On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 1:50 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Moriel and others,
Do you have a list of "realistic changes" in mind for the community?
I hear almost no one say that the typical state of (in)civility on wiki or on Wikimedia-l is good enough or that people are being hypersensitive, so I get the sense that there's a lot of agreement that we have a cultural problem. Ideas for solutions seem to be in short supply, so any "realistic changes" that you can suggest would be good to hear, either on this list or in IdeaLab.
The problem on en.wiki at least is that a vocal minority effectively prevent any enforcement of the civility policy. This includes a significant group of admins that are willing to overturn blocks for all but the most blatant violations of the policy. And because of the wheel warring loophole (undoing a block is allowed, but reinstating a block is wheel warring, which is prohibited), there is nothing that anyone can do about it. ArbCom (or the community) could close this loophole, but so far have not shown interest in doing so. The single action that I think would be most useful on en.wiki would be for someone to shepherd an RfC to create a policy statement that "unilaterally overturning a block is wheel-warring". I know this sounds very far removed from the issue of making en.wiki more civil, but I actually think such a change is realistically possible and would go a long way towards shifting the balance of power away from the trolls and misogynists.
Alternately, the board or ArbCom could step up and declare that civility is not to be treated as a second-class policy, but I doubt that would ever happen.
Ryan Kaldari
On 7/3/2014 1:40 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
The problem on en.wiki at least is that a vocal minority effectively prevent any enforcement of the civility policy.
The other problem is double standard enforcement. A bunch of guys may complain about mild incivility by a female and she'll get warned by an admin at an ANI. A guy can get away with a lot of bullying, insults and harassment before complaints are taken seriously and there is even an admin comment on an ANI.
That's why it's important to have the talk page of the gender gap task force page open to a listing of various ANIs and enforcement actions involving editors known to be women. A couple women going to each one and pointing out when these gender gap double standards obviously exist, over and over again would be a big help. That way there's some hope editors and admins especially will understand that double standards exist and are "bad"! Same with Harassment, incivility, etc. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Going to Admins talk pages directly after the rule "wrong" can be helpful. I've seen some obnoxious individuals get away with stuff because they'd chummy up to the Admin on their talk page and explain the righteousness of their behavior ad nauseam, as if to brainwash the admin. More squeaky wheel stuff.
CM
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 10:56 AM, Carol Moore dc carolmooredc@verizon.net wrote:
On 7/3/2014 1:40 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
The problem on en.wiki at least is that a vocal minority effectively prevent any enforcement of the civility policy.
The other problem is double standard enforcement. A bunch of guys may complain about mild incivility by a female and she'll get warned by an admin at an ANI. A guy can get away with a lot of bullying, insults and harassment before complaints are taken seriously and there is even an admin comment on an ANI.
I agree, policies against harassment can be co-opted to further harass marginalized people and there is a long history of this in other areas (see SLAPP and anti-SLAPP in U.S. law for example).
People on this list might be interested in some experiments in other open tech/culture communities where people are extending any policy about harassment to take into account the surrounding power structure of society. That is, they explicitly say that they will take into account the power imbalance between parties before deciding whether something is harassment.
"In order to protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. The Geek Feminism Anti-Abuse Team is not here to explain power differentials or other basic social justice concepts to you. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response."
http://geekfeminism.org/about/code-of-conduct/
"A supplemental goal of this Code of Conduct is to increase open source citizenship by encouraging participants to recognize and strengthen the relationships between our actions and their effects on our community. Communities mirror the societies in which they exist and positive action is essential to counteract the many forms of inequality and abuses of power that exist in society."
http://opensourcebridge.org/about/code-of-conduct/
-VAL
That's why it's important to have the talk page of the gender gap task force page open to a listing of various ANIs and enforcement actions involving editors known to be women. A couple women going to each one and pointing out when these gender gap double standards obviously exist, over and over again would be a big help. That way there's some hope editors and admins especially will understand that double standards exist and are "bad"! Same with Harassment, incivility, etc. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Going to Admins talk pages directly after the rule "wrong" can be helpful. I've seen some obnoxious individuals get away with stuff because they'd chummy up to the Admin on their talk page and explain the righteousness of their behavior ad nauseam, as if to brainwash the admin. More squeaky wheel stuff.
CM
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:23 AM, Valerie Aurora valerie@adainitiative.org wrote:
I agree, policies against harassment can be co-opted to further harass marginalized people and there is a long history of this in other areas (see SLAPP and anti-SLAPP in U.S. law for example). . .. [snip] ...
A major problem with our dispute-resolution processes is that the person being harassed has to endure more harassment to draw attention to the problem. All experts in harassment will tell you that this is the wrong thing to do. Almost always, the best thing for a victim of harassment is to do nothing further to attract the person's attention. But that leaves the problem editor free to choose the next victim.
I have long thought the Foundation ought to employ a team of specialists who can take up those cases when they see them, so that the pursuit of sanctions is not laid at the victim's door. This is perhaps similar to Sumana's suggestion that communities need dedicated helpers who will do the emotional labour in conflict situations.
Sarah
On 4 July 2014 00:35, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:23 AM, Valerie Aurora <valerie@adainitiative.org
wrote:
I agree, policies against harassment can be co-opted to further harass marginalized people and there is a long history of this in other areas (see SLAPP and anti-SLAPP in U.S. law for example). . .. [snip] ...
A major problem with our dispute-resolution processes is that the person being harassed has to endure more harassment to draw attention to the problem. All experts in harassment will tell you that this is the wrong thing to do. Almost always, the best thing for a victim of harassment is to do nothing further to attract the person's attention. But that leaves the problem editor free to choose the next victim.
I have long thought the Foundation ought to employ a team of specialists who can take up those cases when they see them, so that the pursuit of sanctions is not laid at the victim's door. This is perhaps similar to Sumana's suggestion that communities need dedicated helpers who will do the emotional labour in conflict situations.
There was a point in time where there was an "editor advocacy" group that proposed to take these sorts of cases to Arbcom. The basic idea was fairly good. The problem was that the couple of individuals bringing it forward were...ummm...highly combative in their own right, shall we say? As in, it might have been hard for Arbcom to tell whose behaviour was worse...
It takes the right kind of people do to this successfully. And I fear that the "right kind of people" are in short supply on Wikipedia, and most of those are busy doing things they like to do instead. On the other hand, I have a hard time imagining the WMF coughing up the cost of even a couple of genuine "editor advocates" when the community advocacy department (covering all 800+ projects) is so small.
Risker/Anne
>A major problem with our dispute-resolution processes is that the person being harassed has >to endure more harassment to draw attention to the problem. This is, of course, hardly unique to Wikipedia or even online communities in general, I think.
I have long thought the Foundation ought to employ a team of specialists who can take up >those cases when they see them, so that the pursuit of sanctions is not laid at the victim's >door. This is perhaps similar to Sumana's suggestion that communities need dedicated >helpers who will do the emotional labour in conflict situations.
Would there be a good existing example of such a program we could take a look at? Daniel Case
Daniel and Elizabeth Case wrote:
>A major problem with our dispute-resolution processes is that the person being harassed has >to endure more harassment to draw attention to the problem. This is, of course, hardly unique to Wikipedia or even online communities in general, I think.
I have long thought the Foundation ought to employ a team of specialists who can take up >those cases when they see them,
so that the pursuit of sanctions is not laid at the victim's >door. This is perhaps similar to Sumana's suggestion that communities need dedicated >helpers who will do the emotional labour in conflict situations.
Would there be a good existing example of such a program we could take a look at? Daniel Case
Online communities can allow anyone to "report" problem posts or PMs. Only the moderators see these reports, not the general membership or public. For example, Simple Machines Forum has a report link on every post.
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php
Now in many cases the harasser can blame the victim, but that happens whether it is the truth or not.
I have run into a problem of neutrals feeling as though reporting is "being a snitch." Haven't figured out a way around that yet.
Janine
Online communities can allow anyone to "report" problem posts or PMs. Only the moderators see these reports, not the general membership or public. For example, Simple Machines Forum has a report link on every post.
I've been part of the moderation team in scienceforums.net for the past 6-7 years, and I can account for this from the "other side" (of a moderation team member) --- it really depends on how well the moderation team handles these reports, but from my experience, the system has great advantages-
1. It allows users to complain about anything from bias to bad attitude to stalking *privately* and without repercussion (no one other than the moderators knows that something was reported) and when we take action, we take care not to imply that anyone reported the post.
2. It also allows users the freedom to "check" their concerns before they become disasters. We sometimes get reports about a thread that isn't a problem *yet* but might very well get there without intervention, and we keep that thread in sight and try to intervene when possible to steer things back to normal.
However, these reports and moderation-action can also have some negative side effects -
1. It can look like "Big Brother is Watching" when moderators respond to a report but no one knows that there even was a report.
2. It requires that there *is* a sort of moderation team and that people know who the moderators are. It also requires that people are able to complain *about* the moderation team in the reports, so the team has to have internal rules about how to inspect one of its own members.
3. Some (not all) of the forums and moderation-driven systems also have some sort of "history" about troublesome users. This is extremely helpful to spot a user that is "borderline" on trolling or harassment, those are very easily "flying under the radar" and hurting others. So history in that aspect is very helpful. However, that can easily devolve, especially when/if these are public (in which case they can trigger worse behaviors)
The entire idea of reporting posts can be a tricky to make right and effective. I don't know how this can be implemented in a project like Wikipedia, where the idea of some "moderation authority" is generally frowned upon (and justly so)
Maybe we can have a faux-moderation-team, a team that can get (private!) reports and then go and intervene. So even if they have no "teeth" or authority for actual action it can show users that they have support and they're not alone -- which seems to be one of the main issues with the gendergap and participation of minorities in general.
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php
Now in many cases the harasser can blame the victim, but that happens whether it is the truth or not.
I have run into a problem of neutrals feeling as though reporting is "being a snitch." Haven't figured out a way around that yet.
Janine
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Moriel Schottlender moriel@gmail.com wrote:
Online communities can allow anyone to "report" problem posts or PMs. Only
the moderators see these reports, not the general membership or public. For example, Simple Machines Forum has a report link on every post.
I've been part of the moderation team in scienceforums.net for the past 6-7 years, and I can account for this from the "other side" (of a moderation team member) --- it really depends on how well the moderation team handles these reports, but from my experience, the system has great advantages-
- It allows users to complain about anything from bias to bad attitude to
stalking *privately* and without repercussion (no one other than the moderators knows that something was reported) and when we take action, we take care not to imply that anyone reported the post. ...
Janine, Ryan, Pete and Moriel, these are great ideas. I love the idea of a button that anyone can press to send an alert to a Wikiquette team. How can an idea like this be moved forward? There could be different levels of urgency (low: general incivility; medium: sexism, racism, homophobia; high: harassment, outing, threats).
Janine,
Ryan, Pete and Moriel, these are great ideas. I love the idea of a button that anyone can press to send an alert to a Wikiquette team. How can an idea like this be moved forward? There could be different levels of urgency (low: general incivility; medium: sexism, racism, homophobia; high: harassment, outing, threats).
In the forum, we made it so that while no one sees the report publicly, the moderators do see the name (or user name) of the reporter (we don't share that outside the moderation team, though)
We found that this helps us mediate problems of harassment-by-reporting and to spot potential underlying issues with a repeat offender. So, for example, we can recognize when a user consistently over-reports another user for no reason (or petty reasons) which can also be harassment.
I'm not sure if this is possible in Wikipedia itself, we might want to see if we need another tool just for that.
Do you think that having to use an external tool is realistic for a Wikipedia group, though? We use external tools for development (like bugzilla) but I am not sure what the reaction would be for something like this when an on-wiki team is involved. (I might be missing an option of having this semi-closed/hidden space on-wiki)
I think the closest thing we have with these capabilities is the Wikimedia OTRS system:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS
Specific queues can be customized in many ways, I believe, though others will know more about this.
Thanks, Pharos
On Sat, Jul 5, 2014 at 2:02 AM, Moriel Schottlender moriel@gmail.com wrote:
Janine,
Ryan, Pete and Moriel, these are great ideas. I love the idea of a button that anyone can press to send an alert to a Wikiquette team. How can an idea like this be moved forward? There could be different levels of urgency (low: general incivility; medium: sexism, racism, homophobia; high: harassment, outing, threats).
In the forum, we made it so that while no one sees the report publicly, the moderators do see the name (or user name) of the reporter (we don't share that outside the moderation team, though)
We found that this helps us mediate problems of harassment-by-reporting and to spot potential underlying issues with a repeat offender. So, for example, we can recognize when a user consistently over-reports another user for no reason (or petty reasons) which can also be harassment.
I'm not sure if this is possible in Wikipedia itself, we might want to see if we need another tool just for that.
Do you think that having to use an external tool is realistic for a Wikipedia group, though? We use external tools for development (like bugzilla) but I am not sure what the reaction would be for something like this when an on-wiki team is involved. (I might be missing an option of having this semi-closed/hidden space on-wiki)
-- No trees were harmed in the creation of this post. But billions of electrons, photons, and electromagnetic waves were terribly inconvenienced during its transmission!
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
On Jul 5, 2014 2:18 AM, "Pharos" pharosofalexandria@gmail.com wrote:
I think the closest thing we have with these capabilities is the
Wikimedia OTRS system:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS
Specific queues can be customized in many ways, I believe, though others
will know more about this.
Yes, there are plenty of per-queue settings. e.g. auto reply on receiving a new ticket, behavior on receiving a followup to an existing ticket, ACL, boilerplates, filters, etc.
Pete mentioned OTRS earlier.
There's even some queues set up with their own on wiki accounts so you can mail the queue from special:emailuser.
Anyway, before deciding on a tool we need to know how the tool is intended to work.
