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(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

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(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

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(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Oliver Keyes Count Logula Wikimedia Foundation

Hi Pine, Thanks for your thoughtful answer! No, let's not throw any money at this problem yet, but let's consider first all of our options. We should have a pretty big amount of data available in AfC backlogs and deletions. Maybe we can direct some trusted researchers there. I guess they would have to have admin rights if we want them to have access to the deletions, though that may be debatable if the material was never published onwiki and only submitted to an open-access project. Last month I was flattered, amused, offended, and astounded by degrees when I attended the Erasmus Prize presentations by researchers of the University of Amsterdam. I have been thinking back to those presentations again and again ever since. I wish they had been taped, especially some of the reactions from the mostly Wiki(p/m)edian audience. We need solid data in order to make weighed decisions. Since this is an encyclopedia, there is no rush and we can plan for decision-making based on numbers and ways to get those numbers. Though the collateral damage in CoI (Conflict-of-Interest) editing is a big one, it pales in comparison to the collateral damage in diversity edits. By diversity I don't even mean women and people of color, but subjects currently not on the top-ten notability list of new page patrollers. In order to innovate and morph into an up-to-date "sum of all knowledge" hub for the universe, we need a lot more than just the stuff we let in now. We need ongoing projects dealing with such things as oral histories, film- video- or audio citations, music themes, recording types, and all sorts of other things that don't even fit the old text-based model. After listening to those presentations it occurred to me that the typical Wikimedian could probably write a better study proposal than the typical professor who has never made an edit. Maybe we should be actively soliciting scholarly research from our own ranks and offer a quarterly research award to Wikimedians who are able to wrangle the data in such a way that our questions are answered. We just need a place to put our structured questions and some "How-to" info about the data. As far as I know, we don't have a published database schema that relates the technical terms to the onwiki terms. Jane On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 2:36 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Pine, I don't know if Jane answered this -- but I think that would be a great idea. There's been a little research work in improving newbie interactions (and NPP/AFC/etc) but there needs to be a lot more. -Jodi On Sat, Dec 26, 2015 at 5:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

There will always be difficulties in getting good volunteer patrolling of some subjects, for exactly the same reason that there are difficulties in getting articles on those subjects: the lack of knowledgable volunteers interested in writing about them on WP. What complicates the situation is that many of these subjects that are relative unattractive to volunteers are very attractive to people with the most blatant forms of conflict of interest: practitioners of various professions, companies in various lines of business, makers of certain types of products. It is unfortunately impossible for a volunteer-based project to avoid this, in the absence of fixed rules that can discriminate closely between those articles and subjects worth fixing and those not. There is a very few areas of WP where we do have such rules, (eg. WP:PROF) and decisions there go quite smoothly in most cases. But there is no way of making exact decision on keeping articles when relying on something as amorphous as the GNG. At AfC, there is another limitation: the question is not whether an article should be accepted into WP, but whether there's a decent probability that the article will in fact be accepted. As an analogous problem, the qualification for giving accurate and effective online advice about writing an article is not very common. Many more WPedians can write a decent article than they can teach others to do so. Thus, even the most dedicated people can reach very few of the people who ought to be reached. i do not mean to suggest that we should not try to do better--we should try to do very much better at every step. But there is a limit to what can be expected in an organization like ours. On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 3:21 AM, Jane Darnell <jane023(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

Sorry, my brain made a mashup of 2 trains of thought. At the *Wikipedia 15* sessions on January 16th? Pine On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 4:24 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Yes I agree in ;large part with what you say, however it is only possible to welcome newbies into existing projects. Obviously we cannot welcome newbies into projects that don't exist yet. Whether or not the subject of interest could possibly be considered a conflict of interest is irrelevant. If anything, I would imagine the problem is greater when there is a lack of reliable sources in the subject at hand, not when the subject is a conflict of interest. So as an example, if someone were to start a project to systematically document archeological sites and protected "below earth surface" areas, I can imagine that sites discovered in the 19th-century and earlier could be more easily covered in the project than sites discovered in the 20th-century and later. Similarly, sites that are located near large cities are probably easier to write articles about than sites located in remote areas or war zones. So problems with editor coverage overlap problems with page-patrolling, and possibly themselves are amplifications of similar spotty coverage in other media. On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 11:40 PM, David Goodman <dggenwp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

