. Summary: Follow IRC-esque rules regarding "no posting of logs" on Wikipedia. Adhere to strict OUTING interpretations. Limited private disclosure as necessary and allowed under OUTING in paragraph 5 (I.e. to admins/functionaries/arbs/WMF/etc for reporting). Disclosure: Discord mod and server operator. -- ferret (talk) 16:50, 2 July 2021 (UTC)
• Question - Isn't the Wikimedia Community Discord (and some of the others) technically "private servers", in the sense that the invite link is not technically public? For example, if Nitro subscribers were to use an emote from these Discord servers on another server, the emote will show up as being from a private server, not a public server. If my understanding is correct, options 1 and 2 are out of the question anyway for these servers. Epicgenius (talk) 19:06, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

  I don't know how Discord classifies them exactly, whether it indicates they are available in Discovery, Partner, or what. However the technical label within the service falls, the invite links are publicly viewable on Wikipedia. -- ferret (talk) 19:47, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

  @Ferret: I believe it is classified by Discord as private and not partnered. A month ago I sent a screenshot as a joking response to a comment by Izno (a Discord mod), which showed an emote from the Wikimedia Community Discord server, followed by "Wikimedia Community - private server". I'm not sure if this is still the case. Epicgenius (talk) 23:50, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

• I thought most IRC logs are revision-deleted per WP:RD1, as copying them here is a violation of the copyright policy. This does not apply to linked pages containing the original content. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 19:35, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

  If there's a copyright argument to IRC copy and pasting, I'm quite confident that Discord falls into the same. Certainly there's no disclosure from every participant that their messages are free and clear to copy and paste. -- ferret (talk) 19:50, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

  Well, IRC logs can't be linked to in their original form. Discord logs can. Linking to the original should be fine copyright-wise. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 20:42, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

  Yes, was agreeing on the specific of copy and pasting. -- ferret (talk) 20:48, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

• I think there are at least two separate issues in play. First is outing. It is difficult, given the point ProcrastinatingReader makes above regarding cloaks and authentication, to argue that Discord should be treated differently as far as outing goes. But there is something beyond outing that I have a hard time articulating succinctly.
  Even if someone authenticates, even if someone discloses on-wiki what their Discord username is, and even if it's unambiguous that it's not outing, I think we should still at least discourage linking to what the person has said off-wiki. In doing so, we're recontextualizing things said in a space which is not governed by the same norms and expectations (nevermind policies and guidelines) that apply to on-wiki discussion. That doesn't mean some basic policies don't apply, but it's a very different platform for communication such that the context (not just of the words, but of the platform) matters an awful lot. It's not just "if you did nothing wrong you have nothing to hide"; the photos you post on facebook don't have to be incriminating for you to not want slideshow at a job interview or family reunion. The discordance (ahem) can be jarring and uncomfortable. Another analogy: Wikimania is subject to some basic behavioral policies like Discord, and similar outing policies. That doesn't mean it should be acceptable for anyone to record my casual conversations there and post them to Wikipedia. Yes, we should all be mindful to be sure we're not doing things that we would find embarrassing if recorded, but even a reasonably innocuous conversation can sound strange or worse if recontextualized in a more "serious" setting.
  So while it's not so much an outing issue, I'd prefer to see some language about strongly discouraging these links or logs, if not disallowing them, except when it's necessary to, for example, provide evidence of egregious canvassing or harassment. And perhaps then it should only be sent to arbcom. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:02, 2 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Erring on the side of Option 4 based on the above. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:18, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 4 is safest. It is difficult not to accidentally breach OUTING while linking to any Wikipedian's offwiki activities. Social norms are different in different spaces, so repeating something said on Discord onwiki without context is problematic, while presenting the full context might expose and involve other people. Harassment taking place offwiki can be reported to Arbcom without posting logs onwiki. —Kusma (talk) 21:49, 2 July 2021 (UTC)
• This discussion should consider the similarities and differences with the previous RFC about SUL onwiki at WT:Harassment/Archive 20#RfC: Clarification of OUTING. --Izno (talk) 22:35, 2 July 2021 (UTC)
  • I would prefer a better definition of "personal information" this time around. It appears that RfC only covers information like names, ages, jobs, contact information, etc. Posting of private correspondence (chat logs) doesn't seem to fall within a normal definition of "personal information". The relevant policy appears to be Wikipedia:Harassment § Private correspondence. I'm of the opinion that what happens offwiki is offwiki (except if reported to ArbCom or T&S), and editors do not need to be worried about people prying into their private lives, nor do they need to feel like they're 'on the record' all the time. Offwiki political views or other such statements are irrelevant to ones Wikipedia account. To that end, I think it would be better if the relevant section is updated to codify existing practices (eg relating to IRC logs) better and more generally, as it seems to be a hole bigger than just Discord. Currently it appears the sometimes-enforced prohibition derives from an ArbCom principle on copyright status, but I'd be surprised if someone hasn't pulled the "fair use" card before. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 23:17, 2 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 2.5 Option 1. IRC gets to avoid having logs posted because they post "no public logging" in the MOTD. In IRC there is no way to "see the history" of the server unless you've logged everything. On Discord, history on a public channel is stored and visible to everyone who ever joins a server unless that history is deleted or hidden. I would like to see a combination of these two options that anyone who is authenticated and posts in a server publicly linked from onwiki can have their logs posted; as well as the ability for servers to choose to not have logs publicly posted onwiki. I'd also like to elaborate on WikiProject Tropical Cyclones thing which Barkeep mentioned as a reason for this RfC. For the past several months stealth canvassing has occurred from that (publicly accessible) server to onwiki by a certain authenticated user who I won't name at this time (due to the lack of clarity on WP:OUTING rules). This might look like it's just about a certain admin candidate who expressed certain views offwiki but this RfC would cover a lot more than that. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 23:32, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

  Why discourage authentication? —Kusma (talk) 23:41, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

  If someone isn't authenticated there's no proof that the person on discord is the same person. I'd like to see at least some kind of protection against that possibility. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 00:19, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

  So you are saying that only people who don't authenticate should be protected? That doesn't compute. —Kusma (talk) 06:19, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

  Yes, if you don't want your Discord activity to be linked to your Wikipedia activity, you shouldn't link your Discord account to your Wikipedia account. --Ahecht (TALK
  PAGE) 21:12, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

  as well as the ability for servers to choose to not have logs publicly posted onwiki What do you envision for this? Is it simply a declaration? -- ferret (talk) 23:58, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

  Same way IRC gets to say "no public logging" and have that respected. Put it in the rules of the server and what channels it applies to. Servers should make their expectations clear if they don't want logs going onwiki, but they should understand this means that this forces problems to go to ArbCom as a first resort. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 00:19, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

  I've struck my original !vote after reading what Only in death said. The premise of a lot of Option 4 !votes is that ArbCom will deal with reports of off-wiki harassment. I've seen people acting abusively on Discord and was willing to give the benefit of the doubt to ArbCom on that front to decide whether or not to deal with it. That was one of the premises of my !vote, that cases where people have linked themself to their onwiki identity in a Wikipedia related server can be dealt with my the community and that ArbCom would have the capacity to deal with grey areas where joe jobs are a possibility. But after hearing from another person who has had the experience (backed up by evidence) that ArbCom doesn't wish to deal with offwiki harassment I doubt that ArbCom would be able to effectively deal with these "edge cases". On another note, that !vote made me disagree with the current way that we deal with IRC logs as well and I would like to see some kind of change to that. A significant proportion of the Option 4 !voters voted the way they did because any other option would create an inconsistency between Discord and IRC. I believe what we really need is a change in the OUTING policy itself and not just a change that addresses Discord logs.

