What it took to develop a universal policy: reflections on the development of the UCoC and all the pieces that came after

This post covers the process of developing the Universal Code of Conduct, the Enforcement Guidelines, the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (and the Building Committee). 

The whole Universal Code of Conduct process has been happening for over half a decade now. Let’s reflect together on what happened and what we can learn for future policy development. 

Why did we need a platform-wide policy?

In 2017, a new strategic direction for the Wikimedia movement was created which involved cycles of discussions and conversations. The product of these strategy discussions were the Wikimedia 2030 strategy recommendations. One of these recommendations created by the volunteer working groups was to provide for safety and inclusion – specifically to establish Movement-wide standards for an inclusive, welcoming, safe, and harassment-free environment. This included the creation of the Universal Code of Conduct to provide a baseline of behavior for collaboration on all Wikimedia projects. 

In 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a mapping exercise in response to the recommendation which revealed that over 50% of Wikimedia communities and around 20% of other Wikiprojects have underdeveloped policies or no conduct policies/guidelines at all. This was followed by targeted community consultations where 60.7% of the 1466 responses strongly supported the idea of drafting and enforcing a Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) in the movement. The 2018 community insights survey had also shown that 40% of respondents reported existing conduct policies needed “quite a bit” or “a lot” of improvement. Over 20% of respondents expressed concerns of feeling unsafe or uncomfortable in our online or offline spaces, out of which 71% also reported being bullied or harassed on Wikipedia. All of this underscored the need for a baseline policy for Wikimedia platforms and products to support the health and growth of the community to address the mission: building the sum of all human knowledge.

UCoC creation and implementation processes

The development of the UCoC began with a call for candidates for the drafting committee in 2020, which resulted in the recruitment of a geographically and linguistically diverse group of Wikimedia volunteers and staff to write the policy. After much discussion and drafting, the Code was approved by the Board in December 2020. Over 1500 Wikipedia volunteers from 19 different Wikipedia projects representing 5 continents and 30 languages participated in its creation. Following the approval of the UCoC, there was a need to create enforcement pathways and guidelines that would function well for our international communities of volunteers. The development of the Enforcement Guidelines went through a similar drafting process by a drafting committee with several community consultations.

In March 2022, the community voted on the first draft of the Enforcement Guideline. The first vote indicated community support for the guidelines, with several specific improvement areas identified through comments submitted in the voting process. Because it was important that the system should function, a revisions committee was set-up to address the concerns most frequently raised. In January 2023, the revised Enforcement Guidelines were voted on by 3097 members of the community. Out of these, 2290 (76%) participants supported the Enforcement Guidelines as written. Based on the results, the Board of Trustees voted to ratify the Enforcement Guidelines. 

One of the measures crafted in the Guidelines was a UCoC Coordinating Committee (U4C). The U4C is a final community recourse in case of systemic failures by local groups to enforce the UCoC. Thus, the next step in this process was the creation of the U4C Building Committee to develop a charter and oversee the election of candidates onto that committee.  

The inaugural election for the U4C was conducted from March to May 2024 – 7 members were elected out of a pool of 38 candidates for the 16 available seats. The U4CBC was dissolved after the U4C was seated in June 2024. As the U4C needed to establish a quorum to complete their work, a special election was held to elect, and one more member was elected. Although electing more members would have meant the committee seats were filled in the way the Building Committee designed, the U4C had what it needed to start work. The U4C is just beginning their first year of work as of this Diff post.

The policy development process 

Creating the UCoC and Enforcement Guidelines was a first-in-kind approach to create such high-level policies and guidelines for the Wikimedia community. It was modeled after community governance and decision-making processes that already exist, which helped ensure that it was transparent, participatory, and community-supported. These commonalities informed the entire process from the UCoC creation to the U4C election.

Learnings and reflections

As we are at the end of the UCoC implementation process with the U4C seated, the Foundation UCoC project team has been reflecting on the process which spanned ~ 5 years (2019 – 2024) and wish to share their learnings below.

