Today we are announcing https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/scaling-understanding-of-harassment/ the first results of the collaboration between Wikimedia Research and Jigsaw on modeling personal attacks and other forms of harassment on English Wikipedia. We have released https://figshare.com/projects/Wikipedia_Talk/16731 a corpus of 95M user and article talk page comments as well as over 1M human labels produced by 4000 crowd-workers for a set of 100k comments. Documentation on our methodology and future work can be found in our paper Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08914 (to appear at WWW2017) and on our project page on meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Detox. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please get in touch via the project talk page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Detox. Another great way to get involved is to label a set of comment in the Wikilabels discussion quality campaign http://labels.wmflabs.org/ui/enwiki/.
I'm reflecting on this work and how awesome it was. I see that it's continued in our annual plan under the Community Health Initiative, but I am afraid it's taking a secondary role without Ellery and others to drive it. On https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/AbuseFilter it's only featured as a question under the #Functionality section.
I just wanted to point this out and offer to help if I can be of use.
On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 5:16 PM, Ellery Wulczyn ewulczyn@wikimedia.org wrote:
Today we are announcing https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/scaling-understanding-of-harassment/ the first results of the collaboration between Wikimedia Research and Jigsaw on modeling personal attacks and other forms of harassment on English Wikipedia. We have released https://figshare.com/projects/Wikipedia_Talk/16731 a corpus of 95M user and article talk page comments as well as over 1M human labels produced by 4000 crowd-workers for a set of 100k comments. Documentation on our methodology and future work can be found in our paper Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08914 (to appear at WWW2017) and on our project page on meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Detox. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please get in touch via the project talk page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Detox. Another great way to get involved is to label a set of comment in the Wikilabels discussion quality campaign http://labels.wmflabs.org/ui/enwiki/.
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Hi Dan -- we are actually in touch with Detox as part of the Community Health initiative. They are doing their first quarterly check in this quarter so expect some updates then. Ping me offlist if you want more info.
-Toby
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'm reflecting on this work and how awesome it was. I see that it's continued in our annual plan under the Community Health Initiative, but I am afraid it's taking a secondary role without Ellery and others to drive it. On https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/AbuseFilter it's only featured as a question under the #Functionality section.
I just wanted to point this out and offer to help if I can be of use.
On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 5:16 PM, Ellery Wulczyn ewulczyn@wikimedia.org wrote:
Today we are announcing <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/scaling-
understanding-of-harassment/> the
first results of the collaboration between Wikimedia Research and Jigsaw
on
modeling personal attacks and other forms of harassment on English Wikipedia. We have released https://figshare.com/projects/Wikipedia_Talk/16731 a corpus of 95M
user
and article talk page comments as well as over 1M human labels produced
by
4000 crowd-workers for a set of 100k comments. Documentation on our methodology and future work can be found in our paper Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08914 (to appear at WWW2017) and on our project page on meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Detox. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please get in touch via the project talk page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Detox. Another
great
way to get involved is to label a set of comment in the Wikilabels discussion quality campaign http://labels.wmflabs.org/ui/enwiki/.
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your note. :)
On the Research end, Dario is still a big supporter of the efforts around research to help us better understand harassment (as you noticed in our commitments to the annual plan) and with Ellery's departure, I've been helping him a bit to make sure we can move forward on this front. More specifically, and while we're continuing the research with Nithum and Lucas who were Ellery's collaborators on the Detox project, we recently initiated https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Study_of_harassment_and_its_impact with Cristian and Yiqing from Cornell University. We are very excited about this new collaboration as Cristian has years of experience in spaces that are very relevant to the socio-technical problems related to harassment. I think you will enjoy reading that page which signal the early directions of the research.
The whole harassment research team meets every 2 weeks, if you're curious what's going on on this front and on our end and you want to listen in, please ping me. And, thank you for the offer to help. We may take you up on that. :)
Best, Leila
-- Leila Zia Senior Research Scientist Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 7:55 PM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Dan -- we are actually in touch with Detox as part of the Community Health initiative. They are doing their first quarterly check in this quarter so expect some updates then. Ping me offlist if you want more info.
-Toby
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'm reflecting on this work and how awesome it was. I see that it's continued in our annual plan under the Community Health Initiative, but I am afraid it's taking a secondary role without Ellery and others to drive it. On https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/AbuseFilter it's only featured as a question under the #Functionality section.
I just wanted to point this out and offer to help if I can be of use.
