I agree you can probably never pin down these terms to everyone's satisfaction. But,
at the end of the day, is the real issue here the definition of harassment or is it the
issue of people leaving Wikipedia because of unpleasant interactions with other people or
perhaps retaliating in some inappropriate way. Harassment may not even be occurring on a
Talk page. If someone stalks you on-wiki and reverts each of your edits, you are probably
being harassed without a word being said on Talk.
This is the problem. Two people can see the same set of events or the same commentary from
very different points of view. The question of "harassment" isn't completely
decidable in the real world for the same reasons. But if we train the algorithms based on
human assessments (provided that a wide range of people were making those assessments), we
do have something useful to work with to begin to test hypotheses in the lab before taking
real-world action.
For example, I find it very interesting that a small group of experienced users appear
responsible for a lot of apparently obvious personal attacks. It does indeed suggest that
these people think themselves unstoppable, whether that is being they believe themselves
"unblockable" or perhaps they feel safe in the knowledge that their
less-experienced victim is unlikely to know how to complain. Or perhaps they are just
bantering among themselves, like a bunch of mate at the pub? But it certainly seems to
suggest that there is a way to start identifying potential problem users for a human-based
investigation.
But does the "community" really care about harassment to investigate them? Would
it really take action against experienced users who engaged in harassment? Past events
suggest not.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
Pine W
Sent: Thursday, 22 June 2017 10:04 AM
To: A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in
Wikipedia and analytics. <analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>; Wiki Research-l
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] [Analytics] Wikipedia Detox: Scaling up our understanding
of harassment on Wikipedia
I'm glad that work on detecting and addressing harassment are moving forward.
At the same time, I'd appreciate getting a more precise understanding of how WMF is
defining the word "harassment". There are legal definitions and dictionary
definitions, but I don't think that there is One Definition to Rule Them All. I'm
hoping that WMF will be careful to distinguish debate and freedom to express opinions from
harassment; we may disagree with minority or fringe views (even views that are offensive
to some) but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should use policy and admin tools
instead of persuasion and other tools (such as content policies about verifiability and
notability) to address them (and in some cases Wikipedia may not be a good place for these
discussions). Other distinctions include (1) the distinction between a personal attack and
harassment (
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/scaling-understanding-of-harassment/
appears to have equivocated the two definitions, while English Wikipedia policy makes
distinctions between them), and (2) the distinction between a personal attack and an
evidence-based critique.
Also note that definitions of what constitutes an attack may vary between languages; for
example an expression which sounds insulting to someone in one place, culture, or language
may mean something very different or relatively benign in a different place, culture, or
language. I had an experience myself when I made a statement to someone which from my
perspective was a statement of fact, and the other party took it as an insult. I don't
apologize for what I said since from my perspective it was valid, and the other party has
not apologized for their reaction, but the point is that defining what constitutes a
personal attack or harassment can be a very subjective business and I'm not sure to
what extent I would trust an AI to evaluate what constitutes a personal attack or
harassment in a wide range of contexts. I get the impression that WMF intends to flag
potentially problematic edits for admins to review, which I think could be a good thing,
but I hope that there is great care being invested in how the AI is being trained to
define personal attacks and harassment, and I wouldn't necessarily want admins to be
encouraged to substitute the opinion of an AI for their own.
I understand the desire to tone down some of the more heated discourse around Wikipedia
for the sake of improving our user population statistics, and at the same time I'm
hoping that we can continue to have very strong support for freedom of expression and
differences of opinion. This is a difficult balancing act. I think that moving the needle
a bit in the direction of more civility would be a good thing, but I get the impression
that there are plenty of edits that are blatant personal attacks that we don't need to
move the needle a lot, and could instead focus on more rapidly and thoroughly addressing
instances where there is ample evidence that people's intentions were malicious.
Pine
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 2:08 PM, Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your note. :)
On the Research end, Dario is still a big supporter of the efforts
around research to help us better understand harassment (as you
noticed in our commitments to the annual plan) and with Ellery's
departure, I've been helping him a bit to make sure we can move
forward on this front. More specifically, and while we're continuing
the research with Nithum and Lucas who were Ellery's collaborators on
the Detox project, we recently initiated
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Study_of_
harassment_and_its_impact
with Cristian and Yiqing from Cornell University. We are very excited
about this new collaboration as Cristian has years of experience in
spaces that are very relevant to the socio-technical problems related
to harassment. I think you will enjoy reading that page which signal
the early directions of the research.
The whole harassment research team meets every 2 weeks, if you're
curious what's going on on this front and on our end and you want to
listen in, please ping me. And, thank you for the offer to help. We
may take you up on that. :)
Best,
Leila
--
Leila Zia
Senior Research Scientist
Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 7:55 PM, Toby Negrin <tnegrin(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hi Dan -- we are actually in touch with Detox as
part of the
Community Health initiative. They are doing their first quarterly
check in this quarter so expect some updates then. Ping me offlist
if you want more
info.
-Toby
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Dan Andreescu <
dandreescu(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
>
> I'm reflecting on this work and how awesome it was. I see that
> it's continued in our annual plan under the Community Health
> Initiative, but
I
> am afraid it's taking a secondary role
without Ellery and others to
drive
> it. On
>
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/AbuseFi
> lter it's only featured as a question under the #Functionality
> section.
>
> I just wanted to point this out and offer to help if I can be of use.
>
> On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 5:16 PM, Ellery Wulczyn
> <ewulczyn(a)wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Today we are announcing
> >
> > <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/scaling-
understanding-of-harassment/>
> > the
> > first results of the collaboration between Wikimedia Research and
Jigsaw
> > on
> > modeling personal attacks and other forms of harassment on
> > English Wikipedia. We have released
> > <https://figshare.com/projects/Wikipedia_Talk/16731> a corpus of
> > 95M user and article talk page comments as well as over 1M human
> > labels
produced
> > by
> > 4000 crowd-workers for a set of 100k comments. Documentation on
> > our methodology and future work can be found in our paper Ex Machina:
> > Personal Attacks Seen at Scale <https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08914>
> > (to appear at WWW2017) and on our project page on meta
> > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Detox>. If you are
interested
> > in contributing to the project, please
get in touch via the
> > project
talk
page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Detox>.
Another great way to get involved is to label a set of comment in
the Wikilabels discussion quality campaign
<http://labels.wmflabs.org/ui/enwiki/>.
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