That's one possibility. But if we have declining wikiprojects in a negative feedback loop at the same time as an overall stable or slowly growing community, then either the active wikiprojects are better able to retain existing editors and also convert more casual editors into regulars or there is some other growth area to more than balance the local declines. We need some research to test that model. It is also possible that some people like ploughing their own furrow and being the undisturbed Wikipedia expert in their own area. I'm pretty sure that one thing that drives some people away is conflict and not everyone enjoys the process of their work being ruthlessly edit by others. We may also have a more complex community that needs measurement over a longer period of time, it could be that hundreds of the wikiprojects we now think of as inactive are merely dormant and over a longer time period many of them will have intermittent flourishes of activity as editors join them or reactivate. If it turns out that dormant wikiprojects have as Pine puts it "low stickyness" then perhaps it would make sense to declare loads of inactive projects dormant and redirect them to parent projects. On the other hand if it turns out that simply keeping inactive wikiprojects around waiting for the next person who cares about the topic means that when that person joins the community they are more likely to stay then it would make sense to keep inactive wikiproject. In any event I suspect some reports, "unanswered newbie queries on wikiproject talkpages" and "Wikiprojects with no watchlisters who are currently active experienced editors" would probably be worthwhile. WereSpielChequers On 28 January 2016 at 23:05, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

