(Re: Jonathan's 'Chilling Effect' theory and Kerry's call for experiments to increase gender diversity)
Kerry: In a magic world, where I could experiment with anything I wanted to without having to get permission from communities, I would experiment with enforceable codes of conduct that covered a wider range of harassing and hostile behavior, coupled with robust & confidential incident reporting and review tools. But that's not really an 'experiment', that's a whole new social/software system.
I actually think we're beyond 'experiments' when it comes to increasing gender diversity. There are too many systemic factors working against increasing non-male participation. In order to do that you would need to increase newcomer retention dramatically, and we can barely move the needle there on EnWiki, for both social and technical reasons. But one non-technical intervention might be carefully revising and re-scope policies like WP:NOTSOCIAL that are often used to arbitrarily and aggressively shut down modes of communication, self-expression, and collaboration that don't fit so-and-so's idea of what it means to be Wikipedian.
Initiatives that start off wiki, like women-oriented edit-a-thons and outreach campaigns, are vitally important and could certainly be supported better in terms of maintaining a sense of community among participants once the event is over and they find they're now stuck alone in hostile wiki-territory. But I'm not sure what the best strategy is there, and these kind of initiatives are not large-scale enough to make a large overall impact on active editor numbers on their own, though they set important precedents, create infrastructure, change the conversation, and do lead to new editors.
The Community Health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_health_initiative team just hired a new researcher who has lots of experience in the online harassment space. I don't feel comfortable announcing their name yet, since they hasn't officially started, but I'll make sure they subscribe to this list, and will point out this thread.
Jonathan: This study https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2145265 is the one I cite. There's a more recent--paywalled!--follow up https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-015-0573-y (expansion?) that I haven't read yet, but which may provide new insights. And this short but powerful enthnographic study https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2702514. And this lab study https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216306781 on the gendered perceptions of feedback and anonymity. And the--ancient, by now--former contributors survey https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Former_Contributors_Survey_Results, which IIRC shows that conflict fatigue is a significant reason people leave. And of course there's a mountain of credible evidence at this point that antisocial behaviors drive away newcomers, irrespective of gender.
Thanks for raising these questions,
- J
On Wed, Sep 19, 2018 at 3:21 AM, Jonathan Cardy <werespielchequers@gmail.com
wrote:
Thanks Pine,
In case I didn’t make it clear, I am very much of the camp that IP editing is our lifeline, the way we recruit new members. If someone isn’t happy with Citizendium et al as tests of that proposition then feel free to propose tests. I am open to being proved wrong if someone doesn’t mind wasting their time checking what seems obvious to me.
Just please if you do so make sure you test for the babies that I fear would be thrown out with the bathwater, i.e the goodfaith newbies.
I am not short of promising lines of enquiry, and more productive uses of my time. My choice for my time available for such things is which promising lines of enquiry to follow, and banning IPs isn’t one if them.
One where we might have more agreement is over the default four warnings and a block for vandalism. I think it bonkers that we block edit warrers for a first offence but usually don’t block vandals till a fifth offence. I know that the four warnings and a block approach dates back to some of the earliest years on Wiki, but I am willing to bet that it wasn’t very scientifically arrived at, and that a study of the various behaviours that we treat this way would probably conclude that we could reduce the number of warnings for vandals, whilst we might want a longer dialogue with non neutral editors, copy pasters and those who add unsourced material. Afterall, many of our editors started without getting issues like neutrality, and whilst the few former vandals who we have don’t generally have a grudge that their early vandalism lead to a block, the same isn't always true of others.
The other issue that could really use some research is on the chilling effect theory. Here the community is divided, some honestly believe that the high quality work of certain individuals justifies a certain level of snark, even to the point of harassment. Others, including myself, believe that tolerance of bad behaviour drives away some good editors and fails to improve the behaviour of some who would comply with stricter civility enforcement. It would be really useful to have a study one could point to when that argument next recurs.
Get Outlook for iOShttps://aka.ms/o0ukef ________________________________ From: Wiki-research-l wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org on behalf of Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2018 8:29:32 AM To: Wiki Research-l Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Results from 2018 global Wikimedia survey are published!
I'm going to respond to Kerry and Jonathan in two parts of one email.
--
Hi Kerry, I did not say that transparency should be a free-for-all, and it's important to keep in mind that transparency from my perspective is intended to ensure due process for everyone involved. That includes ensuring that people who are adjudicating cases are not callously dismissing complaints, mistreating people who have been victimized, neglecting evidence, or rushing to conclusions. I would oppose, for example, people who are adjudicating a case deciding to engage in questioning that is completely unnecessary for dealing with the relevant allegations.
On a related issue, I don't trust WMF to adjudicate cases or involve itself directly in deciding who gets to be on Wikimedia sites or attend Wikimedia events; WMF is not the same thing as Wikimedia and I remain deeply unhappy with some of WMF's choices over the years and its lack of apology for those choices. I would be more trusting of a somewhat less transparent process for adjudicating off-wiki problems if it was led by people who are elected from the community, similar to English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee elections. Arbcom is far from perfect, but I have modestly more faith in Arbcom than I do in WMF. On the other hand, arbitrators are volunteers, and over the years I have seen more than one instance of arbitrators appearing to be stressed; volunteers with high skill levels and good intentions are a precious resource, and if one of the outcomes of WMF's strategy process is a move toward having a global Arbitration Committee then one of the difficult questions will be how to get an adequate supply of highly skilled people with good intentions to volunteer. On a related note, I prefer to avoid identity politics when deciding who should be on arbitration committees; I feel that identity politics are often poisonous and make it very difficult to have civil dialogue. How to balance the virtue of diversity with the virtue of avoiding identity politics is an issue that I haven't worked out.
We're getting off of the topic of research and into more of a policy discussion, so if you'd like to continue in this topic then I suggest doing so on Wikimedia-l or on Meta.
--
Hi Jonathan, I'd be supportive of running small experiments about blocking all IP editors on ENWP and mid-sized Wikipedias to see whether that is a net positive. As you noted, the research would be somewhat complicated when keeping in mind that the researchers would want to check for positive and negative side effects, but I think that it would be worth doing. Would you like to make a proposal in IdeaLab?
Regards,
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