Thanks Danny for the elaboration.
I don't want to contest the value of this work at all - sorry if that
seemed implied. I think it's an effort that may be quite necessary -
especially in some communities.
The set of tools you're describing to be developed, seem all to be related
to a process that eventually leads to blocking people off our sites. That
is what triggered my response. This process may be necessary in a number of
cases (unfortunately), and helpful for the community health. But it is all
'after the fact' - once harassment has taken place.
What I am curious about, is whether there are also efforts ongoing that are
focused on influencing community behavior in a more preventive manner. I'm
not sure how that would work out in practice, I don't have the solution
(although some ideas have been bouncing around). This work seems related to
bullying in general - which happens unfortunately in schools and
communities around the world - and research on this topic may help identify
methods that could have a preventive effect. I have yet to see a 100%
effective program, but it may strengthen the efforts for a healthier
community.
I can see that where these approaches are still investigated, or
non-technical, the community tech team may be less suitable for
implementing them. But I do want to express my hope that somewhere in the
Foundation (and affiliates), work is being done to also look at preventing
bullying and harassment - besides handling it effectively. And that you
maybe keep that work in mind, when developing these tools. Some overlap may
exist - for example, I could imagine that if the
harassment-identificationtool is reliable enough, it could trigger warnings
to users before they save their edit, or the scores could be used in admin
applications (and for others with example-functions). A more social
approach that is unrelated, would be to train community members on how to
respond to poisonous behavior. I'm just thinking out loud here, and others
may have much better approaches in mind (or actually work on them).
Hope that clarifies a bit,
Best,
Lodewijk
2017-01-27 17:24 GMT+01:00 Danny Horn <dhorn(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
The project has four focus areas, and blocking is just
one of them. Here's
the whole picture:
* Detection and prevention: Using machine learning to help flag situations
for admin review -- both text that looks like it's harassing and
aggressive, as well as modeling patterns of user interaction, like stalking
and hounding, before the situation gets out of control.
* Reporting: Building a new system to encourage editors to reach out for
help, in a way that's less chaotic and stressful than the current system.
* Evaluation: Giving admins and others tools that help them evaluate
harassment cases, and make good decisions.
* Blocking: Making it more difficult for banned users to come back.
We'll be actively working on all four areas. There aren't a ton of details
right now about exactly what we'll build, for a couple reasons. The product
manager and the analyst haven't started yet, and the research that they do
will generate a lot of new ideas and insights. Also, we're going to work
closely with the community -- talking to people with different roles and
perspectives, and making plans in collaboration with contributors who are
interested in these issues. So there's lots of work and thinking and
consulting to do.
But here's one idea that I'm personally excited about, which I think helps
to explain why we're focusing on tools:
Right now, when two people end up at AN/I, the only way to figure out whose
version of the story to believe is by looking at individual, cherrypicked
diffs. You can also look through the two editors' contributions, but if
they're both active editors and the problem has been going on for a while,
then it's very difficult to get a sense of what's going on. Sometimes it
really matters who did what first, and you have to correlate the two
contributions logs, and pay attention to timestamps.
The idea is: build a tool that helps admins (and others) follow the "story"
of this conflict. Look for the pages where the two editors have interacted,
and show a timeline that helps you see what happened first, how they
responded, and how the drama unfolded. That could reduce the time cost of
investigating and evaluating considerably, making it much easier for an
admin or mediator to get involved.
There are lots of UI questions about how that would work and what it would
look like, but I don't think it would be too difficult on the tech side.
The information is already there in the contributions; it's just difficult
to correlate by hand.
Assuming it works, that tool could have a lot of good outcomes. Admins
would be more likely to take on harassment cases, because there'd be
greater return for the time investment. It would take some of the burden
off the target, so they don't have to figure out which individual diffs
they should provide in order to make their case. Also, it would be harder
for harassers to get away with mistreating people, because they wouldn't be
able to hide behind a smokescreen of random diffs.
As folks on this thread have said, there are lots of other components to
tackling the harassment problems. There will probably be groups of admins
and others who are especially interested in helping with the reporting and
evaluation, and the Foundation could provide trainings and resources for
those groups. Making changes to the reporting system will involve a lot of
community discussions about policies and competing values. Some of those
conversations and plans will probably be led by the Foundation, and some of
them will arise naturally within the community.
For this specific team -- the Community Tech product team, working with the
community advocate -- our focus is on doing research and building tools
that will support those conversations and plans. We're not going to take
over the community's proper role in setting policy, or making decisions
about how to handle cases.
To Fæ's point, the community will determine the social and cultural
decisions about how to treat harassment cases, and our team's job is to
build software that will help to put those decisions into practice.
On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 3:06 AM, Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 27 January 2017 at 09:21, Lodewijk
<lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org>
wrote:
...
> Do I understand correctly that this particular initiative will focus on
> fighting harassment, and not necessarily on preventing it? Basically
in a
similar
pattern that vandalism is fought on most wikipedia projects?
I really hope that prevention, education and (social) training will
become
> a major point in the overall agenda, but I can imagine that we can't
pay
> all that from the single grant :) So I just
would like to place it in
the
proper
context.
Best,
Lodewijk
+1 Spot on.
The plan appears to hinge on blocks as the outcome. Based on cases of
long term harassment targeted at individuals which invariably involved
off-wiki doxxing or contacting friends and family members of their
target, blocking Wikimedia accounts is an approach that may remove
Wikimedia projects as a platform but does little to help reform the
person causing harassment. I would rather see systems that include
reaching out to the apparent harasser to help them recognize and deal
with their anger or obsessive issues. Treating badly behaved
individuals as the "other", without aiming for a lasting resolution,
means we are back to the old days of telling the unfortunate
target/victim to change their identity or grow a thicker skin as the
on-line harassment may never stop.
Fae
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