(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(a)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 iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef>
________________________________
From: Wiki-research-l <wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org> on
behalf of Pine W <wiki.pine(a)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,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
--
Jonathan T. Morgan
Senior Design Researcher
Wikimedia Foundation
User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>