  It's tempting to discuss this in terms of "controversial political opinions" since the last event where Discord logs were posted onwiki dealt with a person who made comments promoting the destruction of Israel and calling the IRA's actions "justified" but editors should bear in mind that there are very real cases of abusive conduct on Discord. If an editor was to say "someone should get his stupid ass fired" about an indeffed user who was revealed to be a contributor to a YouTube channel? What if that editor pinged another editor and told them to track down the aforementioned indeffed user on a Discord server for that YouTube channel and to "get him fired" based on their onwiki conduct? These are cases where the community might take a different approach than ArbCom. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 01:29, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

• Option 2 I don't think the community can or should be subject to the strict masquerade that nothing exists in discussion other than the pages on this site. IRC logging was always problematic, both in IRC culture and in technical reasons. Discord pages are semi-officially endorsed by the community, have a publicly-linkable archive, and have user authentication to prevent Joe Jobs and other abuse. If a participant in the Discord does not want their account linked to other Discord servers or their real life identity, they already must take precautions; there is simply no real privacy benefit at stake here by prohibiting it on-wiki. There is concern about copyright when copying archival logs here, but linking to public Discord logs should always be permitted. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 23:44, 2 July 2021 (UTC)
• I'm leaning toward option 3. While the server is "private", this is only a technicality of how Discord functions, as the invite link to the server is public. The mods have not disabled the ability to see message history, but they also have not disabled the ability to set a custom nickname, and so any user can create any nickname they want. The only way to verify if a user is who they say they are on Wikipedia is through authing. As for outing, Discord profiles can carry across dozens of servers (up to 200 with Nitro and 100 without). People who wish not to be outed may create an alt entirely for Wikipedia use and have their existing account just not join the Wikimedia server. Epicgenius (talk) 23:59, 2 July 2021 (UTC)
• Eh, I don't see much point in doing anything other than treat it similarly to IRC, lest we then have to make further judgement calls for the Next Big Chat Platform that ends up getting used? - TNT ^😺 00:05, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 4 Consistency between IRC and Discord should be used, if we change the discord outing rules we should also change the IRC outing rules.Jackattack1597 (talk) 18:16, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 4 While I see people above mentioning the fact that Discord users choose to authenticate as a argument I would like to point out that A) there is as far as I'm aware not a way to undo such authentication, and B) because of a Discord LTA currently almost all channels are locked to non authenticated users. -- Asartea ^{Talk | Contribs} 17:24, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 3 – this really isn't like IRC, as IRC servers don't maintain a public record of anything that was ever said, and is therefore generally unusable as evidence. This is more like Twitter. If you have publicly linked your Wikipedia account and your Twitter account via a link on Wikipedia, it is not a violation of WP:OUTING to refer to those tweets publicly. The same principle applies to Discord – if you have publicly linked your Discord account via an edit on Wikipedia, your messages on Discord can be publicly discussed.
  More practically, handling Discord evidence as private means that the only way problematic behaviour that affects Wikipedia can be handled is via ArbCom. ArbCom has received far too many complaints about Discord already, and they should be handled by the community instead. For comparison, ArbCom almost never receives complaints about IRC, and when it does, they get referred to the IRC operators. ArbCom occasionally receives complaints about Twitter, but only handles them in cases when they cannot be publicly discussed.
  Going with Option 4 essentially puts ArbCom in charge of dealing with problematic behaviour (canvassing, harassment, etc.) on Discord. I don't think the Discord crowd wants that, and ArbCom definitely doesn't want that. Clearly establishing that Discord logs are public information is the best way to discourage misbehaviour. – bradv^🍁 17:46, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  The same principle applies to Discord – if you have publicly linked your Discord account via an edit on Wikipedia, your messages on Discord can be publicly discussed. This doesn't occur though, in the main. Linking is private via OAuth. -- ferret (talk) 17:49, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  Thanks for the correction. I struck the words "via an edit on Wikipedia". The point is that the identity of the account is proven, which is the reason for that line in the OUTING policy. – bradv^🍁 18:01, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  Already linked in this discussion, but Wikipedia_talk:Harassment/Archive_20#RfC:_Clarification_of_OUTING suggests even SUL is not considered sufficient for OUTING. It was particular to personal information, though. -- ferret (talk) 18:10, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  Right. I don't think the name of an account on a Wikipedia-specific Discord channel, for the purposes of discussing Wikipedia with other Wikipedians, counts as personally identifiable information. If some changes are required to make this clear to people on Discord, or to change the governance structure, server settings, or advice to new Discordians, I would encourage the leadership to enact them. – bradv^🍁 18:18, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  I'm not sure anything is required yet, at least for WP:Discord (I cannot speak for any other servers, the other two mentioned here or the 20+ others linked from Meta). The server is already very clear that anyone can read anything posted and to be mindful of it. Any changes required would need to result from how the community wants this handled (via this discussion). To be clear, in the end, I accept whatever the community wants. I've simply chosen to argue a more hardline take on OUTING, especially the paragraph dealing with opposition research. If the community feels otherwise, that's fine. The server itself cannot dictate the community's position and how to handle things on wiki though, hence the need for the discussion. Even the server declaring "Our logs are not to be posted on Wiki" (As suggested by Chess) is untenable UNLESS the community agrees with that position. -- ferret (talk) 18:28, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  (edit conflict) if you have publicly linked your Discord account via an edit on Wikipedia, your messages on Discord can be publicly discussed. Discord accounts are not linked like this. On Discord you have a link to the user's Wikipedia account, but there is no disclosure or linking onwiki. The verification of this authentication is also in the hands of whichever user hosts the verification bot (ie, they could make up an auth and nobody else can verify it, unlike enwiki revision history). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:52, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  Presumably, a login checkuser could. -- ferret (talk) 18:16, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  Sure, technically speaking, but the WP:Checkuser policy does not allow checks for the purpose of confirming/denying whether offwiki messages are authentic, or selfrequested checks. (nor should it) ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:45, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  This is more like Twitter. Hmm... If I (or someone with my name) made a Twitter, and on that Twitter set the bio to "Authenticated as "ProcrastinatingReader" on en.wikipedia.org" are any Tweets that account posts citable onwiki as if I wrote them, even if I don't make an onwiki link to that Twitter account? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:53, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  If we say Discord is like Twitter, we should still discourage (or even prohibit) the quoting/linking to messages that are not connected to Wikipedia. It is one thing to publicly shame Discord users for attempted votestacking in an RfA, and a very different thing to link to their posts in an offtopic channel about whatever political or other opinions they hold (possibly in jest). It may be "public" that User X said "I hope Trump dies from COVID" or "We need a dictator now to fix climate change" or whatever on Twitter or on Discord, but it is nobody's business on Wikipedia. (There are some outrageously bad things that should get a user removed from Wikipedia by T&S, but that's not the type of things I'm talking about here). —Kusma (talk) 19:06, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

• I'm not sure that any of this really matters in practice. Imagine that you see something relevant on the Discord system. You could:
  • Quote it on wiki
  • Put a link to the log/archives on wiki
  • Say "Well, I don't want to fall afoul of any policies, but let me just say that anyone who joins Discord can see everything ever posted, and I'm talking about a comment that was made at 19:34, 1 July 2021 (UTC)."
• All of these have the same end result, namely that anyone who wants to read it can. This policy is just about as privacy-protective as someone saying "Oh, noes, I'd never doxx someone on wiki. If you want to know that editor's name and his employer's phone number, you have to e-mail me instead". I don't know what the current practice is, but in the past, we haven't even been willing to warn people who post on wiki that they're willing to share personal information off wiki. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:20, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  That's why Option 4 isn't feasible. IRC doesn't have server-side logs, nor does it have pre-join scrollback. If you weren't in the channel when the message was sent, you can't ever read it. – bradv^🍁 18:28, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  Well, logging bots are very common on IRC. The #wikipedia-en channel prohibits them so there is no 'official' log, but any user can setup a logging bot, add it, and spread the URL around, and nobody would be the wiser. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:46, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  True, but the authenticity of the logs cannot be verified, and posting them on Wikipedia violates our copyright policies. The point is that, unlike Discord, messages can't be linked, and unless you maintained a log yourself, you can't read past comments. – bradv^🍁 18:50, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  It violates an ArbCom principle on copyrights, but falls entirely within US law on fair use: the fair use of a copyrighted work ... for purposes such as criticism, comment ... or research ... is not an infringement of copyright, which seems to cover both the archiving, and I would imagine that pasting a sentence or two of a user's IRC-expressed political views to oppose their RfA is "criticism". It's also of a "non-profit" nature that doesn't affect the "commercial value" of the "work". Not to mention, you could link to the full IRC log, and I can't see how this would be any different to linking to web.archive.org as far as copyright law is concerned. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 19:05, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