-Jeremy
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 9:55 PM, Daniel and Elizabeth Case < dancase@frontiernet.net> wrote:
>A major problem with our dispute-resolution processes is that the person being harassed has >to endure more harassment to draw attention to the problem.
This is, of course, hardly unique to Wikipedia or even online communities in general, I think.
Hi Daniel, the very public nature of it on Wikipedia makes it unusual and very stressful.
I have long thought the Foundation ought to employ a team of specialists
who can take up >those cases when they see them, so that the pursuit of sanctions is not laid at the victim's >door. This is perhaps similar to Sumana's suggestion that communities need dedicated >helpers who will do the emotional labour in conflict situations.
Would there be a good existing example of such a program we could take a look at?
Daniel Case
Sumana talked https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hospitality,_Jerks,_and_What_I_Learned about the situation at Hacker School: " If you don’t understand why something you did broke the rules, you don't ask the person who corrected you. You ask a facilitator. You ask someone who’s paid to do that emotional labor, and you don't bring everyone else's work to a screeching halt. This might sound a little bit foreign to some of us right now. Being able to ask someone to stop doing the thing that’s harming everyone else’s work and knowing that it will actually stop and that there’s someone else who’s paid to do that emotional labor who will take care of any conversation that needs to happen. "
The idea of having people paid to do this is very attractive for Wikipedia. I think they would have to be professionals with appropriate training, otherwise there's a big risk of making things worse. The Foundation probably has enough of an income to consider this, given the potential impact on the atmosphere and editor retention.
Sarah
I would assume that WMF has an ombudsman who would do just that, but I see that there is only this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman_commission
On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 7:50 AM, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 9:55 PM, Daniel and Elizabeth Case < dancase@frontiernet.net> wrote:
>A major problem with our dispute-resolution processes is that the person being harassed has >to endure more harassment to draw attention to the problem.
This is, of course, hardly unique to Wikipedia or even online communities in general, I think.
Hi Daniel, the very public nature of it on Wikipedia makes it unusual and very stressful.
I have long thought the Foundation ought to employ a team of specialists
who can take up >those cases when they see them, so that the pursuit of sanctions is not laid at the victim's >door. This is perhaps similar to Sumana's suggestion that communities need dedicated >helpers who will do the emotional labour in conflict situations.
Would there be a good existing example of such a program we could take a look at?
Daniel Case
Sumana talked https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hospitality,_Jerks,_and_What_I_Learned about the situation at Hacker School: " If you don’t understand why something you did broke the rules, you don't ask the person who corrected you. You ask a facilitator. You ask someone who’s paid to do that emotional labor, and you don't bring everyone else's work to a screeching halt. This might sound a little bit foreign to some of us right now. Being able to ask someone to stop doing the thing that’s harming everyone else’s work and knowing that it will actually stop and that there’s someone else who’s paid to do that emotional labor who will take care of any conversation that needs to happen. "
The idea of having people paid to do this is very attractive for Wikipedia. I think they would have to be professionals with appropriate training, otherwise there's a big risk of making things worse. The Foundation probably has enough of an income to consider this, given the potential impact on the atmosphere and editor retention.
Sarah
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
What if...
Wikiquette assistance were resurrected as a list of volunteer admins that you could privately email about problems rather than a public noticeboard?
Ryan Kaldari
On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 4:05 AM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
I would assume that WMF has an ombudsman who would do just that, but I see that there is only this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman_commission
On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 7:50 AM, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 9:55 PM, Daniel and Elizabeth Case < dancase@frontiernet.net> wrote:
>A major problem with our dispute-resolution processes is that the person being harassed has >to endure more harassment to draw attention to the problem.
This is, of course, hardly unique to Wikipedia or even online communities in general, I think.
Hi Daniel, the very public nature of it on Wikipedia makes it unusual and very stressful.
I have long thought the Foundation ought to employ a team of
specialists who can take up >those cases when they see them, so that the pursuit of sanctions is not laid at the victim's >door. This is perhaps similar to Sumana's suggestion that communities need dedicated >helpers who will do the emotional labour in conflict situations.
Would there be a good existing example of such a program we could take a look at?
Daniel Case
Sumana talked https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hospitality,_Jerks,_and_What_I_Learned about the situation at Hacker School: " If you don’t understand why something you did broke the rules, you don't ask the person who corrected you. You ask a facilitator. You ask someone who’s paid to do that emotional labor, and you don't bring everyone else's work to a screeching halt. This might sound a little bit foreign to some of us right now. Being able to ask someone to stop doing the thing that’s harming everyone else’s work and knowing that it will actually stop and that there’s someone else who’s paid to do that emotional labor who will take care of any conversation that needs to happen. "
The idea of having people paid to do this is very attractive for Wikipedia. I think they would have to be professionals with appropriate training, otherwise there's a big risk of making things worse. The Foundation probably has enough of an income to consider this, given the potential impact on the atmosphere and editor retention.
Sarah
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
This sounds similar to a proposal from a couple years ago to create a new queue at OTRS for women concerned about images depicting themselves. there was some discussion on the OTRS List; as I recall, I managed to throw the discussion into some disarray by presenting the idea in a way that led to some misunderstanding. But overall, once we got that sorted, I don't think there were any objections to the idea.
If I can help move things along, please let me know.
Pete On Jul 4, 2014 11:08 AM, "Ryan Kaldari" rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
What if...
Wikiquette assistance were resurrected as a list of volunteer admins that you could privately email about problems rather than a public noticeboard?
Ryan Kaldari
On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 4:05 AM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
I would assume that WMF has an ombudsman who would do just that, but I see that there is only this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman_commission
On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 7:50 AM, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 9:55 PM, Daniel and Elizabeth Case < dancase@frontiernet.net> wrote:
>A major problem with our dispute-resolution processes is that the person being harassed has >to endure more harassment to draw attention to the problem.
This is, of course, hardly unique to Wikipedia or even online communities in general, I think.
Hi Daniel, the very public nature of it on Wikipedia makes it unusual and very stressful.
I have long thought the Foundation ought to employ a team of
specialists who can take up >those cases when they see them, so that the pursuit of sanctions is not laid at the victim's >door. This is perhaps similar to Sumana's suggestion that communities need dedicated >helpers who will do the emotional labour in conflict situations.
Would there be a good existing example of such a program we could take a look at?
Daniel Case
Sumana talked https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hospitality,_Jerks,_and_What_I_Learned about the situation at Hacker School: " If you don’t understand why something you did broke the rules, you don't ask the person who corrected you. You ask a facilitator. You ask someone who’s paid to do that emotional labor, and you don't bring everyone else's work to a screeching halt. This might sound a little bit foreign to some of us right now. Being able to ask someone to stop doing the thing that’s harming everyone else’s work and knowing that it will actually stop and that there’s someone else who’s paid to do that emotional labor who will take care of any conversation that needs to happen. "
The idea of having people paid to do this is very attractive for Wikipedia. I think they would have to be professionals with appropriate training, otherwise there's a big risk of making things worse. The Foundation probably has enough of an income to consider this, given the potential impact on the atmosphere and editor retention.
Sarah
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
On 3 July 2014 13:40, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 1:50 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Moriel and others,
Do you have a list of "realistic changes" in mind for the community?
I hear almost no one say that the typical state of (in)civility on wiki or on Wikimedia-l is good enough or that people are being hypersensitive, so I get the sense that there's a lot of agreement that we have a cultural problem. Ideas for solutions seem to be in short supply, so any "realistic changes" that you can suggest would be good to hear, either on this list or in IdeaLab.
The problem on en.wiki at least is that a vocal minority effectively prevent any enforcement of the civility policy. This includes a significant group of admins that are willing to overturn blocks for all but the most blatant violations of the policy. And because of the wheel warring loophole (undoing a block is allowed, but reinstating a block is wheel warring, which is prohibited), there is nothing that anyone can do about it. ArbCom (or the community) could close this loophole, but so far have not shown interest in doing so. The single action that I think would be most useful on en.wiki would be for someone to shepherd an RfC to create a policy statement that "unilaterally overturning a block is wheel-warring". I know this sounds very far removed from the issue of making en.wiki more civil, but I actually think such a change is realistically possible and would go a long way towards shifting the balance of power away from the trolls and misogynists.
Alternately, the board or ArbCom could step up and declare that civility is not to be treated as a second-class policy, but I doubt that would ever happen.
You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several occasions when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of certain individuals to initiate a case....but nobody wanted to do that, and the community quite correctly will not allow arbcom to initiate its own cases absent something that is a clear and present danger, such as a sysop gone wild (e.g., mass deletes, unblocking themselves) or someone repeatedly violating another user's privacy, or paedophile activism. (And on the last point, arbcom still got plenty of grief for it.)
Arbcom isn't a core part of the community - partly because when it messes up, it REALLY messes up (historical - banning an uncivil user without bothering to even talk to him, sort of a star chamber trial; creating a "subcommittee" to "advise Arbcom" on content aspects of cases it accepted). It only gets requests for 20 or so cases a year anymore, half of which are clearly not in their scope, and accepts about 8-10 cases a year.
Risker/Anne
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several occasions when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of certain individuals to initiate a case....but nobody wanted to do that...
Well, you know I did actually take one of the worst misogynists on en.wiki to ArbCom,[1] and it was such a horrible experience that I decided to never do it again. After giving up a month of my life to the case and enduring constant harassment during the process, all of the evidence that I painstakingly assembled, presented, and defended was completely ignored by ArbCom, and instead he was banned for a year for making a legal threat. He is now free to return on the condition that he simply agrees not to make any more legal threats. You were actually on that ArbCom panel, Risker, so I don't really understand your argument that taking incivil editors to ArbCom is a good idea. To me it is worse than a waste of effort, it is actually counterproductive and an invitation to be relentlessly harassed.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Ca...
Ryan Kaldari
The more I hear about this, the more I think this is something that WMF needs to address at an institutional level (Board etc.) to resolve these process issues and loopholes. Has this ever been taken "up the chain"?
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several occasions when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of certain individuals to initiate a case....but nobody wanted to do that...
Well, you know I did actually take one of the worst misogynists on en.wiki to ArbCom,[1] and it was such a horrible experience that I decided to never do it again. After giving up a month of my life to the case and enduring constant harassment during the process, all of the evidence that I painstakingly assembled, presented, and defended was completely ignored by ArbCom, and instead he was banned for a year for making a legal threat. He is now free to return on the condition that he simply agrees not to make any more legal threats. You were actually on that ArbCom panel, Risker, so I don't really understand your argument that taking incivil editors to ArbCom is a good idea. To me it is worse than a waste of effort, it is actually counterproductive and an invitation to be relentlessly harassed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Ca...
Ryan Kaldari
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Well, here's the issue. It's never been clear to me whether this is a WMF-wide issue or it's an English Wikipedia specific issue. The overwhelming majority of people participating on this list work almost exclusively on enwiki, and almost every single experience discussed here involves enwiki.
As important as we all know English Wikipedia to be (if nothing else, it's the fundraising driver from which the bulk of donations derives), it's also only one of hundreds of projects. There are issues with the Board micromanaging a single project directly, and pretty serious issues when the Board tries to fix a problem on one project by creating a global policy or rule that may actually be counterproductive in other areas. (And as we can see from the obtuseness that Commons shows about such issues as personality rights - a major gendergap issue in my mind - even when the Board does try to intervene, it's often ineffective.)
Risker/Anne
On 3 July 2014 14:58, Leigh Honeywell leigh@hypatia.ca wrote:
The more I hear about this, the more I think this is something that WMF needs to address at an institutional level (Board etc.) to resolve these process issues and loopholes. Has this ever been taken "up the chain"?
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several
occasions
when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of
certain
individuals to initiate a case....but nobody wanted to do that...
Well, you know I did actually take one of the worst misogynists on
en.wiki
to ArbCom,[1] and it was such a horrible experience that I decided to
never
do it again. After giving up a month of my life to the case and enduring constant harassment during the process, all of the evidence that I painstakingly assembled, presented, and defended was completely ignored
by
ArbCom, and instead he was banned for a year for making a legal threat.
He
is now free to return on the condition that he simply agrees not to make
any
more legal threats. You were actually on that ArbCom panel, Risker, so I don't really understand your argument that taking incivil editors to
ArbCom
is a good idea. To me it is worse than a waste of effort, it is actually counterproductive and an invitation to be relentlessly harassed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Ca...
Ryan Kaldari
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
-- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Even if it is an en-wiki only issue, it's having a clear impact on editor retention and therefore the long-term sustainability of the project. I think trying to fix that is easy to dismiss as "micromanagement" but sometimes it turns out that fixing the big picture /does/ require organizational leadership to address specific things.
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Well, here's the issue. It's never been clear to me whether this is a WMF-wide issue or it's an English Wikipedia specific issue. The overwhelming majority of people participating on this list work almost exclusively on enwiki, and almost every single experience discussed here involves enwiki.
As important as we all know English Wikipedia to be (if nothing else, it's the fundraising driver from which the bulk of donations derives), it's also only one of hundreds of projects. There are issues with the Board micromanaging a single project directly, and pretty serious issues when the Board tries to fix a problem on one project by creating a global policy or rule that may actually be counterproductive in other areas. (And as we can see from the obtuseness that Commons shows about such issues as personality rights - a major gendergap issue in my mind - even when the Board does try to intervene, it's often ineffective.)
Risker/Anne
On 3 July 2014 14:58, Leigh Honeywell leigh@hypatia.ca wrote:
The more I hear about this, the more I think this is something that WMF needs to address at an institutional level (Board etc.) to resolve these process issues and loopholes. Has this ever been taken "up the chain"?
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several occasions when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of certain individuals to initiate a case....but nobody wanted to do that...
