To WSC's point about the difficulty of detecting such behavior or surveying
at a point in which it would still be salient, I'd add that in general we
have a large gap in our knowledge about why people choose to stop editing
because almost all of our survey mechanisms depend on existing logged-in
usage of the wikis. This is a challenge with many other websites too but
it's generally easier to find and survey who, for instance, has left
Facebook (example
<http://socialmedia.soc.northwestern.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/CHI2013-FBLL.pdf>)
by collecting a random sample of people than it is to find and survey
someone who was a former editor of Wikipedia. There were surveys that did
ask about major barriers to editing (which presumably contribute to
burnout) such as the 2012 survey:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Editor_Survey_2012_-_Wi…
(see the editor survey category
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Editor_surveys> if you're looking
for others)
Some things that come to mind though:
- I suspect very few readers see vandalism in their daily browsing (as a
very frequent, long-term reader of English Wikipedia, I have trouble
recalling encountering any clear vandalism in the course of normal
reading). That said, I do suspect that most people have seen plenty of
stories of outlandish vandalism to Wikipedia -- some legitimate but many
more about vandalism that literally lasted minutes -- that may lead to
lower trust. Whether or not lower trust in Wikipedia leads to lower
readership is a separate question though. Jonathan Morgan ran some recent
surveys on reader trust and what factors affected it that might be
relevant:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_role_of_citations_in_how_reade…
- Specifically in the context of harassment and gender equity:
- Harassment as barrier:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_equity_report_2018/Barriers_to_equity
- Edit summaries in particular as harassment:
https://www.elizabethwhittaker.net/wmf-internship (more details
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#July_2019>
)
- Annual Community Insights Reports often have a section on this --
e.g.,
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Insights/Community_Insights_2020_…
- 2015 Harassment Survey:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Harassment_survey_2015
- The body of work around barriers to newcomers might have some good
insights too -- e.g.,
https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfaker/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/
On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 5:44 AM WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Amir,
This is one of those areas of research where we really need the annual
editor survey. I think it ran once after the 2009/10 Strategy process, and
I don't know if the best questions got included.
But the best time to ask editors what prompted them to start editing has
to be fairly soon after they started as memories fade. I once went back to
my early edits and the edit I remembered starting me editing barely made it
into my first 50.
There is a longstanding theory that a lot of new editors start or started
to fix some vandalism that they saw, and that this group went into steep
decline a decade ago with the rise of Cluebot and other antivandalism tools
that work faster than a newbie could. But without an annual survey to ask
editors what prompted them to edit you are going to struggle to research
this. Of course you could look at the early logged in edits of
active/prolific wikipedians, but if it is true that many/most Wikipedians
start with some IP edits, the earliest edits of many Wikipedians won't be
available.
Abuse one assumes has a differential effect on the targets of abuse,
disproportionately women, gays and ethnic minorities. But I'd be inclined
to look at stuff targeted at their user and usertalkpages rather than
talkpages and edit summaries, though an email survey of former editors
would be useful.
My suspicion is that when we revert, block and maybe even revdel or
oversight abuse we assume that fixes the problem, and if we want to tackle
abuse we need more edit filters to prevent such abuse from going live.
WSC
On Sat, 16 Jan 2021 at 15:16, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il>
wrote:
Hi,
Is there any research about the effect of vandalism in wiki content pages
on readers, experienced editors, and new and potential editors?
And of abuse in discussion pages and edit summaries on experienced
editors
and new and potential editors?
Intuitively and anecdotally one could think of the following:
1. Vandalism in content pages (articles) wastes editors' and patrollers'
time. This (probably) doesn't require proof (or does it?). But some
people
say it also causes some experienced editors to
burn out and leave. Is
there
any data about it, beyond intuition?
2. Does vandalism *measurably* affect the perception of the wikis'
reliability? (This may be wildly different in different languages and
wikis.)
3. Abusive language on discussion pages and edit summaries affects
editors,
and may cause them to reduce their editing, to
stop editing about certain
topics, or to leave the wiki entirely. Is this effect measurable? How
does
it differ for various groups by gender, age,
religion, country,
professional and educational background, seniority at the wiki, etc.?
Thanks! :)
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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