  "Violates our copyright policy" has always been an unconvincingly lame excuse against the posting of IRC logs. —Kusma (talk) 19:08, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

• Option 3, with caveats. Since Discord is publicly logged and authenticated users have chosen to make an explicit, public connection between their Wikipedia and Discord accounts (FWIW almost everyone on Discord is authenticated) I don't think it makes sense to treat these messages as private information. Anyone who joins the server can read the entirety of the message history and the user authentication logs.
  With that said, we should still be mindful of privacy issues and not treat this as a carte blanche to engage in opposition research. Discord is a different environment from Wikipedia and some users may feel encouraged to share information there that they wouldn't post on-wiki (particularly because Discord messages can be deleted by the poster whereas Wikipedia edits generally cannot). I would not consider it appropriate to repost personally identifying information or otherwise sensitive material that has been posted on Discord but not on Wikipedia. Posting a log of someone discussing Wikipedia-related matters is probably fine. Logs of someone stating their real name or location, discussing personal issues, etc. are not fine, and should be eligible for revdel or oversight. Spicy (talk) 20:53, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 4 because it avoids having unofficial non-wiki platforms be de facto extensions of Wikipedia where we can block people for what they say on them (yes, I'm aware ArbCom can for other sites and that we've had ArbCom cases over IRC stuff, but that's been a long time ago...)
  I'm not a fan of the environment on the Discord. I'm not a fan of Wikipediocracy. I'm an IRC regular, but I also try to separate it from what actually happens on Wikipedia. The entire point of these off-wiki platforms is that they're a way for people who like Wikipedia and want some social aspect of it to talk, network, and discuss things without the strictures of the rules we have on here, and if we allowed linking to them, we'd effectively be expanding our rules to a non-en.wiki platform as, yes, we'd have someone inevitably be blocked for what they said there at some point. That's just how it goes. People can be jerks in chatrooms, oftentimes more so than they can be on wiki.
  The short of it: many people who are active on this site have preferred off-wiki ways to communicate, some of them open for the public to view forever (forums and Discord); others aren't publicly logged (IRC.) Traditionally we have not allowed people to link to these communications unless the user in question consented.
  I don't really see why we should treat Discord any differently than we treat other public off-wiki sites, and I'm very skeptical of any attempt to extend regulation of conduct off-wiki more than is absolutely necessary such as in cases of off-wiki harassment. Allowing linking to Discord logs would be a huge step in that direction, and I am very much not comfortable with it, even if it's not something that will impact me as much. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:08, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 4. I concur with Ferret's comment above. Authentication by a private process whose results are not made publicly visible on Wikipedia itself (i.e. OAuth) is analogous to posting publicly on a Facebook or Twitter account about editing Wikipedia under a given account. WP:OUTING has historically made very clear that this FB/Twitter example is plainly insufficient for allowing quoting/linking of external comments, even if an editor has posted personal information or edits under their own name, making them easily identifiable through online searches. The defining factor is not accuracy nor ease of identification, but the location: public identification (PI) must have been made on Wikipedia itself, not simply in a semi-public location like Discord. As Izno raises above, the 2019 RfC established that PI made even on other Wikimedia wikis can be an insufficient form of PI for OUTING purposes, particularly if it requires much "research" to find or if it is non-consensual. Discord is even further removed from Wikipedia than other Wikimedia wikis are, so allowing quoting and linking from Discord without further and narrow stipulations (like the "too much research" or "consent" ones for other WM wikis) would constitute a major and inadvisable reduction in the policy's sensible requirement for on-wiki declaration. — Goszei (talk) 05:48, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

  My comment above is mainly concerned with the identifying information tied directly through Discord accounts/links/usernames or posted in messages, but I want to also express my concurrence with several editors here (Rhododendrites, TonyBallioni, ProcrastinatingReader) who have commented on norms and the "wall" that should be maintained between the on- and off-wiki environment. The atmosphere created by opening the door to free posting and linking of off-wiki opinions, possibly out of context, would not benefit the encyclopedia -- what happens on Wikipedia should certainly be transparent, as Levivich opines, but the accountability of its editors should not extend to any and all online expressions. — Goszei (talk) 19:24, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

• Copying/quoting them here is almost certainly a copyright violation. Linking I guess isn't terrible. I guess that translates to option 3?
  Not relevant to the present poll, but I abhor the use of Discords or other off-wiki fora for discussing matters that should be discussed on-wiki. Stifle (talk) 10:21, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
• I don't do Dischord, so I have no clue what the rules are, and what I'd like to see clarified is if accounts on WP-related Dischord have some vetting process to link them with WP accounts. If the accounts are confirmed as the same operator and the whole thing is viewable by the public I don't see the problem with linking or quoting. what I would expect however is that anything submitted here as evidence in support of a sanction had better be really egregiously out of line and not just "something you wouldn't normally say on-wiki." Dischord is not subject to WP's rules and neither arbcom nor the community should be acting as the thought police. Beeblebrox (talk) 16:27, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 4 Substantively, I'm in agreement with TonyBallioni, and believe the other options are flawed and inconsistent (per my comments above). More importantly, I'm concerned with any attempt to formally make thoughtcrime a violation of Wikipedia policy. What a user says in their private time offwiki - privately to their friends or publicly on their Twitter feed - is none of our business. Every user has probably at some point in their life expressed a comment, somewhere (online or in person), that they would not repeat here. Ultimately, all other options permit editors to do opposition research to effectively harass other editors without consequence. I do not think Beeble's 'strong discouragement' will work; such wording is toothless, and when it comes down to it someone will violate it, and it's unlikely others will challenge the posting, especially if the comment is unflattering, and even if it should not have been posted in the first place. Sometimes things are better left unknown, even if we can't consciously make the decision to ignore it. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:10, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
• Treat the same as IRC. The differences between IRC and Discord are real, in particular the authenticated log. I agree with Kusma that the "copyright" reason has always felt a bit flimsy. Ultimately though my line of thinking aligns with Tony. Unlike IRC where we're all on a single server with control of channels by individuals, in Discord's case we're on a multitude of servers with the whole server being under the control of individuals. Beyond the 3 discord servers I linked when formulating the question I am aware of at least 5 other Wikimedia/Wikipedia related discord servers none of them publicly advertised. So ultimately when the differences are real, I don't think they're real enough to overcome our general protections against OUTING (which as noted, offer limited protection on enwiki even against onwiki disclosure on other language wikis). Barkeep49 (talk) 02:04, 6 July 2021 (UTC)
• My thoughts on this are similar to what Kevin says in their close at Wikipedia talk:Harassment/Archive 20#RfC: Clarification of OUTING, and functionally I think that ends up with something similar to option 4. I also like TonyBallioni's take. Ironically, what follows is an adaptation of something I said in Discord, but I digress. Personally I find digging through old conversations for something to discredit someone with is smarmy. We should have a norm if not policy against doing that. Erring on the strict side has the benefit of disincentivizing rumor milling. Imagine if User:Example just started posting things on wiki about how bad those Wugapodes are and all the bad stuff I say, with quotes but links that don't work for some reason. Example explains (falsely) that I deleted them. It will be hard if not impossible to disprove, but if posting logs or quoting messages was disallowed (and redactable), we sidestep that whole issue. On the other side of the coin, it incentivizes responsible reporting. Rather than taking accusations to the pillory AN, the private evidence is sent to admins or arbcom who can figure out what if anything needs to be done before a frenzy rather than trying to clean up afterwards. — Wug·a·po·des​ 06:02, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 4 per Wugapodes - been following this discussion for a while but their reasoning convinced me stronger than anyone else's. Elli (talk | contribs) 21:09, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 1/2. Lets be clear about this, the IRC 'rules' that prohibited logging were entirely in place to protect abusive IRC members from having their actions and statements challenged on-wiki. These were not channels that were unrelated to Wikipedia, they were specifically set up to deal with on-wiki issues, run by wiki-admins, donated to by the WMF and intricately tied in with WMF staff members (the history of WP-on-IRC is a dark and murky one that a lot of editors are going to be unfamiliar with). Some people may not have been around for the the issues of IRC logging, "throatpunching", Arbcom declining to do anything about an admin making comments about bathing an editor in acid - and keep in mind these are not examples of calculated abuse by secretive IRC members. They were just unpleasant people saying unpleasant nasty things and getting away with it for a long time because of secrecy rules that protected them. The actual outcome was of course that they were logged, and acted upon, but it took a far greater amount of effort to get any traction on them, and in the meantime they continued with their abuse. The Super Secret Sockpuppet hunting co-ordination etc (amongst other IRC groups) was arguably far more calculated abuse due to its secretive nature when it targeted editors.

