Board Thread:Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20190912220906

While I mostly hang here as a local admin, today I have to speak as a Fandom staff member.

The issue
Following complaints sent into Fandom’s Customer Support Team, an ad hoc group of four staff members, including myself, was convened in order to examine whether doxxing had occurred on this wiki, and whether it was incidental or malicious. We also examined whether there was cause to remove admin powers from anyone.

We unanimously decided that doxxing had indeed occurred, but that it was ill-advised, not intentionally harmful. At issue was the question of whether investigating someone to see if they were professionally involved in publishing relevant fiction disqualified them to edit here.

This is an important question, since wikis are, by nature, mostly intended to be written "by fans for fans". This truism, or some variation of it, is so fundamental to what Fandom is that we changed our name from Wikia to Fandom to underline who we are. Virtually every ad tagline we’ve ever used has stressed our fan-centric nature, to indicate who mostly writes our wikis.

And this wiki’s main page reflects that adage by saying, in part, "we’re just fans doing our best to catalogue the franchise we love".

What Amorkuz was trying to do, we believe, was to try to figure out how a particular publication and its authors could fit in to the wiki. We in Customer Support believe that he went a little too far by actually connecting the dots and revealing someone’s real life name when they arguably weren’t a public figure.

Actions taken
Since it’s a violation of our Terms of Use to do that, he has been globally blocked for a few weeks, as agreed to by all four Staff members who reviewed the case. This is just standard procedure in cases like this. However, the majority also agreed that there was no cause to remove admin rights, since there was no clear evidence of genuine malice.

I have had occasion to speak with Amorkuz personally since the decision was taken and he truly regrets any harm he might have inadvertently caused.

To protect the sensitive nature of the personal information in question — as well as some other things in the thread that had been cause for concern from some other recent correspondents with Fandom — we have deleted the thread entirely. Local admin who could resurrect the thread are asked not to do so.

We'd also like to see a cooling off period on the specifics of the volume in question. A new thread on the matter shouldn’t be started for at least two weeks. It should also not involve anyone who is professionally involved in the work's creation or publication because, again, most wikis on Fandom — except those dedicated to Fanon or Role-play — are about fan interpretation of professional work.

Thanks!  