Board Thread:Help!/@comment-43874324-20200710191251/@comment-45692830-20200828084100

I'm not unsympathetic to these concerns. However, current policies on this wiki already make it easy for bad actors to disrupt/attack the wiki in subtle ways. There are discussions that have been resolved for years that haven't been officially closed so no action can be taken. People can edit, the mistake can be noticed a short bit later, and then when an edit war starts it becomes the new default under a strict reading of the edit war policy, people are then obfuscatory on the talk page, and it stays. The situation at Talk:Fanboys (short story) has made it more than clear that you can edit obscure short stories and people will not correct you for years. While I was browsing Eye of Harmony, I found a user who explicitly has on their user page the view that T:NPOV should be actively rejected, and had to revert an edit of theirs to this effect. Were I not looking at a relatively mainstream page related to my interest in physics in the DWU, the damage done could have been far more long-lasting. Thread:281689 has a bug that people could use maliciously that was likely around for years and nobody stumbled across. The tools given to editors allow for a reasonable degree of freedom to make garish pages for articles.

All of this is already here, and some of it actively can't be dealt with, since you can't always pin down someone being obtuse. Tools are already in place for bad actors if they want to use them. Is this potentially another tool? Yes. Obviously. Anything added to the wiki is potentially a tool for bad actors. But we always have to think about how likely it is to be used compared to how helpful it can be.

Now, the other point, of having to fall on the negative when someone has a genuine issue, I think it's clear that this is going to happen only in very fringe cases. How fringe is up for discussion, obviously (again, cf trypophobia). But at that level of discussion I think the point you can make isn't "we're discounting the idea that you and some others have a genuine issue", but rather "given the possibility of bad actors, we have to draw the line somewhere, and the problem you're discussing, while it may be legitimate, is so marginal that adding the tags you're asking for would enable bad actors more than it would help the community we're serving. We're sorry, and encourage you to make your own list of pages that might upset people with the problem you have so this resource can still exist for your community."

The keyword for disabilities is "reasonable accommodations". If five people in the world suffer from a particular phobia, tagging our content concerning it isn't reasonable. Mentioning when there's pictures of spiders or clowns? Or discussion of torture or sexual assault? Yeah, that's a reasonable accommodation.