Well, you know I did actually take one of the worst misogynists on en.wiki to ArbCom,[1] and it was such a horrible experience that I decided to never do it again. After giving up a month of my life to the case and enduring constant harassment during the process, all of the evidence that I painstakingly assembled, presented, and defended was completely ignored by ArbCom, and instead he was banned for a year for making a legal threat. He is now free to return on the condition that he simply agrees not to make any more legal threats. You were actually on that ArbCom panel, Risker, so I don't really understand your argument that taking incivil editors to ArbCom is a good idea. To me it is worse than a waste of effort, it is actually counterproductive and an invitation to be relentlessly harassed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Ca...
Ryan Kaldari
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
-- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
do you know women outside the north american culture, i.e. US and CA, affected by this?
rupert Am 03.07.2014 21:13 schrieb "Leigh Honeywell" leigh@hypatia.ca:
Even if it is an en-wiki only issue, it's having a clear impact on editor retention and therefore the long-term sustainability of the project. I think trying to fix that is easy to dismiss as "micromanagement" but sometimes it turns out that fixing the big picture /does/ require organizational leadership to address specific things.
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Well, here's the issue. It's never been clear to me whether this is a WMF-wide issue or it's an English Wikipedia specific issue. The overwhelming majority of people participating on this list work almost exclusively on enwiki, and almost every single experience discussed here involves enwiki.
As important as we all know English Wikipedia to be (if nothing else,
it's
the fundraising driver from which the bulk of donations derives), it's
also
only one of hundreds of projects. There are issues with the Board micromanaging a single project directly, and pretty serious issues when
the
Board tries to fix a problem on one project by creating a global policy
or
rule that may actually be counterproductive in other areas. (And as we
can
see from the obtuseness that Commons shows about such issues as
personality
rights - a major gendergap issue in my mind - even when the Board does
try
to intervene, it's often ineffective.)
Risker/Anne
On 3 July 2014 14:58, Leigh Honeywell leigh@hypatia.ca wrote:
The more I hear about this, the more I think this is something that WMF needs to address at an institutional level (Board etc.) to resolve these process issues and loopholes. Has this ever been taken "up the chain"?
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several occasions when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of certain individuals to initiate a case....but nobody wanted to do that...
Well, you know I did actually take one of the worst misogynists on en.wiki to ArbCom,[1] and it was such a horrible experience that I decided to never do it again. After giving up a month of my life to the case and
enduring
constant harassment during the process, all of the evidence that I painstakingly assembled, presented, and defended was completely
ignored
by ArbCom, and instead he was banned for a year for making a legal
threat.
He is now free to return on the condition that he simply agrees not to
make
any more legal threats. You were actually on that ArbCom panel, Risker,
so I
don't really understand your argument that taking incivil editors to ArbCom is a good idea. To me it is worse than a waste of effort, it is
actually
counterproductive and an invitation to be relentlessly harassed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Ca...
Ryan Kaldari
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
-- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
-- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
As A Canadian I would dispute that there's a "North American" culture that's the same for the US and Canada :)
But yes, I do know women outside of those two countries which are affected by this.
On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 11:53 AM, rupert THURNER rupert.thurner@gmail.com wrote:
do you know women outside the north american culture, i.e. US and CA, affected by this?
rupert Am 03.07.2014 21:13 schrieb "Leigh Honeywell" leigh@hypatia.ca:
Even if it is an en-wiki only issue, it's having a clear impact on
editor retention and therefore the long-term sustainability of the project. I think trying to fix that is easy to dismiss as "micromanagement" but sometimes it turns out that fixing the big picture /does/ require organizational leadership to address specific things.
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Well, here's the issue. It's never been clear to me whether this is a WMF-wide issue or it's an English Wikipedia specific issue. The overwhelming majority of people participating on this list work almost exclusively on enwiki, and almost every single experience discussed here involves enwiki.
As important as we all know English Wikipedia to be (if nothing else,
it's
the fundraising driver from which the bulk of donations derives), it's
also
only one of hundreds of projects. There are issues with the Board micromanaging a single project directly, and pretty serious issues when
the
Board tries to fix a problem on one project by creating a global policy
or
rule that may actually be counterproductive in other areas. (And as we
can
see from the obtuseness that Commons shows about such issues as
personality
rights - a major gendergap issue in my mind - even when the Board does
try
to intervene, it's often ineffective.)
Risker/Anne
On 3 July 2014 14:58, Leigh Honeywell leigh@hypatia.ca wrote:
The more I hear about this, the more I think this is something that WMF needs to address at an institutional level (Board etc.) to resolve these process issues and loopholes. Has this ever been taken "up the chain"?
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several occasions when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of certain individuals to initiate a case....but nobody wanted to do that...
Well, you know I did actually take one of the worst misogynists on en.wiki to ArbCom,[1] and it was such a horrible experience that I decided to never do it again. After giving up a month of my life to the case and
enduring
constant harassment during the process, all of the evidence that I painstakingly assembled, presented, and defended was completely
ignored
by ArbCom, and instead he was banned for a year for making a legal
threat.
He is now free to return on the condition that he simply agrees not to
make
any more legal threats. You were actually on that ArbCom panel, Risker,
so I
don't really understand your argument that taking incivil editors to ArbCom is a good idea. To me it is worse than a waste of effort, it is
actually
counterproductive and an invitation to be relentlessly harassed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Ca...
Ryan Kaldari
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
-- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
-- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Rupert I have spoken to women from several other projects who have identified it as an issue. They tend not to post to english-language mailing lists. The overwhelming majority of women who post to this list are from English Wikipedia or other primarily English projects, so the comments will naturally be weighted in that way.
Risker/Anne
On 4 July 2014 14:53, rupert THURNER rupert.thurner@gmail.com wrote:
do you know women outside the north american culture, i.e. US and CA, affected by this?
rupert Am 03.07.2014 21:13 schrieb "Leigh Honeywell" leigh@hypatia.ca:
Even if it is an en-wiki only issue, it's having a clear impact on
editor retention and therefore the long-term sustainability of the project. I think trying to fix that is easy to dismiss as "micromanagement" but sometimes it turns out that fixing the big picture /does/ require organizational leadership to address specific things.
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Well, here's the issue. It's never been clear to me whether this is a WMF-wide issue or it's an English Wikipedia specific issue. The overwhelming majority of people participating on this list work almost exclusively on enwiki, and almost every single experience discussed here involves enwiki.
As important as we all know English Wikipedia to be (if nothing else,
it's
the fundraising driver from which the bulk of donations derives), it's
also
only one of hundreds of projects. There are issues with the Board micromanaging a single project directly, and pretty serious issues when
the
Board tries to fix a problem on one project by creating a global policy
or
rule that may actually be counterproductive in other areas. (And as we
can
see from the obtuseness that Commons shows about such issues as
personality
rights - a major gendergap issue in my mind - even when the Board does
try
to intervene, it's often ineffective.)
Risker/Anne
On 3 July 2014 14:58, Leigh Honeywell leigh@hypatia.ca wrote:
The more I hear about this, the more I think this is something that WMF needs to address at an institutional level (Board etc.) to resolve these process issues and loopholes. Has this ever been taken "up the chain"?
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several occasions when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of certain individuals to initiate a case....but nobody wanted to do that...
Well, you know I did actually take one of the worst misogynists on en.wiki to ArbCom,[1] and it was such a horrible experience that I decided to never do it again. After giving up a month of my life to the case and
enduring
constant harassment during the process, all of the evidence that I painstakingly assembled, presented, and defended was completely
ignored
by ArbCom, and instead he was banned for a year for making a legal
threat.
He is now free to return on the condition that he simply agrees not to
make
any more legal threats. You were actually on that ArbCom panel, Risker,
so I
don't really understand your argument that taking incivil editors to ArbCom is a good idea. To me it is worse than a waste of effort, it is
actually
counterproductive and an invitation to be relentlessly harassed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Ca...
Ryan Kaldari
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
-- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
-- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
I'm European (from Ireland) and clearly identify this as a major issue.
-- Allie (User:Alison)
On Jul 4, 2014, at 11:53 AM, rupert THURNER rupert.thurner@gmail.com wrote:
do you know women outside the north american culture, i.e. US and CA, affected by this?
rupert Am 03.07.2014 21:13 schrieb "Leigh Honeywell" leigh@hypatia.ca: Even if it is an en-wiki only issue, it's having a clear impact on editor retention and therefore the long-term sustainability of the project. I think trying to fix that is easy to dismiss as "micromanagement" but sometimes it turns out that fixing the big picture /does/ require organizational leadership to address specific things.
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Well, here's the issue. It's never been clear to me whether this is a WMF-wide issue or it's an English Wikipedia specific issue. The overwhelming majority of people participating on this list work almost exclusively on enwiki, and almost every single experience discussed here involves enwiki.
As important as we all know English Wikipedia to be (if nothing else, it's the fundraising driver from which the bulk of donations derives), it's also only one of hundreds of projects. There are issues with the Board micromanaging a single project directly, and pretty serious issues when the Board tries to fix a problem on one project by creating a global policy or rule that may actually be counterproductive in other areas. (And as we can see from the obtuseness that Commons shows about such issues as personality rights - a major gendergap issue in my mind - even when the Board does try to intervene, it's often ineffective.)
Risker/Anne
On 3 July 2014 14:58, Leigh Honeywell leigh@hypatia.ca wrote:
The more I hear about this, the more I think this is something that WMF needs to address at an institutional level (Board etc.) to resolve these process issues and loopholes. Has this ever been taken "up the chain"?
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several occasions when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of certain individuals to initiate a case....but nobody wanted to do that...
Well, you know I did actually take one of the worst misogynists on en.wiki to ArbCom,[1] and it was such a horrible experience that I decided to never do it again. After giving up a month of my life to the case and enduring constant harassment during the process, all of the evidence that I painstakingly assembled, presented, and defended was completely ignored by ArbCom, and instead he was banned for a year for making a legal threat. He is now free to return on the condition that he simply agrees not to make any more legal threats. You were actually on that ArbCom panel, Risker, so I don't really understand your argument that taking incivil editors to ArbCom is a good idea. To me it is worse than a waste of effort, it is actually counterproductive and an invitation to be relentlessly harassed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Ca...
Ryan Kaldari
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
-- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
-- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
There was an attempt to address the civility problem on Wikipedia English with a top down approach at the very start of Sue Gardner's time at WMF. Sue, Jimmy Wales, myself, and a group of half dozen other people talked about it in a closed group. It failed because a top down approach is not effective on Wikipedia because policies can not be enforced from the top. Policies need to be made that a large part of the community agrees at proper and enforceable.
I would be willing to assist a group that wants to take another run at it. But there are significant challenges with enforcing a civility policy on a global community where cultural norms differ at great deal. So, we need to be careful that an attempt to assist one group of users does not make it harder for other groups of people who are also under represented on Wikipedia English.
Sydney
Sydney
Sydney
Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Leigh Honeywell leigh@hypatia.ca wrote:
The more I hear about this, the more I think this is something that WMF needs to address at an institutional level (Board etc.) to resolve these process issues and loopholes. Has this ever been taken "up the chain"?
-Leigh
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several
occasions
when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of
certain
individuals to initiate a case....but nobody wanted to do that...
Well, you know I did actually take one of the worst misogynists on
en.wiki
to ArbCom,[1] and it was such a horrible experience that I decided to
never
do it again. After giving up a month of my life to the case and enduring constant harassment during the process, all of the evidence that I painstakingly assembled, presented, and defended was completely ignored
by
ArbCom, and instead he was banned for a year for making a legal threat.
He
is now free to return on the condition that he simply agrees not to make
any
more legal threats. You were actually on that ArbCom panel, Risker, so I don't really understand your argument that taking incivil editors to
ArbCom
is a good idea. To me it is worse than a waste of effort, it is actually counterproductive and an invitation to be relentlessly harassed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Ca...
Ryan Kaldari
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
-- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
When I was a little girl in the 1950s and 60s we were told to be passive and pray for what we wanted. Thank heavens self-actualization and womens liberation came along and we discovered "well-behaved women seldom make history." (Nicely covered at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Thatcher_Ulrich )
If we want the guys to change we gotta keep busting their chops about being civil, within the limits of civility of course. On a one on one basis, day after day after day. And even though no matter how civil we are, SOME of them still will think it is we who are being uncivil.
It's a dirty job, but it's gotta be done.
And the more guys who help promote civility and are willing to counter the good-old-boy mentality, the better... :-)
On 7/3/2014 3:18 PM, Sydney Poore wrote:
There was an attempt to address the civility problem on Wikipedia English with a top down approach at the very start of Sue Gardner's time at WMF. Sue, Jimmy Wales, myself, and a group of half dozen other people talked about it in a closed group. It failed because a top down approach is not effective on Wikipedia because policies can not be enforced from the top. Policies need to be made that a large part of the community agrees at proper and enforceable.
I would be willing to assist a group that wants to take another run at it. But there are significant challenges with enforcing a civility policy on a global community where cultural norms differ at great deal. So, we need to be careful that an attempt to assist one group of users does not make it harder for other groups of people who are also under represented on Wikipedia English.
I previously described my experience of being a member of Kevin Spacey's Trigger Street Labs website http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2014-June/004388.html
I think part of my shock was based on being British, and how the sink-or-swim attitude prevailed by those running and moderating. At least at Wikipedia there is some notion of "We have a problem here, let's discuss how best to fix it." The name of one forum at TS was "Free for all - enter at your own risk" followed by a note that more members had been suspended from that message board than from any of the others, and this is all they have in the way of rules http://labs.triggerstreet.com/labs/Help?faqCat=Message%20Board
Having said that, the one thing that I thought worked well was their Hall of Justice. Members earn credits for their reviews (which are randomly assigned by the 'assignment generator') they then spend them on the website. An obvious way of earning a lot of credits is to make up a load of generic comments like, "the characters in this screenplay are very interesting", request another assignment, copy and paste, earn credit, and repeat.
