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.
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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.
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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@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l