Hello, everyone. I’m Trevor, a new Product Manager here at the WMF and I’ll be working on the Community Health Initiative.
If you’re looking to read press about this new initiative, I personally think the two best articles are the Wikimedia Foundation’s blog post published on January 26th 2017[1] and Craig Newmark’s blog post published the following day.[2]
This specific Newmark Foundation grant will be used to staff a software development team to research, design, and build tools for wiki contributors and functionaries to detect, report, and evaluate incidents of harassment and block offenders if appropriate. At this moment in time we believe all four pillars — detection, reporting, evaluation, and blocking — are equally important. This initiative is not just about blocking users.
If you’re looking for in-depth details, the best places to learn more are the Meta page on the Community Health Initiative[3] (which is admittedly still a work-in-progress) and the 14-page grant proposal.[4]
But ‘Tools’ is just part of the equation. An equally important part of this initiative is will be to work with the communities to evaluate and improve the conduct policies and dispute resolution processes. This is outside the scope of this specific Newmark Foundation grant but is crucial to the goal of reducing the frequency of harassment and complexity of resolving harassment reports.
One of the challenges for this initiative will be crafting, committing to, and executing an inclusive and open communication strategy that encourages and fosters constructive participation into the process. Community input is vital to this initiative. As we staff up this new team we’ll begin making decisions on best to include everyone who wants to be involved. Until then, I personally encourage you to discuss this initiative on its talk page.[5]
Thank you!