The HOJ exists for members who think the review that they received was unfair. There is a criteria for the reviews including: not cutting and pasting from other reviews, (if you think it has happened then you include the ref. no. from the other review as evidence), reviews should be constructive and non-abusive, a decent word length (I think the minimum was 100 words), there should also be evidence in the review which shows that the reviewer definitely read / watched the submission.
If a member thinks they have been unfairly treated then they send a review to the HOJ. Other members - let's call them arbitrators - with a high enough participation level (like having 'enough' edits in your edit history) can request a - randomly generated - docket, read the review, read the details of the complaint e.g. ("I think this review is a cut & past of ref. # 'x' ...."). The arbitrator who received the docket for review then has a choice of Y/N check-boxes relating to the review critieria and a comment form, for anything else that they might like to add.
The same docket goes to a number of different arbitrators in the same way. (Note: there is a limit to how many dockets a member can request in 24 hrs.) If the majority think it should go further, it is passed on to the jury.
Details about the jury from the website:
"The jury is a group of your peers made up of seasoned members picked by site staff. Although we cannot say what the criteria is used to pick the jury, logic dictates that they are active, positive, and objective members of the community. They are asked not to reveal themselves or discuss their status with anyone so they can vote without retribution."
(FAQs about the HOJ: http://labs.triggerstreet.com/labs/Help?faqCat=Hall%20of%20Justice )
A Wikipedia variation on it might include: * editors would need a certain number of edits before they are eligible to become an arbitrator * there would be a time-limit from the end of being blocked before being eligible for 'arbitration duty' * administrators / senior figures would be ineligible to be arbitrators * 'cases' for arbitrators to consider would be assigned randomly by computer * it would be prohibited for an arbitrator to tell those involved in the case that they have been allocated it * 50% of those asked to consider a case would have to be female (other quotas might be relevant for other demographics) * there would be a limit to how many cases an arbitrator could ask for in a certain time period (I actually envisage it being more like a cross between jury service and those user talk page notices that there is a discussion taking place somewhere
These might be more technically difficult: * cases would only go to arbitrators whose edit history is generally in a different subject area - so someone complaining about a dispute about a particular scientific point would have their complaint go to an arbitrator whose edit history is in, say, historical BLPs * a limit to the number of times you could go through the arbitration process with the same case
Cases would only go forward for administrators to get involved with if enough arbitrators agreed that it merited being put forward.
On a slightly different note:
Everyone seems to be mentioning the different ways in which the rules are applied to male vs. female editors. Is it possible to run a query or get hold of statistics for the average length of time female editors get blocked for, versus how long male editors are blocked for? Perhaps a table that takes account of the editors' participation levels prior to the block?
Marie
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2014 21:23:18 -0400 From: carolmooredc@verizon.net To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
When I was a little girl in the 1950s and 60s we were told to be passive and pray for what we wanted. Thank heavens self-actualization and womens liberation came along and we discovered "well-behaved women seldom make history." (Nicely covered at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Thatcher_Ulrich )
If we want the guys to change we gotta keep busting their chops about being civil, within the limits of civility of course. On a one on one basis, day after day after day. And even though no matter how civil we are, SOME of them still will think it is we who are being uncivil.
It's a dirty job, but it's gotta be done.
And the more guys who help promote civility and are willing to counter the good-old-boy mentality, the better... :-)
On 7/3/2014 3:18 PM, Sydney Poore wrote:
There was an attempt to address the civility problem on Wikipedia English with a top down approach at the very start of Sue Gardner's time at WMF. Sue, Jimmy Wales, myself, and a group of half dozen other people talked about it in a closed group. It failed because a top down approach is not effective on Wikipedia because policies can not be enforced from the top. Policies need to be made that a large part of the community agrees at proper and enforceable.
I would be willing to assist a group that wants to take another run at it. But there are significant challenges with enforcing a civility policy on a global community where cultural norms differ at great deal. So, we need to be careful that an attempt to assist one group of users does not make it harder for other groups of people who are also under represented on Wikipedia English.
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
A few points here:
- If less than 15% of editors identify as female, and the vast majority of those do not regularly participate in "dispute management", how are you going to establish a panel that is 50% women? This isn't a small point - there are so few individuals generally speaking who regularly participate in dispute management at all (I'd put the number on enwiki at less than 150 total), and many of them are there because of the perceived power gradient, not because they have a genuine interest in managing disputes. - What disputes, exactly, would the panel be analysing? I'm having a hard time visualizing this. "User:XXXX made a sexist comment here (link)"? - What would you expect administrators to do, exactly? They're directly accountable for the use of their tools and have to be able to personally justify any actions they take - and surprisingly, a huge percentage of administrators (almost) never use the block button. (There's a subset of admins who only use their tools to read deleted versions, and another subset that only shows up once a year, makes a couple of edits so they keep their tools, and disappears again.) - How would you develop any statistics based on gender of editor, when the overwhelming majority of editors do not identify their gender at all in any consistent fashion? I've personally never added any gender categories to my userpage, for example, and I have no intention of doing so now.
Some thoughts.
Risker/Anne
On 6 July 2014 04:51, Marie Earley eiryel@hotmail.com wrote:
I previously described my experience of being a member of Kevin Spacey's Trigger Street Labs website http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2014-June/004388.html
I think part of my shock was based on being British, and how the sink-or-swim attitude prevailed by those running and moderating. At least at Wikipedia there is some notion of "We have a problem here, let's discuss how best to fix it." The name of one forum at TS was "Free for all - enter at your own risk" followed by a note that more members had been suspended from that message board than from any of the others, and this is all they have in the way of rules http://labs.triggerstreet.com/labs/Help?faqCat=Message%20Board
Having said that, the one thing that I thought worked well was their Hall of Justice. Members earn credits for their reviews (which are randomly assigned by the 'assignment generator') they then spend them on the website. An obvious way of earning a lot of credits is to make up a load of generic comments like, "the characters in this screenplay are very interesting", request another assignment, copy and paste, earn credit, and repeat.
The HOJ exists for members who think the review that they received was unfair. There is a criteria for the reviews including: not cutting and pasting from other reviews, (if you think it has happened then you include the ref. no. from the other review as evidence), reviews should be constructive and non-abusive, a decent word length (I think the minimum was 100 words), there should also be evidence in the review which shows that the reviewer definitely read / watched the submission.
If a member thinks they have been unfairly treated then they send a review to the HOJ. Other members - let's call them arbitrators - with a high enough participation level (like having 'enough' edits in your edit history) can request a - randomly generated - docket, read the review, read the details of the complaint e.g. ("I think this review is a cut & past of ref. # 'x' ...."). The arbitrator who received the docket for review then has a choice of Y/N check-boxes relating to the review critieria and a comment form, for anything else that they might like to add.
The same docket goes to a number of different arbitrators in the same way. (Note: there is a limit to how many dockets a member can request in 24 hrs.) If the majority think it should go further, it is passed on to the jury.
Details about the jury from the website:
"The jury is a group of your peers made up of seasoned members picked by
site staff. Although we cannot say what the criteria is used to pick the jury, logic dictates that they are active, positive, and objective members of the community. They are asked not to reveal themselves or discuss their status with anyone so they can vote without retribution."
(FAQs about the HOJ: http://labs.triggerstreet.com/labs/Help?faqCat=Hall%20of%20Justice )
A Wikipedia variation on it might include:
- editors would need a certain number of edits before they are eligible to
become an arbitrator
- there would be a time-limit from the end of being blocked before being
eligible for 'arbitration duty'
- administrators / senior figures would be ineligible to be arbitrators
- 'cases' for arbitrators to consider would be assigned randomly by
computer
- it would be prohibited for an arbitrator to tell those involved in the
case that they have been allocated it
- 50% of those asked to consider a case would have to be female (other
quotas might be relevant for other demographics)
- there would be a limit to how many cases an arbitrator could ask for in
a certain time period (I actually envisage it being more like a cross between jury service and those user talk page notices that there is a discussion taking place somewhere
These might be more technically difficult:
- cases would only go to arbitrators whose edit history is generally in a
different subject area - so someone complaining about a dispute about a particular scientific point would have their complaint go to an arbitrator whose edit history is in, say, historical BLPs
- a limit to the number of times you could go through the arbitration
process with the same case
Cases would only go forward for administrators to get involved with if enough arbitrators agreed that it merited being put forward.
On a slightly different note:
Everyone seems to be mentioning the different ways in which the rules are applied to male vs. female editors. Is it possible to run a query or get hold of statistics for the average length of time female editors get blocked for, versus how long male editors are blocked for? Perhaps a table that takes account of the editors' participation levels prior to the block?
Marie
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2014 21:23:18 -0400 From: carolmooredc@verizon.net To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
When I was a little girl in the 1950s and 60s we were told to be passive and pray for what we wanted. Thank heavens self-actualization and womens liberation came along and we discovered "well-behaved women seldom make history." (Nicely covered at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Thatcher_Ulrich )
If we want the guys to change we gotta keep busting their chops about being civil, within the limits of civility of course. On a one on one basis, day after day after day. And even though no matter how civil we are, SOME of them still will think it is we who are being uncivil.
It's a dirty job, but it's gotta be done.
And the more guys who help promote civility and are willing to counter the good-old-boy mentality, the better... :-)
On 7/3/2014 3:18 PM, Sydney Poore wrote:
There was an attempt to address the civility problem on Wikipedia English with a top down approach at the very start of Sue Gardner's time at WMF. Sue, Jimmy Wales, myself, and a group of half dozen other people talked about it in a closed group. It failed because a top down approach is not effective on Wikipedia because policies can not be enforced from the top. Policies need to be made that a large part of the community agrees at proper and enforceable.
I would be willing to assist a group that wants to take another run at it. But there are significant challenges with enforcing a civility policy on a global community where cultural norms differ at great deal. So, we need to be careful that an attempt to assist one group of users does not make it harder for other groups of people who are also under represented on Wikipedia English.
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Being relatively new to this list, I dip my toe into what seems to be a somewhat fraught mailing list with some trepidation. (Read: please don't bite this newbie).
I think we need to understand where the problems lie and therefore what problem(s) we are seeking to solve. If I understand it correctly, we are looking at the low proportion of female editors. Presumably we need to understand what is happening to women in different phases of the lifecycle, noting that not all of these phases may occur for any individual woman
* Initial recruitment - women clicking "edit" for the first time - what does/doesn't motivate? * Newbie phase as anonymous editor (may or may not occur) * Newbie phase as registered user * Active editor * Active editor self-identifying as female (can take many forms) * Editor taking wiki-stress break * Blocked editor * etc
I note that a major difficulty in working at the earlier stages of the lifecycle is that we simply do not know whether the editor is male or female until there is some self-identification. Other than the choice of a obviously-gendered user name, we often have no way of guessing the sex of the user until they are experienced enough (e.g. know about User page, etc) *and* choose to self-identity in some form.
A second and not-entirely-dependent but not-entirely-independent set of issues relates to "gender" of articles. There is data to suggest that certain topics are more of interest to women and therefore less well-developed on WP because of there being fewer women editors. Therefore, there is the possibility of slicing the problem on another axis in relation to:
* Ungendered article, by which I mean there is nothing "gendered" about the subject matter nor any reason to think it is more likely to interest editors of either sex * Gendered-topic article, by which I mean the subject matter has "gender" but this doesn't necessarily alter relative editor interest * Gender-attracting topics, which disproportionately attract editors of one sex * Gender-controversial topics, which I draw out because this seems to be a particular battleground, by which I mean articles about feminism, women's rights, abortion, etc and other issues which are real-world controversial topics that have definite gender issues and create major POV issues. * etc
I note that a machine-analysis of the edits of self-identified male/female editors we can identify those articles/categories which appear to be neutral or biased in terms of editor interest. Machine-analysis can also show us which articles/categories have high levels of activity (in particular high levels of reverts and low levels of text survival and probably high levels of Talk page activity and User Talk page of editors involved) that suggest they are "controversial" (although "breaking news" can manifest similar activity patterns without being controversial in the real world) and how self-identifying editors fare during these processes (simply, do female editors exhibit different patterns of behaviour to male editors?).
And there are probably other criteria by which we can slice this issue up. I think we have to recognise this is not just "one problem" requiring "one solution". But rather that there are potentially many scenarios where we may have a problem and, if we do have that problem, we need a solution appropriate to that lifecycle phase and that kind of article. Or to put it another way, there is a world of difference between the anonymous female editor who attempts her first edit on a living person biography, has it reverted because there is no citation, and can't understand why her edit disappeared (noting she probably doesn't even know that she can view the edit summary that may explain why, assuming she can figure out what the cryptic letters WP:BLP means if she did) and the experienced female editor harassed on a talk page in a "sexualised" picture-of-the-day dispute. Both situations could be the straw that breaks the camel's back and both women might never edit again, but clearly the problem is different and the solution has to be too.
Solutions like the existing ArbCom (or Hall of Justice as proposed) are both mechanisms that depend on the editor involved being 1) sufficiently experienced to know they even exist 2) know how to engage with them and 3) are comfortable engaging with them. Despite editing WP on and off for several years, 1) I did not know of ArbCom for many years 2) I still don't actually know how to engage with it, and 3) I am not disposed to solve my problems that way (don't like the conflict that I rightly-or-wrongly presume is part and parcel of it). A Hall of Justice solution might work for particular scenarios (although I concur with the practicalities of staffing it with a 50% female representation) but is probably irrelevant for many others. Or to put it another way, I suspect the membership of this list is not typical of the WP editor population, nor even of the female WP editor population and we have to be careful to not just design a solution that works for us because we are probably highly atypical. I suspect that list members are 1) predominantly female 2) somewhat engaged in gender-politics 3) experienced WPians 4) feel empowered, etc. If we weren't, we wouldn't be on this list and wouldn't be contributing to this conversation. We are the survivors of WP, not the ones lost to it. And we should not design solutions that just work for survivors. We have to speak and act for those who don't survive and don't make it to this list.
