User:Isra1337/Letter to NZSTA

To whom it may concern:

Recently the administrators and users of Uncyclopedia.org learned through an article in the New Zealand Herald that your organization, the New Zealand School Trustees Association has flagged Uncyclopedia as a source of online harassment. According to the article, Chris Haines, president of NZSTA also alleges that Uncyclopedia induces children to "enroll under the name of their school, set up their own personal page and interact with others on the site." This allegation is false, and we take it very seriously.

While current site policy does allow entries to be created on the subject of secondary schools, the posting of personal information, including full names, is never allowed on these pages, and harassment of others on Uncyclopedia is never condoned. Even when pages about secondary schools stay within these guidelines, they are generally considered to be a nuisance and are never encouraged.

The problem with inappropriate behavior that does occur is one of enforcement. Uncyclopedia is a large and growing site with thousands of edits per day, maintained entirely by a volunteer staff of a few dozen. We simply do not have the time or resources to read each edit made to the site. Catching the sort of policy violations that constitute student harassment is especially difficult because pages about secondary schools tend to be long and frequently edited, and it is difficult to discern without context which material is humor and which is harassment.

We believe that the proper response to any inappropriate behavior you or your students find occurring on Uncyclopedia, or any other wiki, is to alert the site's administrators to the situation. If alerted to pages that violate site policy, administrators can take a variety of measures, including removing personal information from the site's history files, blocking specified IP addresses from editing pages, and deleting and permanently locking pages to prevent to future creation of objectionable material. If contacted by a school official, our staff can take additional steps to address other concerns, even when no violation of our policies has occurred.

Uncyclopedia is currently in the process of further revising its policies concerning pages on non-notable institutions and persons who are not public figures, and we have taken the step of suspending pages about those New Zealand schools of which we have been made aware. But responsibility for student safety does not rest with us alone. If you are aware of additional student information that has been posted on Uncyclopedia, notify us promptly. We also suggest that if school equipment is being used for inappropriate behavior that you either take measures to prevent that equipment from being used to access Uncyclopedia or that you give us the necessary information to block school machines from being used to edit Uncyclopedia.

Sincerely,

Uncyclopedia.org Community