The UCoC and Enforcement Guidelines filled a real gap

The policy review and community consultations done at the beginning of this process highlighted a strong need for a set of uniform baseline, platform-wide policies and guidelines, particularly for small- and medium-sized projects that had huge policy gaps. The community insights report corroborated this by revealing the impact of these gaps with the rates of people feeling unsafe online and reports of harassment and bullying on Wikimedia platforms. The UCoC provided universal definitions to key harm and abuse topics such as harassment, vandalism, doxxing, etc. that helped to give a baseline meaning and understanding of these issues across projects. Following the approval of the UCoC and ratification of the Enforcement Guidelines, the community has been leading its enforcement.

Transparency

The drafting process of the UCoC and its related documents were well documented on Meta-wiki, from the call for candidates to updates of the drafting progress by the different drafting committees. There were also timelines established at the beginning of each project phase that were updated when there were delays or extensions. This made it easy to track the progress of the work and encourage participation in the process. Reports, vote statistics, and comments were shared publicly at the end of each vote for the community’s awareness. This is an approach we at the Foundation believe we should standardize in our communal policy development work.

Community consultations and participation

The process for the development of the UCoC, Enforcement Guidelines, and U4C Charter were very participatory. Community consultations were regularly organized on Meta-wiki, through conversation hours for live feedback and spaces were made at community events and meetings for discussion. This provided multiple avenues for feedback intake and provided various opportunities for community members to engage with the volunteers shaping and staff supporting the process. Feedback received was digested and used to revise the text. Consultations centered community voices in the process and ensured that diverse opinions were received to shape policies and protocols. 

Language support is necessary for an inclusive policy development process

The Wikimedia movement is a very globally-diverse community, thus translation is very important to ensure that policies are available in multiple languages for consideration and consumption. The UCoC project team sought both volunteer and external, paid language support to make sure that texts (policy drafts, announcements, reminders etc.) were available in multiple languages: almost 200,000 words were translated in over 30 languages. Interpretation support was also offered during live conversation hours to enable additional volunteers to participate in the feedback process. The diversity of thought brought by the participation of users from multiple projects provided invaluable knowledge, which is crucial when drafting policies for a global community. Several users reached out to the team about feeling seen and included when they saw texts translated into their local languages. This alone encouraged participation and motivated volunteers to learn more.

Barriers to participation

The Wikimedia Foundation is continuously finding inclusive and creative approaches to  outreach and engagement to get a diverse pool of feedback. For the UCoC project, the Trust and Safety team went through a rigorous process to develop a diverse language list to translate outreach materials that included about 30 languages, covering all major languages from all 7 continents. This ensured that community members could access policy documents and related communication pieces in their language to make it easier to participate in the process. 

Community participation in the ratification vote and consultations for the UCoC, Enforcement Guidelines, and U4C Charter are among some of the most inclusive in the Wikimedia movement. The UCoC process got participation from over 1500 users from 19 Wikipedia projects. Voters for the Enforcement Guidelines also represented over 140 Wikimedia communities and vote comments were received in 27 languages. The Foundation will continue efforts to ensure that community participation is as diverse as the global movement to inform and shape inclusive policies that truly reflect the diversity of the Wikimedia movement.

Part of being inclusive is noticing when things are not. There were  barriers observed to participation in the process due to inequities in time, resources, language availability, etc. among volunteers which hindered the participation of some users, mostly from small and medium-sized wiki projects. This led to the dominance of voices of editors from mostly large wikis despite translation work. 

While this blog post is coming to a close, the work on the Universal Code of Conduct and future global policies is far from finished. The UCoC showed us all what we could do to build this living policy, and we honed the best practices along the way to make the path easier for future policy work. As communities continue to localize and use the UCoC and Enforcement Guidelines for their local communities, the hope is these reflections and learnings will be useful for guidance. Hopefully, you have connected with some parts of this process. You may keep up-to-date with what the U4C is doing so you might participate in the future. 

Please share below in the comments what you find is important as part of building global community policy. We’d love to hear your thoughts.