Summary. Can we break this problem up into pieces and address the pieces separately. I don't think we get anywhere with "one size fits all".
For example, could we run an A/B experiment where we require anonymous editors to provide an email address with their edit? Right now we have no effective means of communicating with them (writing on an IP user talk page being the ultimate exercise in futility - they don't know it's there). Being able to communicate with these very newest of editors might mean we can help them achieve their edit and improve their retention. It might also reduce vandalism. Yes, it makes them less anonymous and maybe there are downside with that, but unless we run that experiment, we will never know.
For example, is the ability to be anonymous or use a pseudonym more likely to allow undesirable behaviours? Do people behave better if they can be more linked to their real world identity? We could test this as a research project. Identify sets of words that disproportionately appear in "uncivil" remarks or revert stats or other possible indicators of undesirable behaviours and see if anon/pseudo users appear more likely to do these things than real-name users. If the finding was that undesirable behaviours are more likely to occur when there is no link to real world identity, maybe there's solutions in that direction. I note that there are legitimate reasons for anonymity/pseudonymity in some circumstances but perhaps this should be the exception rather than the norm? I note that we aspire to scholarly practices in Wikipedia, yet overlook that scholarly publishing is always (in my experience at least) published under one's real name and often has institution and email address (or other contact information) included. Frankly, in academic life, my name is my brand and my reputation. Why should WP be different?
I appreciate that the suggestions I make above might be big changes to the current culture, but if it is the culture that is the problem, it is what needs to be changed. Big problems are rarely solved by tinkering at the margins. I think the issues we have with the WP gender gap are not dissimilar to the gender gap in employment. It is usually easy to explain why you employed one person over another because most jobs have a number of selection criteria and by emphasising some over others you can often easily justify any decision retrospectively "yes, she had better qualifications, but he had more previous experience" or vice versa. This is where Hall of Justice solutions fail because they are looking at a specific situation. However, when one looks at the overall statistics of hiring staff, bias against women (or any other group) becomes harder to hide. So getting some kind of gender KPIs into the monthly WMF metrics might be another example of how we get focus on gender issue and how we can spot the macroscopic changes that occur when new software or new policies roll out. If an issue matters to an organisation, you start with metrics so people can see the problem and then you start putting changes to those metrics into annual plan of staff members, link them to bonuses, etc. While WP is very much a volunteer organisation, we might have to think hard how we reward the volunteers whose behaviours lead to improvements in the metrics (it's easier with staff through bonuses, promotions, etc), but there must be a way (scholarships to Wikimania, the Fluffy Kitten BarnStar of Gender Metrics Improvement, etc).
Kerry, who is female, does self-identify as such, edits under her real name (User:Kerry Raymond), likes receiving Kitten WikiLove and is about to don her best asbestos suit for fear of the flames to come .
I have a class of many women who have an optional editing assignment,. Many try to edit but leave out of concern about bullying by (probably) male editors. You are right that they are lost before they get here. My attrition rate is 70%. I do not want women to go where they do not feel safe.
I do not see any problem in identification. It would help a great deal to diminish the aggression.
Kathleen McCook
On Sun, Jul 6, 2014 at 7:12 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
Being relatively new to this list, I dip my toe into what seems to be a somewhat fraught mailing list with some trepidation. (Read: please don’t bite this newbie).
I think we need to understand where the problems lie and therefore what problem(s) we are seeking to solve. If I understand it correctly, we are looking at the low proportion of female editors. Presumably we need to understand what is happening to women in different phases of the lifecycle, noting that not all of these phases may occur for any individual woman
Initial recruitment – women clicking “edit” for the first time – what does/doesn’t motivate? Newbie phase as anonymous editor (may or may not occur) Newbie phase as registered user Active editor Active editor self-identifying as female (can take many forms) Editor taking wiki-stress break Blocked editor etc
I note that a major difficulty in working at the earlier stages of the lifecycle is that we simply do not know whether the editor is male or female until there is some self-identification. Other than the choice of a obviously-gendered user name, we often have no way of guessing the sex of the user until they are experienced enough (e.g. know about User page, etc) *and* choose to self-identity in some form.
A second and not-entirely-dependent but not-entirely-independent set of issues relates to “gender” of articles. There is data to suggest that certain topics are more of interest to women and therefore less well-developed on WP because of there being fewer women editors. Therefore, there is the possibility of slicing the problem on another axis in relation to:
Ungendered article, by which I mean there is nothing ”gendered” about the subject matter nor any reason to think it is more likely to interest editors of either sex Gendered-topic article, by which I mean the subject matter has “gender” but this doesn’t necessarily alter relative editor interest Gender-attracting topics, which disproportionately attract editors of one sex Gender-controversial topics, which I draw out because this seems to be a particular battleground, by which I mean articles about feminism, women’s rights, abortion, etc and other issues which are real-world controversial topics that have definite gender issues and create major POV issues. etc
I note that a machine-analysis of the edits of self-identified male/female editors we can identify those articles/categories which appear to be neutral or biased in terms of editor interest. Machine-analysis can also show us which articles/categories have high levels of activity (in particular high levels of reverts and low levels of text survival and probably high levels of Talk page activity and User Talk page of editors involved) that suggest they are “controversial” (although “breaking news” can manifest similar activity patterns without being controversial in the real world) and how self-identifying editors fare during these processes (simply, do female editors exhibit different patterns of behaviour to male editors?).
And there are probably other criteria by which we can slice this issue up. I think we have to recognise this is not just “one problem” requiring “one solution”. But rather that there are potentially many scenarios where we may have a problem and, if we do have that problem, we need a solution appropriate to that lifecycle phase and that kind of article. Or to put it another way, there is a world of difference between the anonymous female editor who attempts her first edit on a living person biography, has it reverted because there is no citation, and can’t understand why her edit disappeared (noting she probably doesn’t even know that she can view the edit summary that may explain why, assuming she can figure out what the cryptic letters WP:BLP means if she did) and the experienced female editor harassed on a talk page in a “sexualised” picture-of-the-day dispute. Both situations could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and both women might never edit again, but clearly the problem is different and the solution has to be too.
Solutions like the existing ArbCom (or Hall of Justice as proposed) are both mechanisms that depend on the editor involved being 1) sufficiently experienced to know they even exist 2) know how to engage with them and 3) are comfortable engaging with them. Despite editing WP on and off for several years, 1) I did not know of ArbCom for many years 2) I still don’t actually know how to engage with it, and 3) I am not disposed to solve my problems that way (don’t like the conflict that I rightly-or-wrongly presume is part and parcel of it). A Hall of Justice solution might work for particular scenarios (although I concur with the practicalities of staffing it with a 50% female representation) but is probably irrelevant for many others. Or to put it another way, I suspect the membership of this list is not typical of the WP editor population, nor even of the female WP editor population and we have to be careful to not just design a solution that works for us because we are probably highly atypical. I suspect that list members are 1) predominantly female 2) somewhat engaged in gender-politics 3) experienced WPians 4) feel empowered, etc. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be on this list and wouldn’t be contributing to this conversation. We are the survivors of WP, not the ones lost to it. And we should not design solutions that just work for survivors. We have to speak and act for those who don’t survive and don’t make it to this list.
Summary. Can we break this problem up into pieces and address the pieces separately. I don’t think we get anywhere with “one size fits all”.
For example, could we run an A/B experiment where we require anonymous editors to provide an email address with their edit? Right now we have no effective means of communicating with them (writing on an IP user talk page being the ultimate exercise in futility – they don’t know it’s there). Being able to communicate with these very newest of editors might mean we can help them achieve their edit and improve their retention. It might also reduce vandalism. Yes, it makes them less anonymous and maybe there are downside with that, but unless we run that experiment, we will never know.
For example, is the ability to be anonymous or use a pseudonym more likely to allow undesirable behaviours? Do people behave better if they can be more linked to their real world identity? We could test this as a research project. Identify sets of words that disproportionately appear in “uncivil” remarks or revert stats or other possible indicators of undesirable behaviours and see if anon/pseudo users appear more likely to do these things than real-name users. If the finding was that undesirable behaviours are more likely to occur when there is no link to real world identity, maybe there’s solutions in that direction. I note that there are legitimate reasons for anonymity/pseudonymity in some circumstances but perhaps this should be the exception rather than the norm? I note that we aspire to scholarly practices in Wikipedia, yet overlook that scholarly publishing is always (in my experience at least) published under one’s real name and often has institution and email address (or other contact information) included. Frankly, in academic life, my name is my brand and my reputation. Why should WP be different?
I appreciate that the suggestions I make above might be big changes to the current culture, but if it is the culture that is the problem, it is what needs to be changed. Big problems are rarely solved by tinkering at the margins. I think the issues we have with the WP gender gap are not dissimilar to the gender gap in employment. It is usually easy to explain why you employed one person over another because most jobs have a number of selection criteria and by emphasising some over others you can often easily justify any decision retrospectively “yes, she had better qualifications, but he had more previous experience” or vice versa. This is where Hall of Justice solutions fail because they are looking at a specific situation. However, when one looks at the overall statistics of hiring staff, bias against women (or any other group) becomes harder to hide. So getting some kind of gender KPIs into the monthly WMF metrics might be another example of how we get focus on gender issue and how we can spot the macroscopic changes that occur when new software or new policies roll out. If an issue matters to an organisation, you start with metrics so people can see the problem and then you start putting changes to those metrics into annual plan of staff members, link them to bonuses, etc. While WP is very much a volunteer organisation, we might have to think hard how we reward the volunteers whose behaviours lead to improvements in the metrics (it’s easier with staff through bonuses, promotions, etc), but there must be a way (scholarships to Wikimania, the Fluffy Kitten BarnStar of Gender Metrics Improvement, etc).
Kerry, who is female, does self-identify as such, edits under her real name (User:Kerry Raymond), likes receiving Kitten WikiLove and is about to don her best asbestos suit for fear of the flames to come …
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Hi Risker / Anne,
In response to the points you raise:
* A panel suggests a group of people who discuss and decide things, it wouldn't be that, it would be a pool of adjudicators. * The home page shows 130,858 active editors, if 15% of those are female then it means there must be 19,628 female editors to draw the 50% from. * I don't participate in "dispute management", but then I have never been asked to. * More people might agree to take part in dispute management if they know that their input will be kept anonymous. * Administrators would do what they have always done.
Example of a possible way to approach potential adjudicators: Those eligible (maybe they've been editing for more than a year and they have an edit history of 1,000+ edits) are sent a private e-mail, this would be a circular to all eligible editors. It would say something like:
"According to our records you have been with us for more than [length of time] and have contributed over [number of edits]. We would therefore like to invite you join our pool of adjudicators which we are currently in the process of establishing. The purpose of adjudication would to consider editors requests to block other editors ('cases'). We envisage adjudication to be the first stage in managing cases with the second stage being handled by administrators.
Your anonymity as an adjudicator would be protected by us at all times, in fact one of the conditions of being an adjudicator would be that you have no direct contact with those involved any of the cases which you are asked to consider (although you may inform the Wikipedia community that you are an adjudicator). If you wish to become an adjudicator please click on the link and fill out the form. (The form would include equal opportunities monitoring questions http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/private-and-public-sector-guidance/employ... )."
Example case: * Editor 'X' wants a block against editor 'Y'. * Editor X submits a case for adjudication. * Adjudicator 'A' requests a case, the case is randomly selected from those pending by computer. * Adjudicator A reads the details and decides whether X has a point, or whether Y appears to have behaved reasonably (even if X didn't like it). * Adjudicator A marks a one of two check boxes, "Pass to next stage? Yes [box] No [box]" (perhaps other boxes like "I lack the technical knowledge to adjudicate on this.") and a small comments form, maybe 1,000 characters. * The same case goes to a few more adjudicators, 50% of whom are female. * If enough rule that the case has merit then it goes forward and administrators deal with it as they currently do (the idea is to weed out groundless requests and save administrators and above time). * Their would be a maximum number of cases that any single adjudicator could rule on in a 24 or 48 hour period. * From time to time there would be a general call, "we currently have a backlog of cases".
I must confess, I had to logout of Wikipedia and remind myself about what questions are asked when joining. I'm so used to filling in Equal Opportunities Monitoring Forms for statistical purposes that I didn't really think about not being able to just run the query. Having said that, most user pages of active users that I've seen do appear to volunteer which gender they are. It is probably possible to go back.
Marie
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2014 13:45:34 -0400 From: risker.wp@gmail.com To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
A few points here:
If less than 15% of editors identify as female, and the vast majority of those do not regularly participate in "dispute management", how are you going to establish a panel that is 50% women? This isn't a small point - there are so few individuals generally speaking who regularly participate in dispute management at all (I'd put the number on enwiki at less than 150 total), and many of them are there because of the perceived power gradient, not because they have a genuine interest in managing disputes. What disputes, exactly, would the panel be analysing? I'm having a hard time visualizing this. "User:XXXX made a sexist comment here (link)"?What would you expect administrators to do, exactly? They're directly accountable for the use of their tools and have to be able to personally justify any actions they take - and surprisingly, a huge percentage of administrators (almost) never use the block button. (There's a subset of admins who only use their tools to read deleted versions, and another subset that only shows up once a year, makes a couple of edits so they keep their tools, and disappears again.)
How would you develop any statistics based on gender of editor, when the overwhelming majority of editors do not identify their gender at all in any consistent fashion? I've personally never added any gender categories to my userpage, for example, and I have no intention of doing so now.
Some thoughts.
