Battlestar Wiki:Harassment

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This page is an official policy of Battlestar Wiki.
This policy is considered by the community and its leadership to be the status quo of Battlestar Wiki and is not to be countermanded or ignored, though changes to it can be discussed on the appropriate talk page. This policy was implemented on 2006 October 25.

Shortcut:
BW:HA
BW:HAR
BW:STALK

This is a derivative work from Wikipedia's Harassment, which is permissible under the GNU FDL license. All related edits will be released under this same license.

Do not stop other editors from enjoying Battlestar Wiki by making threats, nitpicking good-faith edits to different articles, repeated personal attacks or posting personal information.

What is harassment?

Harassment is defined as a pattern of disruptive behavior that appears to a reasonable and objective observer to have the purpose of causing negative emotions in a targeted person or persons, usually (but not always) for the purpose of intimidating the primary target. The purpose could be to make editing Battlestar Wiki unpleasant for the target, to undermine them, to frighten them, or to encourage them to stop editing entirely.

Harassment is sometimes described as a violation of disrupting Battlestar Wiki to illustrate a point, or no personal attacks, but is properly both a subset and special case of both, while at the same time being separate from both for definition reasons. The policy of "no personal attacks" is primarily about content, not behavior (for example, calling certain editors "assholes" is a violation of "no personal attacks," but is not in itself harassment), while the policy of "don't disrupt Battlestar Wiki to prove a point" covers many less malicious behaviors that, while unacceptable, are not as bad as harassment (for example, disruption intended to support a cause). And yet, it is a subset of both, in that it is disruption to prove a point, and it is an attempt to personally attack another editor of Battlestar Wiki.

Types of harassment

There is no way to spell out all the behaviors that can be considered harassment. One of the tendencies of harassers is to come up with new and inventive ways to plague their victims. However, harassment on Battlestar Wiki could include:

Wikistalking

The term "wiki-stalking" has been coined to describe following a contributor around the wiki, editing the same articles as the target, with the intent of causing annoyance or distress to another contributor.

This does not include checking up on an editor to fix errors or violations of Battlestar Wiki policy, nor does it mean reading a user's contribution log; those logs are public for good reason. The important part is the disruption - disruption is considered harmful.

Targeted personal attacks

Not all personal attacks are harassment, but when an editor engages in repeated personal attacks on a particular editor or group of editors, that's another matter.

Threats

Threatening another person is considered harassment. This may include threats to harm another person, to disrupt their work on Battlestar Wiki, or to otherwise hurt them.

Posting of personal information

Posting another person's personal information (legal name, home or workplace address, telephone number, email address, or other contact information, regardless of whether or not the information is actually correct) is harassment, unless that editor voluntarily provides or links to such information himself or herself. This is because it places the other person at unjustified and uninvited risk of harm in "the real world" or other media. This applies whether or not the person whose personal information is being revealed is a Battlestar Wiki editor. It also applies in the case of editors who have requested a change in username, but whose old signatures can still be found in archives.

Blockable disruption not defined above

This sort of behavior is blockable on its own (for example, moving another user's User Talk page), but should be considered an aggravating factor for the purposes of the block.