Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-188432-20190324211646

Tardis welcomes everyone.

Both our administrative staff and our editing populace are comprised of people of many different cultural backgrounds, gender identities, sexual orientations and ages.

These differences help us create a vibrant and evolving community.

We also feel that our strict policy against personal attacks — and the harsh penalties it invariably brings — make for an environment that is much freer of interpersonal rancour than is typical on the internet.

Recently, one or two users encountered those penalties as they sought a better way for us to deal with the serious topic of "". This blocking was interpreted by some as transphobic.

Instead, it was merely an attempt to uniformly uphold civility on the wiki. The issue was never the content of the message, but the harsh way in which that content was delivered.

In fact, our policies have included a facility to handle deadnames, and were written with that goal in mind. T:ACTOR, for instance, has long maintained that crew members' page names should always be moved to the most current name by which the crew member wishes to be known. Indeed our own trans admin, SOTO, was in the middle of trying to re-organise all these pages when some boring technical issues suddenly put a stop to their efforts. These changes were a work in progress, and the details were under discussion behind the scenes.

This created a misunderstanding for which we are deeply sorry.

We invite you to respond to this message — within the bounds of our policies on civility, of course — giving us ideas about how we can be more inclusive. And we do mean you. Whether you've edited this wiki, are an infrequent reader, or a first-time visitor, we need to hear your thoughts on how we can do better. We hope this discussion will be a place where those with the lived experience will help guide those in our community without it.

In the meantime, we're going to be expanding a few of our rules so that examples of documenting trans people are given. And we're going to revisit a few, crusty, old decisions that affected documenting other members of the LGBTQ+ community, which were made long ago.

We want you to join us in this journey.

While much work has already been done this week, some work remains undone. We want to get to that unfinished work quickly, since we believe the matter is urgent. So we'd like to put a tentative close date on this discussion of two weeks from now. If you're reading this page far in the future, though, and you still think there are areas where we can improve, please be sure to reach out to an administrator.

For now, we on the administrative staff want to step back and turn this discussion over to you. This is your conversation to have, and though we may provide insight on current convention and policy, we will do our best not to talk over you.  