Risker/Anne
On 6 July 2014 04:51, Marie Earley eiryel@hotmail.com wrote:
I previously described my experience of being a member of Kevin Spacey's Trigger Street Labs website http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2014-June/004388.html
I think part of my shock was based on being British, and how the sink-or-swim attitude prevailed by those running and moderating. At least at Wikipedia there is some notion of "We have a problem here, let's discuss how best to fix it." The name of one forum at TS was "Free for all - enter at your own risk" followed by a note that more members had been suspended from that message board than from any of the others, and this is all they have in the way of rules http://labs.triggerstreet.com/labs/Help?faqCat=Message%20Board
Having said that, the one thing that I thought worked well was their Hall of Justice. Members earn credits for their reviews (which are randomly assigned by the 'assignment generator') they then spend them on the website. An obvious way of earning a lot of credits is to make up a load of generic comments like, "the characters in this screenplay are very interesting", request another assignment, copy and paste, earn credit, and repeat.
The HOJ exists for members who think the review that they received was unfair. There is a criteria for the reviews including: not cutting and pasting from other reviews, (if you think it has happened then you include the ref. no. from the other review as evidence), reviews should be constructive and non-abusive, a decent word length (I think the minimum was 100 words), there should also be evidence in the review which shows that the reviewer definitely read / watched the submission.
If a member thinks they have been unfairly treated then they send a review to the HOJ. Other members - let's call them arbitrators - with a high enough participation level (like having 'enough' edits in your edit history) can request a - randomly generated - docket, read the review, read the details of the complaint e.g. ("I think this review is a cut & past of ref. # 'x' ...."). The arbitrator who received the docket for review then has a choice of Y/N check-boxes relating to the review critieria and a comment form, for anything else that they might like to add.
The same docket goes to a number of different arbitrators in the same way. (Note: there is a limit to how many dockets a member can request in 24 hrs.) If the majority think it should go further, it is passed on to the jury.
Details about the jury from the website:
"The jury is a group of your peers made up of seasoned members picked by site staff. Although we cannot say what the criteria is used to pick the jury, logic dictates that they are active, positive, and objective members of the community. They are asked not to reveal themselves or discuss their status with anyone so they can vote without retribution."
(FAQs about the HOJ: http://labs.triggerstreet.com/labs/Help?faqCat=Hall%20of%20Justice )
A Wikipedia variation on it might include:
* editors would need a certain number of edits before they are eligible to become an arbitrator * there would be a time-limit from the end of being blocked before being eligible for 'arbitration duty' * administrators / senior figures would be ineligible to be arbitrators
* 'cases' for arbitrators to consider would be assigned randomly by computer * it would be prohibited for an arbitrator to tell those involved in the case that they have been allocated it * 50% of those asked to consider a case would have to be female (other quotas might be relevant for other demographics)
* there would be a limit to how many cases an arbitrator could ask for in a certain time period (I actually envisage it being more like a cross between jury service and those user talk page notices that there is a discussion taking place somewhere
These might be more technically difficult: * cases would only go to arbitrators whose edit history is generally in a different subject area - so someone complaining about a dispute about a particular scientific point would have their complaint go to an arbitrator whose edit history is in, say, historical BLPs
* a limit to the number of times you could go through the arbitration process with the same case
Cases would only go forward for administrators to get involved with if enough arbitrators agreed that it merited being put forward.
On a slightly different note:
Everyone seems to be mentioning the different ways in which the rules are applied to male vs. female editors. Is it possible to run a query or get hold of statistics for the average length of time female editors get blocked for, versus how long male editors are blocked for? Perhaps a table that takes account of the editors' participation levels prior to the block?
Marie
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2014 21:23:18 -0400 From: carolmooredc@verizon.net To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
When I was a little girl in the 1950s and 60s we were told to be passive and pray for what we wanted. Thank heavens self-actualization and womens
liberation came along and we discovered "well-behaved women seldom make history." (Nicely covered at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Thatcher_Ulrich )
If we want the guys to change we gotta keep busting their chops about being civil, within the limits of civility of course. On a one on one basis, day after day after day. And even though no matter how civil we
are, SOME of them still will think it is we who are being uncivil.
It's a dirty job, but it's gotta be done.
And the more guys who help promote civility and are willing to counter
the good-old-boy mentality, the better... :-)
On 7/3/2014 3:18 PM, Sydney Poore wrote:
There was an attempt to address the civility problem on Wikipedia English with a top down approach at the very start of Sue Gardner's
time at WMF. Sue, Jimmy Wales, myself, and a group of half dozen other people talked about it in a closed group. It failed because a top down approach is not effective on Wikipedia because policies can not be
enforced from the top. Policies need to be made that a large part of the community agrees at proper and enforceable.
I would be willing to assist a group that wants to take another run at
it. But there are significant challenges with enforcing a civility policy on a global community where cultural norms differ at great deal. So, we need to be careful that an attempt to assist one group of
users does not make it harder for other groups of people who are also under represented on Wikipedia English.
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Speaking personally, whenever I am asked what my gender is, I say "do not want to answer"; if that isn't an option, I have refused to join sites before. As often as not, that information is used to categorize and ghetto-ize people. I'm gobsmacked that you've found most people post their gender on their userpages; I've never found that to be the case, and looking at 25 or so userpages on my personal watchlist revealed only one editor who included herself in a "gender" category; the rest (mostly male) editors didn't come close. Are you sure that you're not perceiving that information to be there because you know the gender of the editor?
I know what it's like to have my inbox flooded with requests for assistance in relation to dispute resolution - just for oversight requests I get an average of 8 emails a day, when I was on arbcom it was over 100/day to various lists for various purposes. (Yes, it's one of the reasons that people burn out.)
I also have a real problem with the idea of anonymous reporting and even more so anonymous "assessment" of disputes. As an administrator, I'd have really grave concerns about people gaming the system - it happens constantly - and with only about 10% of administrators (that is, around 80-100) routinely having anything to do with dispute resolution, it would take nothing to overwhelm them and burn them out.
It seems to me that there's this very mistaken impression amongst many on this list that administrators on Wikipedia are somehow equivalent to moderators on other webistes. In reality, very very few administrators become admins in relation to dispute resolution. Most are looking at "mop work" - deletions, vandal blocking, page protections and the like. Most admins who are involved in dispute resolution were involved in it before they became administrators. That's because Wikipedia is not primarily a social site, it is an encyclopedia.
I will speak personally for a minute here. I have seen almost no correlation at all between blocking people and changing behaviour; unless someone's kicked out entirely and permanently, blocking tends to actually escalate behaviour. A borderline first block without significant attempts at discussion beforehand almost always leads to either (a) the person leaving and never returning or (b) a disinhibition effect - since the "incentive"of being a user in good standing has been removed by the existence of the block log. Many of our most seriously problematic sockpuppeting accounts are people who've been blocked for behavioural reasons - and we waste a huge amount of time trying to keep them off the site.
Risker/Anne
On 7 July 2014 03:20, Marie Earley eiryel@hotmail.com wrote:
Hi Risker / Anne,
In response to the points you raise:
- A panel suggests a group of people who discuss and decide things, it
wouldn't be that, it would be a pool of adjudicators.
- The home page shows 130,858 active editors, if 15% of those are female
then it means there must be 19,628 female editors to draw the 50% from.
- I don't participate in "dispute management", but then I have never been
asked to.
- More people might agree to take part in dispute management if they know
that their input will be kept anonymous.
- Administrators would do what they have always done.
Example of a possible way to approach potential adjudicators: Those eligible (maybe they've been editing for more than a year and they have an edit history of 1,000+ edits) are sent a private e-mail, this would be a circular to all eligible editors. It would say something like:
"According to our records you have been with us for more than [length of
time] and have contributed over [number of edits]. We would therefore like to invite you join our pool of adjudicators which we are currently in the process of establishing. The purpose of adjudication would to consider editors requests to block other editors ('cases'). We envisage adjudication to be the first stage in managing cases with the second stage being handled by administrators.
Your anonymity as an adjudicator would be protected by us at all times,
in fact one of the conditions of being an adjudicator would be that you have no direct contact with those involved any of the cases which you are asked to consider (although you may inform the Wikipedia community that you are an adjudicator). If you wish to become an adjudicator please click on the link and fill out the form. (The form would include equal opportunities monitoring questions http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/private-and-public-sector-guidance/employ... )."
Example case:
- Editor 'X' wants a block against editor 'Y'.
- Editor X submits a case for adjudication.
- Adjudicator 'A' requests a case, the case is randomly selected from
those pending by computer.
- Adjudicator A reads the details and decides whether X has a point, or
whether Y appears to have behaved reasonably (even if X didn't like it).
- Adjudicator A marks a one of two check boxes, "Pass to next stage? Yes
[box] No [box]" (perhaps other boxes like "I lack the technical knowledge to adjudicate on this.") and a small comments form, maybe 1,000 characters.
- The same case goes to a few more adjudicators, 50% of whom are female.
- If enough rule that the case has merit then it goes forward and
administrators deal with it as they currently do (the idea is to weed out groundless requests and save administrators and above time).
- Their would be a maximum number of cases that any single adjudicator
could rule on in a 24 or 48 hour period.
- From time to time there would be a general call, "we currently have a
backlog of cases".
I must confess, I had to logout of Wikipedia and remind myself about what questions are asked when joining. I'm so used to filling in Equal Opportunities Monitoring Forms for statistical purposes that I didn't really think about not being able to just run the query. Having said that, most user pages of active users that I've seen do appear to volunteer which gender they are. It is probably possible to go back.
Marie
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2014 13:45:34 -0400 From: risker.wp@gmail.com
To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
A few points here:
- If less than 15% of editors identify as female, and the vast
majority of those do not regularly participate in "dispute management", how are you going to establish a panel that is 50% women? This isn't a small point - there are so few individuals generally speaking who regularly participate in dispute management at all (I'd put the number on enwiki at less than 150 total), and many of them are there because of the perceived power gradient, not because they have a genuine interest in managing disputes.
- What disputes, exactly, would the panel be analysing? I'm having a
hard time visualizing this. "User:XXXX made a sexist comment here (link)"?
- What would you expect administrators to do, exactly? They're
directly accountable for the use of their tools and have to be able to personally justify any actions they take - and surprisingly, a huge percentage of administrators (almost) never use the block button. (There's a subset of admins who only use their tools to read deleted versions, and another subset that only shows up once a year, makes a couple of edits so they keep their tools, and disappears again.)
- How would you develop any statistics based on gender of editor, when
the overwhelming majority of editors do not identify their gender at all in any consistent fashion? I've personally never added any gender categories to my userpage, for example, and I have no intention of doing so now.
Some thoughts.
Risker/Anne
On 6 July 2014 04:51, Marie Earley eiryel@hotmail.com wrote:
I previously described my experience of being a member of Kevin Spacey's Trigger Street Labs website http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2014-June/004388.html
I think part of my shock was based on being British, and how the sink-or-swim attitude prevailed by those running and moderating. At least at Wikipedia there is some notion of "We have a problem here, let's discuss how best to fix it." The name of one forum at TS was "Free for all - enter at your own risk" followed by a note that more members had been suspended from that message board than from any of the others, and this is all they have in the way of rules http://labs.triggerstreet.com/labs/Help?faqCat=Message%20Board
Having said that, the one thing that I thought worked well was their Hall of Justice. Members earn credits for their reviews (which are randomly assigned by the 'assignment generator') they then spend them on the website. An obvious way of earning a lot of credits is to make up a load of generic comments like, "the characters in this screenplay are very interesting", request another assignment, copy and paste, earn credit, and repeat.
The HOJ exists for members who think the review that they received was unfair. There is a criteria for the reviews including: not cutting and pasting from other reviews, (if you think it has happened then you include the ref. no. from the other review as evidence), reviews should be constructive and non-abusive, a decent word length (I think the minimum was 100 words), there should also be evidence in the review which shows that the reviewer definitely read / watched the submission.
If a member thinks they have been unfairly treated then they send a review to the HOJ. Other members - let's call them arbitrators - with a high enough participation level (like having 'enough' edits in your edit history) can request a - randomly generated - docket, read the review, read the details of the complaint e.g. ("I think this review is a cut & past of ref. # 'x' ...."). The arbitrator who received the docket for review then has a choice of Y/N check-boxes relating to the review critieria and a comment form, for anything else that they might like to add.
The same docket goes to a number of different arbitrators in the same way. (Note: there is a limit to how many dockets a member can request in 24 hrs.) If the majority think it should go further, it is passed on to the jury.
Details about the jury from the website:
"The jury is a group of your peers made up of seasoned members picked by
site staff. Although we cannot say what the criteria is used to pick the jury, logic dictates that they are active, positive, and objective members of the community. They are asked not to reveal themselves or discuss their status with anyone so they can vote without retribution."
(FAQs about the HOJ: http://labs.triggerstreet.com/labs/Help?faqCat=Hall%20of%20Justice )
A Wikipedia variation on it might include:
- editors would need a certain number of edits before they are eligible to
become an arbitrator
- there would be a time-limit from the end of being blocked before being
eligible for 'arbitration duty'
- administrators / senior figures would be ineligible to be arbitrators
- 'cases' for arbitrators to consider would be assigned randomly by
computer
- it would be prohibited for an arbitrator to tell those involved in the
case that they have been allocated it
- 50% of those asked to consider a case would have to be female (other
quotas might be relevant for other demographics)
- there would be a limit to how many cases an arbitrator could ask for in
a certain time period (I actually envisage it being more like a cross between jury service and those user talk page notices that there is a discussion taking place somewhere
These might be more technically difficult:
- cases would only go to arbitrators whose edit history is generally in a
different subject area - so someone complaining about a dispute about a particular scientific point would have their complaint go to an arbitrator whose edit history is in, say, historical BLPs
- a limit to the number of times you could go through the arbitration
process with the same case
Cases would only go forward for administrators to get involved with if enough arbitrators agreed that it merited being put forward.