So when I see the same people who refused to do anything when IRC secrecy was abused, advocating for the same approach that led to abuse previously, who deliberately avoided doing anything about that abuse, arguing in favour of applying the same process here? They either learned nothing at all, or have an ulterior motive in keeping their own activity hidden. I will also take 'hopelessly naive' for a third option.

And let us also be perfectly clear on this: Discord is logged, everything you do there, as well as your online identity (that you use for Discord) are kept and will be used against you if you step out of line. The only question is do you want it addressed on-wiki where your peers are likely to take a more understanding approach? Or do you want to go down a path where because of a prohibition here, you are discussed at say, Wikipediocracy, maybe a news article from a sympathetic journo. You have no protections against harressment or outing in other venues. By forcing people to seek redress elsewhere, you will end up (as has previously been the case) in attracting the attention of a group of people who rarely have any sympathy when it comes to abuse and are willing to be more direct in their attempts to bring it to light.

This is another example of why the Outing policy is hopelessly unfit for purpose and needs to be adjusted to take account of reality and experience, not attempt to adjust reality to suit the outing policy. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:17, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

The community has the power to amend the arbitration policy to broaden the scope of when offwiki evidence should be considered. If they wish users could ask prospective arbs a question about how they will handle offwiki evidence and vote for the ones that promise site bans for offwiki evidence like your examples. So I don't see why what the 2015 ArbCom did or didn't do is relevant.

where your peers are likely to take a more understanding approach Let's be clear, the most recent onwiki Discord incident (that I know of) was quoting a user's offwiki political views at RfA, and people were not sympathetic. Are you saying fellow editors will be (or even should be?) sympathetic if actually problematic content is reported? IMO the problem here isn't really about problematic content, which should be dealt with appropriately, it's about non-problematic content. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 23:04, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

• Option 4. Per TonyBallioni. –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:04, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 4 per Wugapodes and Spicy. I especially strongly agree with Spicy's take on the environment Discord provides, as I myself am open to disclosing information about myself to a select few who were part of a conversation (or to any authenticated user in the server at the time, for that matter) on Discord, but not on Wikipedia. The RfC that Kevin closed (linked repeatedly above) also has comments on opposition research (This RfC does not constitute a green-light to snoop around...) and disclosing personal information from off-wiki venues in general, both of which I strongly agree with. Given that, Option 4 would be the only decent choice here that follows the RfC. My own take on the matter is that personal information, such as birth dates, ages, names, etc., must not be quoted/linked at all, no matter what. Additionally, ArbCom should be sent the particularly nasty or egregious comments (pertaining to Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects, including its users) made on Discord by an authenticated Wikipedian to decide what should be done to that user. Bringing those comments up in a publicly-viewable venue on-wiki (God forbid, ANI) for Wikipedians to lynch the user in Wikipedia's special version of cancel culture based on possibly out-of-context comments can and will start a mess and possibly cause damage that can't be undone, even after oversight, which can and will happen if we went with Option 1, 2, or 3. Disclosure: I moderate the RedWarn Discord server, which requires SUL authentication. My thoughts, however, focus more on my experience with WP:DISCORD. Chlod (say hi!) 07:01, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
• Comment - I would worry about vague references to Discord that aren't specifically links. I get the argument for linking to specific messages being bad, but I wonder about if I said something onwiki like "per a discussion on WP:DISCORD a few hours ago". Or imagine I mentioned the channel specifically. Once or twice I've said something like that myself (like: "I asked for advice on WP:DISCORD and they directed me to policy XYZ"). I worry about such vague references being considered not that far away from direct links. Leijurv (talk) 07:13, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 5 : Discord chatroom logs are public and IRC chatroom logs should be as well — My opinion is probably not gonna count for much but I might as well chime in. Anything that could have been read by anyone present in the chatroom at the time of its posting should be available to be re-read by anyone. Any other policy that tries to implement a fake feeling of privacy through "you had to be there, now you'll never know" is completely ridiculous. As a good example, this is the way logging happens on Wikimedia projects. Ben · Salvidrim! ✉ 10:23, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

  We should have a new RfC on "logging" practices in general, honestly. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 21:45, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

• Option 1 (aka Ben's "Option 5", applying this to IRC as well) per OID, Chess, and Ben. Public means public. The notion that on this public website, we would be prohibited from quoting or linking to something on another public website (or chat server, or message board, or a published print magazine, or whatever), just doesn't make any sense to me. If people on other websites don't want to be quoted elsewhere, they should lock down (make private) those other websites. Otherwise it seems like we're making a rule that people can say things in public and we have to pretend here that it didn't happen, simply to ensure that the speaker avoids any consequences here for what they said elsewhere. Balancing the competing values, I come out with: if you said it in public, you said it in public, and having everyone pretend like it didn't happen isn't helpful or productive in any way that I can figure. This especially true when we have a page in projectspace called WP:DISCORD that points editors to the Discord server. Even if the page says it's "unofficial," it's still part of the Wikipedia ecosystem by virtue of being linked in projectspace. We don't have a WP:WIKIPEDIOCRACY or a WP:WIKIPEDIAREVIEW or a WP:WIKIPEDIASUCKS, etc. In my view, the projectspace page, and that it's mostly moderated by admins, makes it at least quasi-official. (Same with WP:IRC.) Particularly where this is Wikipedia, where our strongest values are transparency and accountability. We keep a record of everything everyone does, of every change. All future generations will know it took me multiple edits to write this comment :-P Prohibiting linking/quoting to other public wikipedia-related conversations runs directly counter to those values of transparency-and-accountability-through-excellent-recordkeeping. Levivich 17:18, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
• Personally, I'm not strongly opinionated regarding which direction is taken for logging, as long the approach is made clear. (In any case, I think the question of what off-wiki actions can be used as grounds to evaluate an editor's overall characteristics is going to be more prominent.) I am concerned about maintaining the current minimum requirement for full participation in the English Wikipedia community, which is to be active on this web site. I wouldn't want on-wiki discussions to start pointing to external servers to lay out arguments for whatever topic is being discussed, or for off-site discussions to become the central point for decision-making. If IRC/Discord/Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/any external forum becomes essential to participate, this will have a significant effect on the editing community. isaacl (talk) 21:42, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

  I agree with this, but will note that I have learned through my UCoC work that in quite a few communities this isn't true. That is substantial project coordination occurs in Telgram groups or through a particular affiliate. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 00:08, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

  I appreciate that many users like to use more real-time modes of communication. I'm not sure how well it would work with a global community the size of English Wikipedia's. Can you share any info on the size and number of time zones spanned by the communities you have in mind? If all of the interested parties are able to participate using another service, at least they still have a say. I fear, though, with the size of English Wikipedia, that wouldn't be the case. isaacl (talk) 01:51, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

• Shouldn't any copy-pasting of Discord logs into Wikipedia be immediately revdel'd on the spot as a copyvio? Leijurv (talk) 22:49, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

  The copyright issue is less pertinent to Discord than IRC because Discord logs can be linked to thus avoiding the question of copyright altogether. Barkeep49 (talk) 00:06, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

• Option 4. Even if it is a public server, a Discord username can still be considered personally-identifying information, especially if someone uses a different Discord name than they use on-Wiki. The only possible mitigating circumstance is that unlike IRC, Discord requires a registration and it's harder to see someone's IP. —A little blue Bori v^_^v ^{Jéské Couriano} 00:28, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

  Discord username is PII? Citation needed. Levivich 13:54, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