The number of active editors watching the Project page is probably an easily computable indicator. Analysing the nature of conversations on the Talk page requires more work and probably a human eye. I’d probably use that as a “ground truth” that the first indicator is giving reliable results. Kerry From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Pine W Sent: Friday, 29 January 2016 9:41 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;rg>; James Hare &lt;james.hare(a)wikidc.org&gt; Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Community policing, New Page Patrol, Articles for Creation, and editor retention I like the idea of those reports. Pinging James Hare to ask if those tools could be included in future WikiProject X! activities. Pine On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 3:38 PM, WereSpielChequers &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com <mailto:werespielchequers@gmail.com> > wrote: That's one possibility. But if we have declining wikiprojects in a negative feedback loop at the same time as an overall stable or slowly growing community, then either the active wikiprojects are better able to retain existing editors and also convert more casual editors into regulars or there is some other growth area to more than balance the local declines. We need some research to test that model. It is also possible that some people like ploughing their own furrow and being the undisturbed Wikipedia expert in their own area. I'm pretty sure that one thing that drives some people away is conflict and not everyone enjoys the process of their work being ruthlessly edit by others. We may also have a more complex community that needs measurement over a longer period of time, it could be that hundreds of the wikiprojects we now think of as inactive are merely dormant and over a longer time period many of them will have intermittent flourishes of activity as editors join them or reactivate. If it turns out that dormant wikiprojects have as Pine puts it "low stickyness" then perhaps it would make sense to declare loads of inactive projects dormant and redirect them to parent projects. On the other hand if it turns out that simply keeping inactive wikiprojects around waiting for the next person who cares about the topic means that when that person joins the community they are more likely to stay then it would make sense to keep inactive wikiproject. In any event I suspect some reports, "unanswered newbie queries on wikiproject talkpages" and "Wikiprojects with no watchlisters who are currently active experienced editors" would probably be worthwhile. WereSpielChequers On 28 January 2016 at 23:05, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com <mailto:wiki.pine@gmail.com> > wrote: I've been thinking about what David said. It seems to me that there's a vicious cycle of too few contributors --> languishing wikiprojects --> low stickiness for potential contributors who would otherwise be attracted to those wikiprojects. So how do we get out of it? Any suggestions? I'm wondering if Wikia has some practices that we could borrow. Any thoughts along that line? Pine On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 8:40 PM, David Goodman &lt;dggenwp(a)gmail.com <mailto:dggenwp@gmail.com> > wrote: There will always be difficulties in getting good volunteer patrolling of some subjects, for exactly the same reason that there are difficulties in getting articles on those subjects: the lack of knowledgable volunteers interested in writing about them on WP. What complicates the situation is that many of these subjects that are relative unattractive to volunteers are very attractive to people with the most blatant forms of conflict of interest: practitioners of various professions, companies in various lines of business, makers of certain types of products. It is unfortunately impossible for a volunteer-based project to avoid this, in the absence of fixed rules that can discriminate closely between those articles and subjects worth fixing and those not. There is a very few areas of WP where we do have such rules, (eg. WP:PROF) and decisions there go quite smoothly in most cases. But there is no way of making exact decision on keeping articles when relying on something as amorphous as the GNG. At AfC, there is another limitation: the question is not whether an article should be accepted into WP, but whether there's a decent probability that the article will in fact be accepted. As an analogous problem, the qualification for giving accurate and effective online advice about writing an article is not very common. Many more WPedians can write a decent article than they can teach others to do so. Thus, even the most dedicated people can reach very few of the people who ought to be reached. i do not mean to suggest that we should not try to do better--we should try to do very much better at every step. But there is a limit to what can be expected in an organization like ours. On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 3:21 AM, Jane Darnell &lt;jane023(a)gmail.com <mailto:jane023@gmail.com> > wrote: Hi Pine, I definitely think that there is enough data to start a project or workspace dedicated to creating tools that will deliver the data in ways that can support decision-making. Given 10 newbie good-faith editors, what are their types of interests and reasons for staying or leaving? Similar questions can be asked of current editors. If we break this down, I guess the main questions we have can be split into two groups; namely content-related questions (what types of content receive the most onwiki support? what types of content do we delete most often?) and onboarding questions (who do we let edit the articles we have? who are our page-creators?). Slicing and dicing these questions, you could look at the problems with our current category structure and naming/diambiguation conventions, but also our current list of "reliable sources" and how that relates to our current interpretation of "notability" for whatever field of interest the end-researcher may have. If we can come up with proven success factors based on long-standing editor contributions, we may be able to develop a recipe for successful canvassing to use in editathons and presentations. Like I said, I think experienced Wikimedians can probably formulate such questions better than outsiders to our community, and I think we need to get some new talent on board that can help us write/summarize a structural history of Wikipedia-editing over the past decade in order to help get people up to speed on the issues. Jane On Sat, Dec 26, 2015 at 11:42 PM, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com <mailto:wiki.pine@gmail.com> > wrote: Jane, what would you think about the concept of an IEG research project (or, due to the grantmaking restructure, a "project grant" research project) about gathering some of the data that you suggest and developing recommendations, tools, or systems designed to improve the situations with NPP, AFC, and similar queues? Pine On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 1:59 AM, Jane Darnell &lt;jane023(a)gmail.com <mailto:jane023@gmail.com> > wrote: Hi Pine, Thanks for your thoughtful answer! No, let's not throw any money at this problem yet, but let's consider first all of our options. We should have a pretty big amount of data available in AfC backlogs and deletions. Maybe we can direct some trusted researchers there. I guess they would have to have admin rights if we want them to have access to the deletions, though that may be debatable if the material was never published onwiki and only submitted to an open-access project. Last month I was flattered, amused, offended, and astounded by degrees when I attended the Erasmus Prize presentations by researchers of the University of Amsterdam. I have been thinking back to those presentations again and again ever since. I wish they had been taped, especially some of the reactions from the mostly Wiki(p/m)edian audience. We need solid data in order to make weighed decisions. Since this is an encyclopedia, there is no rush and we can plan for decision-making based on numbers and ways to get those