On a slightly different note:
Everyone seems to be mentioning the different ways in which the rules are applied to male vs. female editors. Is it possible to run a query or get hold of statistics for the average length of time female editors get blocked for, versus how long male editors are blocked for? Perhaps a table that takes account of the editors' participation levels prior to the block?
Marie
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2014 21:23:18 -0400 From: carolmooredc@verizon.net To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
When I was a little girl in the 1950s and 60s we were told to be passive and pray for what we wanted. Thank heavens self-actualization and womens liberation came along and we discovered "well-behaved women seldom make history." (Nicely covered at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Thatcher_Ulrich )
If we want the guys to change we gotta keep busting their chops about being civil, within the limits of civility of course. On a one on one basis, day after day after day. And even though no matter how civil we are, SOME of them still will think it is we who are being uncivil.
It's a dirty job, but it's gotta be done.
And the more guys who help promote civility and are willing to counter the good-old-boy mentality, the better... :-)
On 7/3/2014 3:18 PM, Sydney Poore wrote:
There was an attempt to address the civility problem on Wikipedia English with a top down approach at the very start of Sue Gardner's time at WMF. Sue, Jimmy Wales, myself, and a group of half dozen other people talked about it in a closed group. It failed because a top down approach is not effective on Wikipedia because policies can not be enforced from the top. Policies need to be made that a large part of the community agrees at proper and enforceable.
I would be willing to assist a group that wants to take another run at it. But there are significant challenges with enforcing a civility policy on a global community where cultural norms differ at great deal. So, we need to be careful that an attempt to assist one group of users does not make it harder for other groups of people who are also under represented on Wikipedia English.
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While I've barely had a chance to read through proposal and comments, I'd like to just ask re the below which applies generally right now:
On 7/7/2014 9:35 AM, Risker wrote:
I know what it's like to have my inbox flooded with requests for assistance in relation to dispute resolution - just for oversight requests I get an average of 8 emails a day, when I was on arbcom it was over 100/day to various lists for various purposes. (Yes, it's one of the reasons that people burn out.)
*Is it possible to establish a group of editors called "arbcom assistants" who would be admins appointed by arbcom to help with the workflow??
On 7 July 2014 09:51, Carol Moore dc carolmooredc@verizon.net wrote:
While I've barely had a chance to read through proposal and comments, I'd like to just ask re the below which applies generally right now:
On 7/7/2014 9:35 AM, Risker wrote:
I know what it's like to have my inbox flooded with requests for assistance in relation to dispute resolution - just for oversight requests I get an average of 8 emails a day, when I was on arbcom it was over 100/day to various lists for various purposes. (Yes, it's one of the reasons that people burn out.)
*Is it possible to establish a group of editors called "arbcom assistants" who would be admins appointed by arbcom to help with the workflow??
Well. It's hard enough to get qualified volunteers to work on Arbcom, and their work is mainly on major cases with a lot of participants about disputes that have been adversely affecting the project for an extended period of months or in some cases years. There are arbcom clerks, whose job it is to keep the (few) cases moving relatively smoothly, and there's a bit of dispute resolution there. It looks like there are four of them - probably an historic low, and looking at the list I'm pretty sure two of them are actually inactive.
Arbcom moving out of their very narrow scope has been very loudly and vigorously opposed by the community, and Arbcom itself is looking to try to divest itself of several of its current responsibilities rather than considering taking on anything new. This is absolutely *not* a job for arbcom. It's pretty much the kind of thing that arbitrators kept finding in their mailboxes that someone expected them to solve, but took hours away from the work they were supposed to be doing, and required the individual arbitrators to act on their own because the matter was outside of jurisdiction.
Risker/Anne
Risker wrote:
I also have a real problem with the idea of anonymous reporting
What issues do you have with anonymous reporting? On my forum I have reporting wide open to the world, no login/membership needed. Aside from spambots that can find any link, mostly what I've seen is more biased reporting: Posters will report transgressions by someone they don't like. In most cases, it is a real transgression and something that needs cleaning up. There are a few who narrowly interpret the rules (or make up their own), but those are usually pretty obvious.
The only question on seeing obvious bias would be could it scale. You might need a database of notes from prior decisions, or maybe a trial period of watching other decisions for new adjudicators.
Many of our most seriously problematic sockpuppeting accounts are people who've been blocked for behavioural reasons - and we waste a huge amount of time trying to keep them off the site.
I definitely agree with this. Is there any way to track cellphone users? Their variable IP addresses are as bad as the old AOL days.
Janine
On 7 July 2014 11:12, Janine Starykowicz jrstark@barntowire.com wrote:
Risker wrote:
I also have a real problem with the idea of anonymous reporting
What issues do you have with anonymous reporting? On my forum I have reporting wide open to the world, no login/membership needed. Aside from spambots that can find any link, mostly what I've seen is more biased reporting: Posters will report transgressions by someone they don't like. In most cases, it is a real transgression and something that needs cleaning up. There are a few who narrowly interpret the rules (or make up their own), but those are usually pretty obvious.
The only question on seeing obvious bias would be could it scale. You might need a database of notes from prior decisions, or maybe a trial period of watching other decisions for new adjudicators.
My problem with it is that it is quite frequently agenda-driven. It's also creepy to think that we'd permit anonymous reporting and assessment to hold identifiable users accountable on a broad scale. There may be a few exceptions (paedophilia advocacy is the one pretty much at the top of my list), but often that is as much to prevent unsupportable potentially libelous accusations from being made publicly.
Many of our most seriously problematic sockpuppeting accounts are people
who've been blocked for behavioural reasons - and we waste a huge amount of time trying to keep them off the site.
I definitely agree with this. Is there any way to track cellphone users? Their variable IP addresses are as bad as the old AOL days.
It would be a major violation of the Wikimedia privacy policy to "track" anyone without there being a legitimate and documentable belief that they have violated the terms of use. Remember that any practice that can be used against 'bad' users can also be turned against 'good' users - because bad and good is in the eye of the beholder. I think this is an area where there is a massive split in the international community about its value and appropriateness - particularly in Europe the personal privacy of users takes precedence over just about everything else. It's relatively easy to persuade an English Wikipedia checkuser to do a check provided there are reasonable grounds, and we can do so without a formal public request and discussion. On some other projects, the rules are extremely strict, checking cannot be done absent a public request, and every check that is done is documented publicly (that is "Checkuser A checked Account B for sockpuppetry on DMY, result was xxxx" - private info not publicly posted). This is very much a cultural thing.
Risker/Anne
Janine
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To add to Anne's comment. We also know that requests for checkuser can be used to harass and troll. It is too often the response of someone who is perturbed about being reported to escalate the dispute. Sometimes by requesting sockpuppet investigations on the person who reported them.
Requests for checks can be done to out people who want to edit privately. It is pretty easy to troll someone to the point that they respond with poor conduct and then take them to dispute resolution and ask for check user on them for one reason or another.
Sydney
Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration
On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 7 July 2014 11:12, Janine Starykowicz jrstark@barntowire.com wrote:
Risker wrote:
I also have a real problem with the idea of anonymous reporting
What issues do you have with anonymous reporting? On my forum I have reporting wide open to the world, no login/membership needed. Aside from spambots that can find any link, mostly what I've seen is more biased reporting: Posters will report transgressions by someone they don't like. In most cases, it is a real transgression and something that needs cleaning up. There are a few who narrowly interpret the rules (or make up their own), but those are usually pretty obvious.
The only question on seeing obvious bias would be could it scale. You might need a database of notes from prior decisions, or maybe a trial period of watching other decisions for new adjudicators.
My problem with it is that it is quite frequently agenda-driven. It's also creepy to think that we'd permit anonymous reporting and assessment to hold identifiable users accountable on a broad scale. There may be a few exceptions (paedophilia advocacy is the one pretty much at the top of my list), but often that is as much to prevent unsupportable potentially libelous accusations from being made publicly.
Many of our most seriously problematic sockpuppeting accounts are people
who've been blocked for behavioural reasons - and we waste a huge amount of time trying to keep them off the site.
I definitely agree with this. Is there any way to track cellphone users? Their variable IP addresses are as bad as the old AOL days.
It would be a major violation of the Wikimedia privacy policy to "track" anyone without there being a legitimate and documentable belief that they have violated the terms of use. Remember that any practice that can be used against 'bad' users can also be turned against 'good' users - because bad and good is in the eye of the beholder. I think this is an area where there is a massive split in the international community about its value and appropriateness - particularly in Europe the personal privacy of users takes precedence over just about everything else. It's relatively easy to persuade an English Wikipedia checkuser to do a check provided there are reasonable grounds, and we can do so without a formal public request and discussion. On some other projects, the rules are extremely strict, checking cannot be done absent a public request, and every check that is done is documented publicly (that is "Checkuser A checked Account B for sockpuppetry on DMY, result was xxxx" - private info not publicly posted). This is very much a cultural thing.
Risker/Anne
Janine
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Hi there,
I'm flagging the major issues that need to be considered.
1) we can not promise anonymity for the people acting as adjudicators. Any attempt to have anonymous people hearing a case will attract attention from a group if obsessive people who out anyone who is anonymous. Plus at times harass them.
2) the reasons that people enforcing the rules on Wikipedia ignore incivility, harassment, and trolling is because that approach is often the best way to stop attention seeking behavior. The idea to "not feed trolls" is well engrained into the culture and advise given by mature and experienced people on the Internet.
3) blocks on Wikipedia are not suppose to be punitive but intended to immediately stop disruptive user behavior. Attempts to use them to change conduct is generally not successful. Instead people who are blocked often become entrenched in proving that they are being treated poorly.
3) there is no way to stop people from editing Wikipedia. The wiki software as used by WMF allows easy access to join, and edit. Attempts to stop blocked or banned users from editing is part of what causes administrators to burn out and ignore problems or over react to them.
4) banning people very engaged in the community rarely causes them to go away.
Sydney
n Jul 7, 2014 3:20 AM, "Marie Earley" eiryel@hotmail.com wrote:
Hi Risker / Anne,
In response to the points you raise:
- A panel suggests a group of people who discuss and decide things, it
wouldn't be that, it would be a pool of adjudicators.
- The home page shows 130,858 active editors, if 15% of those are female
then it means there must be 19,628 female editors to draw the 50% from.
- I don't participate in "dispute management", but then I have never been
asked to.
- More people might agree to take part in dispute management if they know
that their input will be kept anonymous.
- Administrators would do what they have always done.
Example of a possible way to approach potential adjudicators: Those eligible (maybe they've been editing for more than a year and they
have an edit history of 1,000+ edits) are sent a private e-mail, this would be a circular to all eligible editors. It would say something like:
"According to our records you have been with us for more than [length
of time] and have contributed over [number of edits]. We would therefore like to invite you join our pool of adjudicators which we are currently in the process of establishing. The purpose of adjudication would to consider editors requests to block other editors ('cases'). We envisage adjudication to be the first stage in managing cases with the second stage being handled by administrators.
Your anonymity as an adjudicator would be protected by us at all times,
in fact one of the conditions of being an adjudicator would be that you have no direct contact with those involved any of the cases which you are asked to consider (although you may inform the Wikipedia community that you are an adjudicator). If you wish to become an adjudicator please click on the link and fill out the form. (The form would include equal opportunities monitoring questions http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/private-and-public-sector-guidance/employ... )."
Example case:
- Editor 'X' wants a block against editor 'Y'.
- Editor X submits a case for adjudication.
- Adjudicator 'A' requests a case, the case is randomly selected from
those pending by computer.
- Adjudicator A reads the details and decides whether X has a point, or
whether Y appears to have behaved reasonably (even if X didn't like it).
- Adjudicator A marks a one of two check boxes, "Pass to next stage? Yes
[box] No [box]" (perhaps other boxes like "I lack the technical knowledge to adjudicate on this.") and a small comments form, maybe 1,000 characters.
- The same case goes to a few more adjudicators, 50% of whom are female.
- If enough rule that the case has merit then it goes forward and
administrators deal with it as they currently do (the idea is to weed out groundless requests and save administrators and above time).
- Their would be a maximum number of cases that any single adjudicator
could rule on in a 24 or 48 hour period.
- From time to time there would be a general call, "we currently have a
backlog of cases".
I must confess, I had to logout of Wikipedia and remind myself about what
questions are asked when joining. I'm so used to filling in Equal Opportunities Monitoring Forms for statistical purposes that I didn't really think about not being able to just run the query. Having said that, most user pages of active users that I've seen do appear to volunteer which gender they are. It is probably possible to go back.
Marie
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2014 13:45:34 -0400 From: risker.wp@gmail.com
To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
A few points here:
If less than 15% of editors identify as female, and the vast majority of
those do not regularly participate in "dispute management", how are you going to establish a panel that is 50% women? This isn't a small point - there are so few individuals generally speaking who regularly participate in dispute management at all (I'd put the number on enwiki at less than 150 total), and many of them are there because of the perceived power gradient, not because they have a genuine interest in managing disputes.
What disputes, exactly, would the panel be analysing? I'm having a hard
time visualizing this. "User:XXXX made a sexist comment here (link)"?
What would you expect administrators to do, exactly? They're directly
accountable for the use of their tools and have to be able to personally justify any actions they take - and surprisingly, a huge percentage of administrators (almost) never use the block button. (There's a subset of admins who only use their tools to read deleted versions, and another subset that only shows up once a year, makes a couple of edits so they keep their tools, and disappears again.)
How would you develop any statistics based on gender of editor, when the
overwhelming majority of editors do not identify their gender at all in any consistent fashion? I've personally never added any gender categories to my userpage, for example, and I have no intention of doing so now.