  If my Discord username were my real name ("Alex Smith" or whatever), it could be. Sdrqaz (talk) 13:58, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

  What ^^ said. PII is anything that allows you to personally identify someone. So any Discord ID that allows you pinpoint a person is PII. The mistake is in thinking that because something is PII it is also not public information. Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:00, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

  If you use your real name as your username on a public discord server, then you've already made it public. There are reasons to oppose this but privacy is not one of them: were talking about linking to public logs. Imagine the reverse argument: that people who use their real name as their username on Wikipedia can't have their contribs linked to on another website because it's PII. I mean, LOL that makes zero sense :-) The person choosing to use their name as their username would be the person who made the PII public, not someone who later links to it. Levivich 14:02, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

  My understanding of policy was that if you looked up where "Alex Smith" lived on Facebook (say they disclosed they lived in a cottage in rural Kazakhstan) and you said that on-wiki and the "Alex Smith" on Wikipedia had not linked to their Facebook profile or given indication of their Kazakh abode, that would be outing. Even if "Facebook Alex" said "oh I'm an active Wikipedia editor called 'Alex Smith' too", linking to that on-wiki still would not be allowed. Couldn't you argue that that is roughly analogous to the Discord username problem, since "Facebook Alex" had made that information public? Sdrqaz (talk) 14:22, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

  Oh yes that's my understanding of our outing policy too. But this isn't an RfC about giving people permission to link usernames on WP and Discord. One can link to discord server logs without doing that. Even that aside, Discord requires OAUTH authentication to post in (most?) channels, so that link between accounts is made public anyway and saved in public logs, using "official" WMF tools to ensure the link is correct. So much for outing, then, since Discord requires you to out yourself anyway? Levivich 14:30, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

• Option 4 per TonyBallioni and Wugapodes. Link20XX (talk) 15:01, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 5 per Ben, Only in death, Levivich, and Iridescent here and here. I have thought a lot about this, considering the role the Discord server played in my RfA. My vote may thus be surprising, but in the Discord server I am on record saying "If you don't want to be revealed as being an asshole, don't be an asshole". My RfA showed the proof in that particular pudding, and in hindsight I see it as an inevitable spark for the discussion we're having now. Regardless of the officiality of the Discord server, it still wears the black W on a white field, is still staffed by admins, and has hundreds of members who have publicly linked to their Wikipedia accounts. It is part of the WikiSphere. Everyone in that server, as the landing channel hints, should be prepared for the consequences of their actions there. –♠Vami_IV†♠ 02:59, 13 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option 5 (no restrictions on posting public logs, per Ben). If you send a message to someone, you can't control what they do with it. If you send a message to a public board (like Discord), you can't control what anyone will do of it. And if that message is signed with your Wikipedia username in a Wikipedia-related forum you can't expect others not to make the link. The alternative isn't keeping this correspondence private; it's an absurd situation where everyone knows that "X said Y on Discord", but they have to pretend that they don't on-wiki. The fact that we sometimes (very inconsistently in my experience) apply a similar logic to IRC, email, Wikipediocracy, etc. is part of a legacy of well-meaning, but ultimately futile, hyper-sensitivity to privacy that we also need to shrug off. – Joe (talk) 08:45, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

  But we don't allow public twitter messages to be used in this way. Why should someone have less protection on Discord than Twitter? Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:06, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

  We don't? For example, earlier this year someone was sanctioned at ANI for a BLP COI based in part on their tweets, which were linked to, quoted, and discussed in the ANI thread (and without which the COI may not have been so apparent... along with some of the editor's blog posts). This wasn't an OUTING violation because the editor had already linked the accounts (same with Discord auth). If we had a rule preventing quoting/linking the Twitter account, the community may not have been able to address the COI; that's the type of danger I hope we can avoid and why I'm supporting options 1/5. We've similarly seen Twitter, Facebook, etc. be linked/quoted on-wiki when dealing with off-wiki canvassing. To me, the other options (like 4) would make Discord be treated differently than other social media like Twitter. Levivich 15:35, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

  same with Discord auth and the same with IRC cloaks. But if we want to discourage people from using that authentication, this is good motivation. AFAIK linking to Twitter is only allowed if (a) it has been linked to from the English Wikipedia (authentication on Discord doesn't create a link in that direction) and (b) if it's being used to illustrate COI. At least that's what's outlined in the "specific situations" at WP:OUTING. The rest should be done through off-wiki channels (e.g. emailing an admin). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 16:23, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

  But the reason why we require disclosure in one direction (disclosure on-wiki of the off-wiki account and not the other way around) is for authentication reasons (we can't be sure the off-wiki account is controlled by the wiki account holder unless the wiki account says so logged in on-wiki). By using mw:OAuth, Discord authentication satisfies this concern. OAuth is the key, for me, for why it's not an WP:OUTING concern. Levivich 16:43, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

  That's not the only reason, no. If what you say were true, we would not say
  If an editor has previously posted their own personal information but later redacted it, it should not be repeated on Wikipedia, although references to still-existing, self-disclosed information are not considered outing. If the previously posted information has been removed by oversight, then repeating it on Wikipedia is considered outing.
  In that case, someone has already verified that it is their account, but we respect their wish not to connect the two. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 17:02, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

  I'm not sure how being allowed to un-verify changes anything? But either way, we can honor that for Discord just as we do for any other off-wiki site. And even putting the linking-accounts thing to one side, we can allow linking to Discord logs without allowing OUTING... I can link to a message without saying which WP editor posted that message. Levivich 17:54, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

  I'm not sure how being allowed to un-verify changes anything you just said the purpose of not allowing linking is for authentication reasons. But it's not, as evident by our stance that even if someone has authenticated, if they've decided not to share it later that must be honored. It's not unauthenticating or "unverifying", after all; it's choosing not to share what one shared in the past. When someone decides to oversight it, they're not saying "actually, I'm not that person" they're saying "actually, I'd rather not share." — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:05, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

  My argument is that whether it's Twitter, Discord, or anything else, rules like this don't offer any "protection" at all; just the impression of it. If you are posting on a public, off-wiki forum under a name that can be linked to your Wikipedia username, you should assume that people you talk to on-wiki are capable of finding it. And if they're not, Wikipediocracy will definitely do it for them if they think there's the slightest nugget of drama in it. If you don't want the two things to be linked, the only true solution is not to link them. The taboo against mentioning that link on-wiki is at best a means of obfuscation, but I think in reality just a polite fiction. – Joe (talk) 10:43, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

  It is simply not true that there are no shades of grey here, as you seem to imply. While information may be out there and could be used by stalkers, we can be better than these stalkers and not link to everything that is technically out there. It is simply disrespectful (consider WP:5P4) to mention/link to all the idiotic stuff User:X said to you yesterday while ranting, whether in the pub or on Discord, to the entire Wikipedia community, which is a far more public area than many of the other technically public places on the Internet. Let's be better people on Wikipedia. —Kusma (talk) 11:09, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

  "Wouldnt it be nice if everyone was nice" is no basis on which to formulate policy given the ample examples of where that is blatantly ignored. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:13, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

  Personally I find talking behind people's backs to be far more uncivil than calling out people for acting badly off-wiki. It is not "stalking" to merely acknowledge what we all already know: that there are places, other than Wikipedia, where Wikipedians talk about Wikipedia. – Joe (talk) 12:03, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

  The thing is, Wikipedians also use these places to talk not about Wikipedia, and there is no reason to ever bring up such conversation onwiki. More concretely, I find things like User:Chess bringing up Vami IV's non-Wikipedia related chat history during the latter's RfA to be wholly unacceptable and want this to be clearly disallowed going forward. Yes, it's all technically public, but if you want to shame people for whatever non-Wikipedia related thing they do offwiki, do it offwiki. —Kusma (talk) 13:24, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

  I wasn't the first person who brought the candidate's Discord history up. Many people voted support because of their interactions with Vami on Discord. Would those support votes be disallowed as well? And for those unfamiliar with the context, that nominee said "oppressors exist to be killed by the oppressed" in an #offtopic discussion on WP:DISCORD about whether the IRA/Hamas were justified in their actions and brought up that the existence of Israel was "intolerable" in an on-topic channel with no prior discussion of Israel. These are not normal political beliefs. These are extreme political beliefs that were expressed in the quasi-official Wikipedia Discord server.

