Well, what is and isn't a reliable source is discussed at various noticeboards and set into stone, so it's more like saying "you published this in a journal on Beall's list"
On 15 December 2015 at 20:35, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with Pine. It’s often patterns of behaviour that are more significant than some individual incident. The drip-drip-drip of constant criticism from a colleague can wear out most people. And if it’s done with AWB or other tool, it’s very easy to grind down other people down, especially as most people don’t know what ways they have to complain about such behaviour and, in any case, most complaints have to lodged on-wiki (which presumably discourages most people from doing it). Why do we allow the bullies to write the rules of this playground?
For example, there is a user account that removes the word “comprises”, a word their user page says they don’t like for various reasons (but none of which appear to relate to Wikipedia policy) . Why is this one user through their persistence allowed to decide what words are used in Wikipedia articles? Another bully (and I can see no other way to describe their behaviour) has a long edit history full of reversions with the edit summary “no source provided” or “not a reliable source” (which seems to be something you can say about just about anything – rather like the way you can criticise most research with “but, with a larger longer study, it might show different results?”).
Kerry
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Pine W Sent: Wednesday, 16 December 2015 10:11 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Community policing, New Page Patrol, Articles for Creation, and editor retention
The problems that I'm contemplating here are, for better and for worse, outside the scope of what I would consider harassment. I think that they could be described as toxic interactions in general, and/or a shortage of or long-delayed positive interactions at places like NPP and AFC.
Pine
On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 4:02 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
Well, we don't really have a judicial approach either; judges get booted when they're biased or refusing to apply the law ;). I would agree that it is a small circle of people, and I would agree that they have a far larger impact than numbers would suggest. Community Advocacy is currently running a harassment consultation at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Harassment_consultation_2015 - I suggest looking at the proposals there.
On 15 December 2015 at 19:00, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe it's just the circles that I happen to circulate in, but it seems to me that a very small percentage of Wikipedians tend to be consistently harsh or toxic, and that small number of people tends to have disproportionately negative influence on the atmosphere in the community. Aligned with Jimbo's comments at Wikimania 2014 in London, I do wonder if their caustic nature rises to the level where they should be excluded from the community, and if so, on what grounds we would make that exclusion. Being a relentless critic doesn't necessarily rise to the level of harassment if it's done broadly rather than directed at a particular individual or group, but looking at the problem from an HR perspective rather than a judicial one, I agree that maybe more should be done to exclude toxic personalities. I wonder, though, how we can do that; our process for excluding people from the community is more like a judicial process than like an HR process. Maybe we need more of an HR approach?
Pine
On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 3:51 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
We can probably talk about the nature of new page patrol without resorting to comparisons to violent, real-world overreactions with multiple serious injuries.
To be perfectly honest as a new page patroller the biggest issue I've seen is toxic senior members of the community making the prospect of patrolling particularly unpleasant. It doesn't do much for patroller numbers.
On 15 December 2015 at 18:28, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Yesterday I gave a presentation about community policing at the Cascadia Wikimedians' end of year event with Seattle TA3M [1][2][3]. An issue that came up for discussion is the extent to which, on English Wikipedia, experienced Wikipedians conducting New Page Patrol create collateral damage during their well-intentioned efforts to protect Wikipedia. Another subject that came up is the need for more human resources for mentoring of newbies who create articles using the Articles for Creation system [4]; one comment I've heard previously is that the length of time between submission and review may be long enough for the newbie to give up and disappear, and another comment that I've heard is that newbies may not understand the instructions that they're given when their article is reviewed. These comments correlate with the community SWOT analysis that was done at WikiConference USA this year, in which "biting the newbies", NPP, and "onboarding/training" were identified as weaknesses [5]
Personally, I would like the interaction of experienced editors with the newbies in places like NPP and AFC to look more like this and less like this. Granted, it's hard for a relatively small number of experienced Wikipedians to keep all the junk and vandals out while also mentoring the newbies and avoiding collateral damage, so one strategy could be to increase the quantity of skilled human resources that are devoted to these domains. Any thoughts on how to make that happen?
I am currently especially interested in this topic because of my IEG project which officially starts this week. [6] It would be very helpful to retain the new editors that are trained through these videos, so improving editor retention via improved newbie experiences at NPP and/or AFC would be most welcome.
Pine
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_policing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_reform_in_the_United_States [3]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Presentations_at_Cascadia_Wikimedian... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creation [5]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWOT_analysis_of_Wikipedia_in_2015.j... [6]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Motivational_and_educational_vide...
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