Some thoughts.
Risker/Anne
On 6 July 2014 04:51, Marie Earley eiryel@hotmail.com wrote:
I previously described my experience of being a member of Kevin Spacey's
Trigger Street Labs website http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2014-June/004388.html
I think part of my shock was based on being British, and how the
sink-or-swim attitude prevailed by those running and moderating. At least at Wikipedia there is some notion of "We have a problem here, let's discuss how best to fix it." The name of one forum at TS was "Free for all - enter at your own risk" followed by a note that more members had been suspended from that message board than from any of the others, and this is all they have in the way of rules http://labs.triggerstreet.com/labs/Help?faqCat=Message%20Board
Having said that, the one thing that I thought worked well was their
Hall of Justice. Members earn credits for their reviews (which are randomly assigned by the 'assignment generator') they then spend them on the website. An obvious way of earning a lot of credits is to make up a load of generic comments like, "the characters in this screenplay are very interesting", request another assignment, copy and paste, earn credit, and repeat.
The HOJ exists for members who think the review that they received was
unfair. There is a criteria for the reviews including: not cutting and pasting from other reviews, (if you think it has happened then you include the ref. no. from the other review as evidence), reviews should be constructive and non-abusive, a decent word length (I think the minimum was 100 words), there should also be evidence in the review which shows that the reviewer definitely read / watched the submission.
If a member thinks they have been unfairly treated then they send a
review to the HOJ. Other members - let's call them arbitrators - with a high enough participation level (like having 'enough' edits in your edit history) can request a - randomly generated - docket, read the review, read the details of the complaint e.g. ("I think this review is a cut & past of ref. # 'x' ...."). The arbitrator who received the docket for review then has a choice of Y/N check-boxes relating to the review critieria and a comment form, for anything else that they might like to add.
The same docket goes to a number of different arbitrators in the same
way. (Note: there is a limit to how many dockets a member can request in 24 hrs.) If the majority think it should go further, it is passed on to the jury.
Details about the jury from the website:
"The jury is a group of your peers made up of seasoned members picked
by site staff. Although we cannot say what the criteria is used to pick the jury, logic dictates that they are active, positive, and objective members of the community. They are asked not to reveal themselves or discuss their status with anyone so they can vote without retribution."
(FAQs about the HOJ:
http://labs.triggerstreet.com/labs/Help?faqCat=Hall%20of%20Justice )
A Wikipedia variation on it might include:
- editors would need a certain number of edits before they are eligible
to become an arbitrator
- there would be a time-limit from the end of being blocked before being
eligible for 'arbitration duty'
- administrators / senior figures would be ineligible to be arbitrators
- 'cases' for arbitrators to consider would be assigned randomly by
computer
- it would be prohibited for an arbitrator to tell those involved in the
case that they have been allocated it
- 50% of those asked to consider a case would have to be female (other
quotas might be relevant for other demographics)
- there would be a limit to how many cases an arbitrator could ask for
in a certain time period (I actually envisage it being more like a cross between jury service and those user talk page notices that there is a discussion taking place somewhere
These might be more technically difficult:
- cases would only go to arbitrators whose edit history is generally in
a different subject area - so someone complaining about a dispute about a particular scientific point would have their complaint go to an arbitrator whose edit history is in, say, historical BLPs
- a limit to the number of times you could go through the arbitration
process with the same case
Cases would only go forward for administrators to get involved with if
enough arbitrators agreed that it merited being put forward.
On a slightly different note:
Everyone seems to be mentioning the different ways in which the rules
are applied to male vs. female editors. Is it possible to run a query or get hold of statistics for the average length of time female editors get blocked for, versus how long male editors are blocked for? Perhaps a table that takes account of the editors' participation levels prior to the block?
Marie
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2014 21:23:18 -0400 From: carolmooredc@verizon.net To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
When I was a little girl in the 1950s and 60s we were told to be
passive
and pray for what we wanted. Thank heavens self-actualization and
womens
liberation came along and we discovered "well-behaved women seldom
make
history." (Nicely covered at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Thatcher_Ulrich )
If we want the guys to change we gotta keep busting their chops about being civil, within the limits of civility of course. On a one on one basis, day after day after day. And even though no matter how civil we are, SOME of them still will think it is we who are being uncivil.
It's a dirty job, but it's gotta be done.
And the more guys who help promote civility and are willing to counter the good-old-boy mentality, the better... :-)
On 7/3/2014 3:18 PM, Sydney Poore wrote:
There was an attempt to address the civility problem on Wikipedia English with a top down approach at the very start of Sue Gardner's time at WMF. Sue, Jimmy Wales, myself, and a group of half dozen
other
people talked about it in a closed group. It failed because a top
down
approach is not effective on Wikipedia because policies can not be enforced from the top. Policies need to be made that a large part of the community agrees at proper and enforceable.
I would be willing to assist a group that wants to take another run
at
it. But there are significant challenges with enforcing a civility policy on a global community where cultural norms differ at great deal. So, we need to be careful that an attempt to assist one group
of
users does not make it harder for other groups of people who are
also
under represented on Wikipedia English.
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On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 10:57 AM, Sydney Poore sydney.poore@gmail.com wrote:
Hi there,
I'm flagging the major issues that need to be considered.
- we can not promise anonymity for the people acting as adjudicators. Any
attempt to have anonymous people hearing a case will attract attention from a group if obsessive people who out anyone who is anonymous. Plus at times harass them.
- the reasons that people enforcing the rules on Wikipedia ignore
incivility, harassment, and trolling is because that approach is often the best way to stop attention seeking behavior. The idea to "not feed trolls" is well engrained into the culture and advise given by mature and experienced people on the Internet.
- blocks on Wikipedia are not suppose to be punitive but intended to
immediately stop disruptive user behavior. Attempts to use them to change conduct is generally not successful. Instead people who are blocked often become entrenched in proving that they are being treated poorly.
- there is no way to stop people from editing Wikipedia. The wiki
software as used by WMF allows easy access to join, and edit. Attempts to stop blocked or banned users from editing is part of what causes administrators to burn out and ignore problems or over react to them.
- banning people very engaged in the community rarely causes them to go
away.
Sydney
So we can't bar people from using the site, and we don't have effective moderation tools (or moderators). We also realize that even if we had either, they would be used on only a teeny tiny sliver of all pages, and only by those who know about them and how to take advantage of them.
This all suggests that the only "cures" to civility are to radically restrict how freely users can interact, or change the culture of the Internet. The first is antithetical to the nature of Wikimedia projects, and the second is impossible, so...
Perhaps we decide that curing incivility is a bridge too far, and focus efforts to narrow the gender gap on other more practical opportunities.
- the reasons that people enforcing the rules on Wikipedia ignore incivility, harassment, and trolling is because that >approach is often the best way to stop attention seeking behavior. The idea to "not feed trolls" is well engrained into the >culture and advise given by mature and experienced people on the Internet.
Or you can just block them firmly when they deserve it, escalate if and when you need to block them again, revoke their talk page access if they continue to use it to troll or harass (they can still use OTRS to request unblock; however, it’s amazing to see how much humbler they get when denied an audience), semi-protect pages they continue to use IPs to make the same problematic edits to and generally make it clear to them they are being eased away from the community. I realize there *is* a small percentage of such users that this will not stop, but in seven years as an admin I *have* seen this approach work much more often than not, regardless of whether said trolls were harassing me or someone else.
Daniel Case
On 7 July 2014 13:00, Daniel and Elizabeth Case dancase@frontiernet.net wrote:
- the reasons that people enforcing the rules on Wikipedia ignore
incivility, harassment, and trolling is because that >approach is often the best way to stop attention seeking behavior. The idea to "not feed trolls" is well engrained into the >culture and advise given by mature and experienced people on the Internet.
Or you can just block them firmly when they deserve it, escalate if and when you need to block them again, revoke their talk page access if they continue to use it to troll or harass (they can still use OTRS to request unblock; however, it’s amazing to see how much humbler they get when denied an audience), semi-protect pages they continue to use IPs to make the same problematic edits to and generally make it clear to them they are being eased away from the community. I realize there *is* a small percentage of such users that this will not stop, but in seven years as an admin I *have* seen this approach work much more often than not, regardless of whether said trolls were harassing me or someone else.
Interesting to hear your experience, Daniel. It doesn't parallel mine at all, but then perhaps we're looking at different groups of problem users. I've never seen anyone "humbled" by a "behaviour" block, in my experience they're usually gone for good (those ones, I suppose, were humbled) or come back worse behaved but usually in a much sneakier way.
Of course, on enwiki we do eventually manage to ban a significant percentage of really bad players over time; not all of them, but a fair number once they've pushed enough buttons and annoyed enough people and lost their supporters. On some projects, it is essentially impossible to ban community members (as opposed to one-off vandal accounts).
Risker/Anne
Just a couple of things to note:
* Reporting would not be anonymous (only adjudicating would be). * A statement from both editor's would be included in a case. * I'm not sure how the process could be 'gamed' if the downloaded case was assigned randomly by computer & to more than one adjudicator who decide independently of one another. * Isn't this how murder trials are decided in the off-line world? What is wrong with a jury of your peers?
Separately,
The idea to "not feed trolls" is well engrained into the culture and advise given by mature and experienced people on the Internet.
This is a real bug bear of mine, the perceived wisdom that the solution is simply "not to respond". Without wishing to offend anyone I find the premise is based entirely on the First Amendment.
The UK values freedom of speech but it is on a horizontal plane along with other rights and freedoms, NOT a vertical one with freedom of speech at the top. Hate speech not only gets you blocked in the UK, it gets you jailed, and quite rightly in my opinion. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-trolls-isabella-sorley-an...
Marie
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2014 13:25:58 -0400 From: risker.wp@gmail.com To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
On 7 July 2014 13:00, Daniel and Elizabeth Case dancase@frontiernet.net wrote:
the reasons that people enforcing the rules on Wikipedia ignore incivility, harassment, and trolling is because that >approach is often the best way to stop attention seeking behavior. The idea to "not feed trolls" is well engrained into the >culture and advise given by mature and experienced people on the Internet. Or you can just block them firmly when they deserve it, escalate if and when you need to block them again, revoke their talk page access if they continue to use it to troll or harass (they can still use OTRS to request unblock; however, it’s amazing to see how much humbler they get when denied an audience), semi-protect pages they continue to use IPs to make the same problematic edits to and generally make it clear to them they are being eased away from the community. I realize there *is* a small percentage of such users that this will not stop, but in seven years as an admin I *have* seen this approach work much more often than not, regardless of whether said trolls were harassing me or someone else. Interesting to hear your experience, Daniel. It doesn't parallel mine at all, but then perhaps we're looking at different groups of problem users. I've never seen anyone "humbled" by a "behaviour" block, in my experience they're usually gone for good (those ones, I suppose, were humbled) or come back worse behaved but usually in a much sneakier way. Of course, on enwiki we do eventually manage to ban a significant percentage of really bad players over time; not all of them, but a fair number once they've pushed enough buttons and annoyed enough people and lost their supporters. On some projects, it is essentially impossible to ban community members (as opposed to one-off vandal accounts). Risker/Anne
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The UK values freedom of speech but it is on a horizontal plane along with other rights and freedoms, NOT a vertical >one >with freedom of speech at the top. Hate speech not only gets you blocked in the UK, it gets you jailed, and quite >rightly in >my opinion. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-trolls-isabella-sorley-an...
And this is how this works in practice, with relevance to Wikipedia and the issues under discussion here obvious: US: Tape of sports team owner in major market talking with his mistress is released in which he makes racist statements, where said owner has some history of making similar statements in the context of his other business interests, and the group against which the racist statements are made constitutes a disproportionately large share of the league’s players and fan base. League commissioner bans him for life from league events, including his own team’s games; he is later forced to sell team (albeit at market rate). UK: Chief executive of major sports league whose games and teams are followed by a worldwide audience as it is widely considered to have some of the world’s best teams in that sport has emails disclosed in which he talks about women, including some identifiable ones in the office, in a sexist, crude and juvenile way. He is not punished in any way as the emails were supposed to have been private and the woman he talked about (whose continued employment, coincidentally, depends on his goodwill) said she didn’t mind.
Daniel Case
I guess you mean Richard Scudamore at the Premier League in the UK http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/may/20/fa-take-no-action-richard-sc... whose secretary outed his sexist e-mails http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/20/exposed-richard-scudamo... ...
... and Donald Sterling for his racist comments in the US http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/usanow/2014/04/29/donald-sterling-fine-pe...
It does go to show how racism is viewed as bigotry and sexism is something that women are supposed to get a sense of humour about.
Marie
From: dancase@frontiernet.net To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2014 11:29:07 -0400 Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
The
UK values freedom of speech but it is on a horizontal plane along with other rights and freedoms, NOT a vertical >one >with freedom of speech at the top. Hate speech not only gets you blocked in the UK, it gets you jailed, and quite >rightly in >my opinion. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-trolls-isabella-sorley-an...
And this is how this works in practice, with relevance to Wikipedia and the issues under discussion here obvious:
US: Tape of sports team owner in major market talking with his mistress is released in which he makes racist statements, where said owner has some history of making similar statements in the context of his other business interests, and the group against which the racist statements are made constitutes a disproportionately large share of the league’s players and fan base. League commissioner bans him for life from league events, including his own team’s games; he is later forced to sell team (albeit at market rate).
UK: Chief executive of major sports league whose games and teams are followed by a worldwide audience as it is widely considered to have some of the world’s best teams in that sport has emails disclosed in which he talks about women, including some identifiable ones in the office, in a sexist, crude and juvenile way. He is not punished in any way as the emails were supposed to have been private and the woman he talked about (whose continued employment, coincidentally, depends on his goodwill) said she didn’t mind.
Daniel Case
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