  I get that you're angry a candidate you supported lost their RfA and you want to prevent evidence from being brought up that could change the community's opinion in the future. But these comments were said in a Wikipedia related Discord server with a big old Wikipedia related logo with accounts authenticated with the user's Wikipedia related account. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 18:25, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

  It's not that the candidate lost, I have no problem with that. There were reasons brought up to oppose the candidate that I found absolutely valid, based on recent onwiki evidence and mentioning actual issues with candidate edits or attitude. But "candidate says idiotic things in non-Wikipedia related chat" was one of the really low and unfair blows (bringing up onwiki POV-pushing or actual evidence of following a nefarious agenda would have been ok, or of evidence that the candidate's judgement is terrible in their actions on Wikipedia. There are already more than enough ways to sink an RfA without sifting through a candidate's chat logs in addition to everything they ever said onwiki). —Kusma (talk) 22:04, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

  don't offer any "protection" at all - The protection isn't that nobody can read it; it's protection on Wikipedia that we don't want people to post users' off-wiki conversations except in very specific circumstances. Basing policy on Wikipediocracy won't do seems scarily cynical. there are places, other than Wikipedia, where Wikipedians talk about Wikipedia - presumably, then, if I go to Wikimania or Wikicon or a local meetup and record or transcribe (whichever allowed by law) the conversations people have over lunch, there would be no problem uploading those recordings to Commons and posting transcripts here? Most of the people involved have identified themselves by their username, after all. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 13:41, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

  A rule that prohibited us from talking about anything anyone said at a wiki meetup, or posting video/audio recordings from meetups, would not make sense to me. We post videos from meetups all the time. Imagine if we had a zoom call and then couldn't quote the transcript of the zoom call or post the video of the call. Why don't we want to refer to off-wiki public recorded discussions on wiki? It's so very easy for people to create private safe spaces online for themselves if they want privacy. But public is public. Levivich 13:50, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

  You missed the point of "over lunch." Yes, conference sessions can be recorded and posted. Likewise any other time people give their consent (although at Wikimedia meetups anyone can typically indicate when they don't want photographs of them to be posted via a colored lanyard or a sticker or something). The point is, Discord doesn't include just the "conference proceedings" part of the conference; it's also what's said over lunch where, yes, people can hear you and you still shouldn't say anything you wouldn't want other people to hear, but where we nonetheless treat it differently. In that context, it would be creepy and inappropriate to record conversations, even if people are self-identified by their username and even if people know they're where other people can hear. It's an imperfect analogy, granted. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:09, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

  I actually think it's a pretty good analogy, but I disagree about this: there is no "over lunch," all of Discord is the "conference." All of it is being recorded and saved all of the time--all of it is public, all of it is logged--so it's all "the conference" part to me. "Over lunch" would be DMs or private servers/channels/whatever. What makes it "conference" and not "lunch" IMO is that it's linked from WP, the OAuth, and the public logs. Levivich 17:39, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

• Option 4 I just don't see the need to support these things and best to have these "conference" within Wikipedia. if they're in these lunch situations, then even less reason to support them. Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 18:06, 14 July 2021 (UTC)
• Option four. To me, it doesn't really matter if you're certain that they're the same user or if they've indirectly outed themself using the OAuth system – the distinction between on-wiki and off-wiki behaviour is one that should be maintained. I am aware of at least one former administrator who was desysopped and banned due to conduct off-wiki, and another editor who was banned for similar reasons. Should behaviour on off-wiki platforms prove problematic, the Committee has been willing to take action against such individuals in the past, and they should now. To be honest, even if an editor outs themself on-wiki and you are working within the policy at OUTING, you should not be posting such opposition research anyway. I can think of an RfA, an RfB and a Committee candidacy that failed because of those reasons, which was regrettable. Sdrqaz (talk) 18:08, 14 July 2021 (UTC)
• I think that nearly everyone has missed the point here, which is that we should not endorse any external platform for discussions that have any impact on what happens on Wikipedia. We shouldn't have done that previously for IRC (just look where that's got to) and we shouldn't do it now for Discord. Any discussion that is not on Wikipedia, or, if it needs to be private, via secure email with trusted functionaries, should not be taken into consideration here, and then it wouldn't matter what's said in Discord or whatever the flavour of the day is because it would be ignored anyway. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:29, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

  The problem is that people can't un-see undesirable behaviour. If someone is uncooperative, aggressive, or unduly dismissive in some off-wiki venue, those witnessing it may well take it into account, and there's no way to avoid it. As I wrote previously, I do personally agree that discussions that lead to decisions on what happens on English Wikipedia should take place on English Wikipedia. I appreciate that some editors find it more effective to use a real-time discussion tool for preliminary discussions such as brainstorming. However in order to include the entire global community, we need to have patience to establish the consensus view. isaacl (talk) 01:19, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

  I didn't miss the point, it's just not reasonable. You already carved out an arbitrary exception for email, so why should your particular off-wiki communication be preferred over others? It's not even particularly secure; I would bet few of us host our own SMTP servers, so most email gets routed through a major corporation's surver farm and is thus vulnerable to both data leaks and corporate introspection. You don't want to endorse any external platform, except that Discord isn't endorsed by Wikipedia or the WMF. I don't see anything at WP:IRC saying that it is an official mode of communication. They're no more official than TheWebsiteThatMustNotBeNamed, they just have fewer banned users. If by "endorse" you mean "has a project page" then that's a pretty low standard. Lots of in-person meet-ups have project pages and I wouldn't want to suggest that we "endorse" them all in any sense of the word or create that implication. Even if we could avoid that, they'll just get moved to Meta since they relate to the wider wikimedia ecosystem and you'll have a hard time getting MediaWiki.org to endorse a global on-wiki-discussion requirement. For all the hand-wringing about Discord and IRC these are fundamentally places where people with similar interest gather to talk about their shared interest. Unless you want to turn Wikipedia into a social networking site where I talk about the Pidgey cards I've been collecting or forbid me from playing chess with Kevin, you'll need to accept humans having social relationships. Trying to control how people choose to associate in their free time off the website is not only dystopian but futile. The best course is what we're doing right now: determine the relationship between off-wiki conduct and on-wiki discussion. Like WP:CANVAS it probably won't be a clear line but a set of considerations ranging from most to least acceptable. It's a nuissance, but it's far more sustainable than pretending nothing exists off Wikipedia. — Wug·a·po·des​ 22:06, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

  I agree it's fruitless to try to stop people from having conversations elsewhere, because social interactions are the norm. But I do think it's reasonable to strive not to provide privileged access to participants in other forums over those who participate solely on English Wikipedia. I don't want to have to participate on sites A, B, C and apps X, Y, Z in order to be able to influence decision-making or gain greater insight into the decision-making of others. Of course people will often kick around ideas in email, IRC, Discord, or whatever communication tool they use. Nonetheless I feel we should migrate discussion on-wiki as soon as possible, to be more inclusive of the entire English Wikipedia community. isaacl (talk) 23:06, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

  I don't disagree, but from the manufactured moral panic in this discussion one could easily get the mistaken idea that there is some massive off-wiki conspiracy taking place where things are decided in secret rooms with no oversight from the wider community. The Discord has apparently existed for quite some time before I joined a few months ago and at no point did I ever feel like I was unable to participate in Wikipedia decision-making; my participation has largely been making bad puns and answering newbie questions. I haven't used IRC in months and have managed to participate in Wikipedia decision-making just fine. I've responded to non-sensitive email requests on the emailing user's talk page instead of by email. We're arguing about a hypothetical situation that simply doesn't exist.

  How are we currently not being inclusive? One of the major arguments (repeated just below this comment) is that the Discord is public so it is very difficult for me to take arguments about "exclusivity" particularly seriously. Who is being excluded from what decisions? It feels like everyone's gotten together to complain about how the band kids always sit together, except instead of high schoolers its middle-aged and retired adults complaining about how the youngest segment of our editor base chooses to engage with the site. Many of the editors on Discord weren't even born when you and Phil started editing under your accounts; I was 10 years old when you made your first edit as Isaacl, and from your writing style at the time I would put money on me being your junior.