numbers. Though the collateral damage in CoI (Conflict-of-Interest) editing is a big one, it pales in comparison to the collateral damage in diversity edits. By diversity I don't even mean women and people of color, but subjects currently not on the top-ten notability list of new page patrollers. In order to innovate and morph into an up-to-date "sum of all knowledge" hub for the universe, we need a lot more than just the stuff we let in now. We need ongoing projects dealing with such things as oral histories, film- video- or audio citations, music themes, recording types, and all sorts of other things that don't even fit the old text-based model. After listening to those presentations it occurred to me that the typical Wikimedian could probably write a better study proposal than the typical professor who has never made an edit. Maybe we should be actively soliciting scholarly research from our own ranks and offer a quarterly research award to Wikimedians who are able to wrangle the data in such a way that our questions are answered. We just need a place to put our structured questions and some "How-to" info about the data. As far as I know, we don't have a published database schema that relates the technical terms to the onwiki terms. Jane On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 2:36 AM, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com <mailto:wiki.pine@gmail.com> > wrote: Hi Jane, Regarding "Are there any numbers available on how many AfC's resulted in articles vs. submissions and then also the same numbers for non-AfC page creations vs. speedy deletions?", I'm sure that data is available but I suspect that getting WMF to take another round of analyzing and trying to improve the situation with AfC would probably require that it be on some team's quarterly goals. I feel that it would be good to resurrect the WMF Growth team. Currently, I hear that contributor growth is one of the metrics that is or will be emphasized for Product teams, but there is no single point of contact for coordinating the multiple growth initiatives, both inside of Product and those being funded by grants. I think that coordination in this area would be beneficial, and that this team would be well positioned to take on activities like developing ways to improve AfC, NPP, etc. Along these lines, one of my thoughts is that WMF has invested heavily in software engineering and data science, my impression is that WMF is lacking in social scientists. WMF has tried many times to develop technical improvements for social problems, with success that has been mixed at best. I would like to see people with backgrounds in fields like social psychology, economics, sociology, and urban planning be involved in a resurrected Growth team. Also, I'm wondering if the shortage of volunteer capacity -- particularly the shortage of competent and quickly-responsive volunteer capacity -- in certain community roles (like reviewers of CoI-flagged edits as well as domains like AfC) increasingly suggests that some of these tasks be at least partially done by paid staff, such as the Wiki Ed Foundation currently does with its content experts that assist classes in the US and Canada Wikipedia Education Program. I suspect that WMF wouldn't want to touch these roles in AfC, CoI and other queues because content review is involved, so maybe this is a place where Wikimedia affiliates can and should get more involved. The affiliates can work on content in ways that WMF cannot. Thoughts? Pine On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 10:19 PM, Jane Darnell &lt;jane023(a)gmail.com <mailto:jane023@gmail.com> > wrote: Hi Pine, I agree with Oliver and Kerry on the violence vs. drip-drip-drip. Our success at keeping people from editing matches the height of the threshold-to-edit. There's no violence going on, it's just the annoyance tolerance level that the typical volunteer needs to have in order to be able cross into the wikiverse seems to be going up these days. Thanks for posting the link to that SWOT analysis - is there any more information about the context in which it was made? Though you mention that experienced Wikipedians know New Page Patrollers create collateral damage and the SWOT slide shows NPP as both a strength and a weakness, no one ever addresses the fact that NPP also contains some seriously misguided POV pushers who in fact act as censors when they use the AfC tools and leave the entries they don't care about to rot. So I see NPP not just as a strength and a weakness, but also as a threat, and its associated AfC is a major threat. I assume AfC was left out of the SWOT analysis because it is so controversial: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWOT_analysis_of_Wikipedia_in_2015.… In that slide the parenthetic notes on items which may fall into more than one quadrant do not include "undisclosed conflict-of-interest editing" so I am also guessing whoever made it falls into the camp of thinking that anyone who is a paid editor and doesn't reveal this on their userpage is a threat. It leaves out a major battle ground about whether or not GLAM employees are considered paid editors or not when they venture into our world for the first time. I see AfC as one of the major threats to the English Wikipedia, and one way to combat this is to educate newbies on how to avoid it. Whenever I speak to anyone who is interested in contributing on the English Wikipedia and who also has a paid job or a volunteer position that they want to write about on Wikipedia, I first try to change their mind and try to get them to contribute to another subject first and if not that, then another project first such as Commons or Wikidata. I also always tell them 1) never edit Wikipedia from their work IP address in case someone links their onwiki interests to their job and 2) never attempt anything on English Wikipedia through AfC as it will rot there forever. I recommend they ignore the official advice to indicate their employer on their userpage, and always emphasize that their choice of username should be personal and not organization-based. In the case of volunteers this is really hard to explain and unfortunately most have to experience some form of onwiki-harassment before they get it. I personally see AfC as some sort of last-gasp effort to keep the hoards at the gate. If anything, it enforces a form of old-boys-network onboarding as people have no hope of having their contributions rescued without the help of an insider. I am an experienced Wikimedian of several projects and can wrangle my way through the most complicated templates, but I give up entirely when it comes to the jungle of AfC. Are there any numbers available on how many AfC's resulted in articles vs. submissions and then also the same numbers for non-AfC page creations vs. speedy deletions? Post creation period analysis (3, 6 and 12 months later) would be interesting to have too. My gut feeling is that AfC is busily creating a backlog we will never get through. To answer your original question, I think the reason we lack New Page Patrollers for the subjects in which they are needed at AfC is exactly the same reason why those people are being turned back at the gates - nobody currently cares about their contributions. If an AfC comes in for a soccer player, ship model or popular TV episode they are welcomed with open arms. You always get what you reward most in the end. Jane On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 12:28 AM, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com <mailto: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 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Police_Week_May_15,_2010_on_Court_Avenue_Bridge,_Des_Moines,_Iowa,_USA-1.jpg> and less like this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ferguson_Day_6,_Picture_44.png> . 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_Wikimedia… [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creation [5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWOT_analysis_of_Wikipedia_in_2015.… [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Motivational_and_educational_vid… _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l