Hi wiki-research-l folks,

Some colleagues at Berkeley and I are looking for feedback on a research-focused grant proposal regarding countering harassment in online platforms including Wikipedia: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/I_School_Challenge_for_Counte...

Very briefly, we plan to: * organize a conference to collect research and assess needs; * issue a Challenge for projects that counter online harassment; and, * develop a "research commons" to support ongoing collaboration on this topic.

Part of our motivation has been that there seems to be a lot of existing research related to online (or offline) harassment that may not have been taken advantage of in platform design yet; simultaneously, there may be data or things learned by particular large platforms in how they run communities and deal with harassment that isn't widely shared. And while there may be a lot of description of problems or suggestions of solutions, more specific needs assessments for different types of users and use cases could help make work towards solutions more effective.

Any constructive comments or feedback would be welcome, on-list, off-list or on the project proposal discussion page. It would be especially helpful for us to hear from Wikipedia researchers about: existing relevant research, what would be helpful to you in terms of collaborating with other researchers on topics related to harassment, whom we should contact about potential collaboration.

Much thanks, Nick

Nick Doty UC Berkeley, School of Information Center for Technology, Society & Policy