  Critique and reasoned discussion about how we should engage with the site is fine, but part of that discussion should be the recognition that this discussion is part of a pattern where editors socialized in the ways of the early internet try to avoid the reality that the internet has changed in the last two decades. Evidence is largely non-existent given our anonymity, and I haven't done a particularly systematic investigation, but it is my impression that opinions on this RfC are distributed by age---personal or account (probably both). Your essay, User:Isaacl/Consensus requires patience, is one of my favorites, but ours are not the only correct philosophies on how wikis prosper. Quite the contrary: wikis work because they can support multiple contradictory workflows and philosophies simultaneously. Many wikis like MediaWiki.org work well with real time communication strategies, while others like MetaWiki work best on glacial time-scales. While I agree that it is best for as much discussion to happen on-wiki as possible, it is disingenuous to say that it is the only way for a wiki to operate. If we want to be inclusive, and I believe that is our shared goal, we need to recognize that not everyone likes or works best using our favorite mode of communication. If we want Wikipedia to survive another 20 years, we need to figure out how we can engage younger internet users who did not grow up in the age of dial-up internet in our discussions and wiki-culture without explicitly or implicitly saying "our way or the highway". Regardless of the specifics, I believe there is something wrong with older editors saying "our favorite communication methods are privileged, but your favorite method has no such privilege and can be used in whatever character assassinations we want." — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:24, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

  I don't believe I've said that the only way for wikis in general to operate is through on-wiki discussion. In many (perhaps most?) situations, wikis are used solely to store info, not communicate between users. I agreed that people like all kinds of communication methods, and that's just the way it is. (*) However English Wikipedia isn't starting from scratch today, and so there are existing expectations. If the community decides it wants to alter the minimum requirements for full engagement, so be it; I just think the community should make a conscious decision around this and establish new expectations. (For instance, it would be really hard to jump back and forth between a real-time, logged messaging app and a talk page to discuss a dispute; the new standard might be for all conversation to take place on the messaging app, with the talk page used to host any desired wikitext examples that can be referred to from the messaging tool.)

  (*) Regarding using information from other venues to help make decisions on editors, that's a separate issue from changing the requirements for participation. Part of the problem is that dealing with behavioural issues in an large group conversation is terribly inefficient and frequently counter-productive as it engages in open speculation. For better or worse, though, it isn't going to change in the intermediate future. isaacl (talk) 21:36, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

  I think we're in a heated agreement, and I'm sorry if I conflated your and Phil's points. To be clear, my point is that the rise of IRC never changed the minimal requirements for participation, and neither has Discord. It's simply the next iteration of that technology which routinely, and particularly on Wikipedia, is met with moral panic. A great example is xkcd 1227. In the 1800s commentators were concerned that letter writing would die out, that we would be so obsessed with reading books that we wouldn't talk to our compatriots. Of course, we still write letters, and we still talk to people on the train. Those morphed into how emails ruined our ablity to write letters, or how we're too invested in playing on our phones to talk to each other. It's an anti-pattern, and we should be aware of it. Centralized communication is useful, and since we all work on Wiki, coordinating on wiki is often easier. That's why it sticks around despite changes in other technologies. We should be aware of how new technologies can change the dynamic on wiki, but we should be wary of making them seem more consequential than they are (unless you do want more pictures of my pokemon card collection...) — Wug·a·po·des​ 01:33, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

  Although they both occurred before either my time on Wikipedia or in paying attention to such things, the eastern European mailing list issues and WP:Esperanza are key influences on how English Wikipedia editors currently eschew off-wiki discussion forums to make decisions. I don't think a shift is imminent, nor do I think anyone is panicking, but it's something that I feel we should keep an eye on, if only to determine that new procedures would be desirable. (I'm guessing by "rise of IRC" you are referring to some point where participation on the Wikipedia IRC channels increased? IRC predates Wikipedia considerably and as I understand it, Wikipedia IRC channels predate the WMF.) isaacl (talk) 02:36, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

  Yes, the Wikipedia IRC channels and the original mailing list predate almost everything, including the MediaWiki software.

  There are notes at mw:Talk pages consultation 2019/Tools in use about different communication methods. Every group/sub-group seems to have its own.

  There is also a mini-history of communication, mostly focused on the English Wikipedia, at mw:Talk pages consultation 2019/Discussion tools in the past. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:09, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

  FWIW, as someone who used the Wikimedia IRC channels before I started editing, I don't think much decision making is done in public channels, or think anyone needs to participate in those areas to be full users of the community. I got to know certain editors better, probably got better advice than I would onwiki, and it's much faster to request deleted revisions etc. But otherwise I don't think it makes a huge difference. If you're a content editor IRC is not as useful I think, but the Discord might help you find editors to collaborate with, review your FA, etc. I don't think this is particularly distinct from the real-world advantages gained by knowing people from other contexts. Overall I don't think offwiki venues provide meaningful advantage in the influence decision-making or gain greater insight into the decision-making of others area. That's true of the public IRC channels anyway, not necessarily the private ones. Personally I think English Wikipedia's "always on the record" that some editors pride is actually not a good thing anymore. The concept doesn't even correlate well to real world interactions. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 23:12, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

  To everyone, there's no need to keep pointing out that decisions are being made on English Wikipedia, as I agree with that. But this isn't a happy accident, as can be seen from Wikipedia's past history that Whatamidoing kindly provided, and the integral use of various communication tools by many groups. It's a deliberate decision, which we could choose to maintain or alter. Regarding gaining insight, there are other venues where editors don't feel constrained by English Wikipedia guidance in how they express themselves, and so feel more free to provide greater detail in their thoughts. I appreciate why that's the case, yet my personal preference remains that we should encourage this type of info to be discussed on-wiki. isaacl (talk) 01:15, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

  Re You already carved out an arbitrary exception for email, so why should your particular off-wiki communication be preferred over others?: well one big difference is that email is private, and the public Discord servers are public. But in fact, we have no rule against disclosing private email communications on-wiki (AFAIK anyway; Wikipedia:Private correspondence was a failed proposal), but we have a rule about not disclosing public IRC conversations, and may soon have a rule against linking to public Discord logs. That's really backwards, eh? Levivich 15:54, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

  Publishing private e-mail messages would have to comply with copyright law, which is a barrier to posting them on wiki. I don't know what terms the Discord system sets for copyright, but that would have to be investigated. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:19, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

  IME posting emails is generally frowned upon even if not explicitly forbidden. I cannot find any project-wide discussion that rejected the proposal you linked, and from the talk page it seems that the authors never decided to see it to completion. It seems that the 2008 draft proposal was in response to the arbitration committee stating unequivocally in 2007 that private correspondence should not be posted on-wiki without permission. See July 2007, reaffirmed December 2007, where they link the posting of private email to a violation of the copyright policy. Regardless of how backwards you think these rules may be, as I said above, we should have a norm if not policy against digging through old off-wiki correspondence to find things to discredit people with per project-wide consensus. Despite the occasional exceptions (see WP:IAR) you point out, we have a robust norm against posting off-wiki correspondence regardless of the mode, and even UPE have had evidence from undisclosed Twitter or Facebook accounts redacted because of this. Quite simply, it would be backwards to give carte blanche to posting Discord links or logs when such behavior is at the very least discouraged for all other modes of communication. — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:47, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

  Yeah, that norm needs changing. Copyright is the silliest fig leaf (of course quoting an email doesn't violate copyright, and no, we don't own the copyright to every word or every sentence of an email we write... entire paragraphs or emails, maybe, but then there's fair use to consider... copyright is so overcited on this website). "Option 5" is right on: public communications are public communications; prohibiting them on-wiki seems to me to be a contortion to allow people to escape any on-wiki consequences for public off-wiki behavior. Levivich 21:06, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

  I agree that copyright concerns are overblown. (I feel there is a good case to be made for an implicit licence being provided for many group conversations. Plus copyright enforcement is about protecting the author's rights for commercial exploitation, which is non-existent for the vast majority of messages.) However in the interest of not marshalling inaccurate arguments in favour of this conclusion: a writer does own the copyright to every specific expression of ideas in a message that is written, and explicitly quoting someone is literally copying their words. The writer doesn't own the underlying ideas, though, so paraphrasing is fine, and even using the same words is fine when there are limited ways of saying the same thing. isaacl (talk) 21:48, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

  Copyright definitely constrains what we can do in large-scale ways. You could normally quote a small section of an e-mail message without running afoul of copyright, especially if you comment on it; however, you couldn't routinely publish long e-mail exchanges – or, more relevantly, whole logs of every comment posted to any chat or social media system – without suitable copyright licensing being in place. I see this as a surmountable problem, but it's still a problem.

  Given that we've blocked and de-sysopped editors for what they've said on IRC in the past, I think that concerns about not being able to punish people for bad behavior if we can't copy their words directly to the wiki (rather than sending it via e-mail to arbs or similar) are overblown. I've no doubt that it's frustrating to a few busybodies, but we seem to be able to manage overall. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:07, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

  Context matters. People routinely quote entire message exchanges on mailing lists and bulletin boards. As this is the norm, expectations are set appropriately and thus anyone participating is implicitly agreeing to this behaviour. In the general case, people communicating with each other haven't consented to posting the contents in other venues, but in specific cases, such as people working up a proposal, the nature of the work implies an agreement. But the issue isn't really copyright, which as I said is more about protecting the author's rights to profit from their work and doesn't prevent paraphrasing, but privacy. Open discussion forums should make it clear what the ground rules are regarding privacy. isaacl (talk) 02:21, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

  Whether or not you believe they're overblown, the links I gave show that your premise is flawed, and as isaac points out your conception of copyright is flawed to start with. I don't particularly care about the copyright status of email; I pointed to them because you said we have no rule against disclosing private email communications on-wiki which is not accurate since the arbitration committee has said it is a violation of copyright. You may disagree or wish to change it, but that doesn't change the fact that your starting premise is flawed. If your ham-fisted principle, public communications are public communications, enjoyed consensus we would not have WP:OUTING. For all your concern about on-wiki consequences for off-wiki behavior, you have aboslutely no regard for off-wiki consequences of your unflinching support for the right to post my tweets. When people have expressed concerns in this thread about privacy or outing, you blow them off as if having your information posted on one of the ten largest websites in the world forever is a minor inconvenience (ironic, considering you make a point in your rationale of how revisions are stored forever). Post your social media accounts and email publicly, right here, if it's no big deal. I'm sure you would love for us to comb through your posts; you have nothing to hide yes? Of course this is rhetorical, because I assume you're intelligent enough to know that you're being disingenuous. There is something unsavory about actively lobbying to make it easier to harass people while working very hard to maintain your own anonymity. That alone would be gross, but not only are you using simplisitc slogans to advocate for decimating an editor's ability to have a private life, every time someone points out how incoherent your arguments are you shift the goalposts or move on to a new argument that contradicts your last one.

  Your original opinion (which you repeat here) is that not posting off-wiki communications on wiki is somehow designed to prevent on-wiki consequences for off-wiki conduct. Nevermind that I and others have pointed out how this can acctually incentivize proper reporting, let's assume you're right: if so, I still wouldn't trust your opinion because you gave your own counter example in reply to Barkeep ("For example, earlier this year someone was sanctioned at ANI for a BLP COI based in part on their tweets, which were linked to, quoted, and discussed in the ANI thread...We've similarly seen Twitter, Facebook, etc. be linked/quoted on-wiki when dealing with off-wiki canvassing"). So clearly you know that we can and do santion people on-wiki for off-wiki conduct, but incorporating that nuance and assuming people are sane enough to apply WP:IAR would undercut the asinine tautology you keep repeating. Moving on, you later say that we should be allowed to out people's real names ("If you use your real name as your username on a public discord server, then you've already made it public" which points out how frivolous this argument is because if taken to its logical conclusion we could post anyone's real names because if you choose to use your real name on Facebook or your driver's license you've made it public, sorry) because you say that we have no rule against linking editors who use their real names to their external contributions ("Imagine the reverse argument: that people who use their real name as their username on Wikipedia can't have their contribs linked to on another website because it's PII. I mean, LOL that makes zero sense :-)"), except that we do have such a rule. When someone points that out to you, you reverse course ("Oh yes that's my understanding of our outing policy too") and show a complete lack of understanding of this RfC or its context saying that Discord requires OAuth (it doesn't) and that this isn't an RfC about linking WP and discord usernames (it is, unless you just want to be able to post random discord links with no context). Rhododendrites does a good job of pointing out the flaws in your argument, and it again illustrates how you keep interpretting OUTING however you want without regard for what it actually says. Now, here, you say that somehow the norm of not posting off-wiki communications doesn't extend to email (it does) based on a proposal that was never put up for community discussion, and when that is pointed out you move on to saying that pointing to the copyright policy is invalid (by making inaccurate claims about copyright law as isaac covered). Arguing with you about this is tiring, which presumably is the point (see Gish gallop: "The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved"). If you seriously think that there are no consequences to indiscriminately posting off-wiki communications and radically altering our OUTING policy, I really don't know what to say, but to speak candidly, given your anonymity, I think you do understand the consequences. If that norm needs changing, be the change and post your social media accounts for inspection. Until you out yourself or make a consistent argument I'm really not interested in continuing this conversation with you. — Wug·a·po·des​ 00:37, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

  Tbh I didn't read all of that. If you want to believe that quoting someone's email constitutes copyright infringement, go ahead. Linking to Discord logs, which is what this RFC is about, certainly doesn't raise any copyright issues, so copyright is not relevant. Similarly, OUTING is not relevant because Discord uses OAuth to link Discord usernames with Wikipedia usernames. So that's not an issue. Discord isn't comparable to email because Discord is public and email is private. Discord isn't comparable to IRC because IRC doesn't do server-side logging. If you want to think I'm disingenuous for believing that we should treat public communications like public communications, go ahead. I'm still supporting options 1/5. Levivich 01:20, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

• Comment: This proposal is hard to understand. Which is the most permissive and which is the most restrictive? Please ping me if required since I do not watch this page. If anything, Option 5 (which sounds like the least restrictive) sounds like the best choice. Leaderboard (talk) 12:00, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
• 1&/or5 Vami's post in compelling. Alanscottwalker (talk) 12:53, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
• Option 5 per Ben, et al. If it's public, it's public, fine to post, common sense. Of course, posting a link between two identities could still very well be outing if it hasn't been made public by the user. Benjamin (talk) 00:32, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
• Option 3. As I said above, if someone doesn't want their activity on Discord linked to their activity on Wikipedia, they shouldn't link their Discord account to their Wikipedia account. I cannot imagine anyone thinking that they have an expectation of privacy when they've linked their accounts in order to post on a publicly-logged server. --Ahecht (TALK
  PAGE) 21:22, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
• Option 3. I'm concerned though by the framing of this debate as Discord vs IRC. Wikipedia-related discussions are now held on a smorgasbord of platforms not run by WMF, not just IRC and Discord but also Telegram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and more. We don't seem to have a coherent rule on what is acceptable cross-posting from such off-site discussion channels to Wikipedia. I would suggest to make the policy coherent along the lines of:
  • Any publicly logged channel where Wikimedia policies are explicitly stated to apply (e.g. other WMF wikis, and public mailing lists and Telegram channels where mw:Code of Conduct applies) should be considered "on-wiki" and can be quoted;
  • Logs from other publicly logged channels can be posted as evidence if the editor in question has previously declared an identity link;
  • Private logs can only be posted on-wiki by permission of the person making the comment (if crucial to an investigation by e.g. ArbCom, such evidence can be emailed to the investigator privately)

  With these principles in mind I think Option 3 is the closest to consistency, but I would implore us to have a coherent approach towards the posting of Wikipedia-related discussion logs from other platforms. Deryck C. 15:13, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

• Option 4 - treat as IRC logs - that is, to oversight, etc., per, well, just a lot of well-reasoned comments above. Oppose 1 and 2. We should not be guessing through our own original reasearch whether some off-wiki account name is equivalent to some on-wiki account name. - jc37 02:32, 30 August 2021 (UTC)