On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 5:16 PM, Ellery Wulczyn ewulczyn@wikimedia.org wrote:
Today we are announcing
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/scaling-understanding-of-harassment/ the first results of the collaboration between Wikimedia Research and Jigsaw on modeling personal attacks and other forms of harassment on English Wikipedia. We have released https://figshare.com/projects/Wikipedia_Talk/16731 a corpus of 95M user and article talk page comments as well as over 1M human labels produced by 4000 crowd-workers for a set of 100k comments. Documentation on our methodology and future work can be found in our paper Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08914 (to appear at WWW2017) and on our project page on meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Detox. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please get in touch via the project talk page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Detox. Another great way to get involved is to label a set of comment in the Wikilabels discussion quality campaign http://labels.wmflabs.org/ui/enwiki/.
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
I'm glad that work on detecting and addressing harassment are moving forward.
At the same time, I'd appreciate getting a more precise understanding of how WMF is defining the word "harassment". There are legal definitions and dictionary definitions, but I don't think that there is One Definition to Rule Them All. I'm hoping that WMF will be careful to distinguish debate and freedom to express opinions from harassment; we may disagree with minority or fringe views (even views that are offensive to some) but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should use policy and admin tools instead of persuasion and other tools (such as content policies about verifiability and notability) to address them (and in some cases Wikipedia may not be a good place for these discussions). Other distinctions include (1) the distinction between a personal attack and harassment ( https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/scaling-understanding-of-harassment/ appears to have equivocated the two definitions, while English Wikipedia policy makes distinctions between them), and (2) the distinction between a personal attack and an evidence-based critique.
Also note that definitions of what constitutes an attack may vary between languages; for example an expression which sounds insulting to someone in one place, culture, or language may mean something very different or relatively benign in a different place, culture, or language. I had an experience myself when I made a statement to someone which from my perspective was a statement of fact, and the other party took it as an insult. I don't apologize for what I said since from my perspective it was valid, and the other party has not apologized for their reaction, but the point is that defining what constitutes a personal attack or harassment can be a very subjective business and I'm not sure to what extent I would trust an AI to evaluate what constitutes a personal attack or harassment in a wide range of contexts. I get the impression that WMF intends to flag potentially problematic edits for admins to review, which I think could be a good thing, but I hope that there is great care being invested in how the AI is being trained to define personal attacks and harassment, and I wouldn't necessarily want admins to be encouraged to substitute the opinion of an AI for their own.
I understand the desire to tone down some of the more heated discourse around Wikipedia for the sake of improving our user population statistics, and at the same time I'm hoping that we can continue to have very strong support for freedom of expression and differences of opinion. This is a difficult balancing act. I think that moving the needle a bit in the direction of more civility would be a good thing, but I get the impression that there are plenty of edits that are blatant personal attacks that we don't need to move the needle a lot, and could instead focus on more rapidly and thoroughly addressing instances where there is ample evidence that people's intentions were malicious.
Pine
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 2:08 PM, Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your note. :)
On the Research end, Dario is still a big supporter of the efforts around research to help us better understand harassment (as you noticed in our commitments to the annual plan) and with Ellery's departure, I've been helping him a bit to make sure we can move forward on this front. More specifically, and while we're continuing the research with Nithum and Lucas who were Ellery's collaborators on the Detox project, we recently initiated https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Study_of_ harassment_and_its_impact with Cristian and Yiqing from Cornell University. We are very excited about this new collaboration as Cristian has years of experience in spaces that are very relevant to the socio-technical problems related to harassment. I think you will enjoy reading that page which signal the early directions of the research.
The whole harassment research team meets every 2 weeks, if you're curious what's going on on this front and on our end and you want to listen in, please ping me. And, thank you for the offer to help. We may take you up on that. :)
Best, Leila
-- Leila Zia Senior Research Scientist Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 7:55 PM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Dan -- we are actually in touch with Detox as part of the Community Health initiative. They are doing their first quarterly check in this quarter so expect some updates then. Ping me offlist if you want more
info.
-Toby
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Dan Andreescu <
dandreescu@wikimedia.org>
wrote:
I'm reflecting on this work and how awesome it was. I see that it's continued in our annual plan under the Community Health Initiative, but
I
am afraid it's taking a secondary role without Ellery and others to
drive
it. On https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/AbuseFilter it's only featured as a question under the #Functionality section.
I just wanted to point this out and offer to help if I can be of use.
On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 5:16 PM, Ellery Wulczyn ewulczyn@wikimedia.org wrote:
Today we are announcing
understanding-of-harassment/>
the first results of the collaboration between Wikimedia Research and
Jigsaw
on modeling personal attacks and other forms of harassment on English Wikipedia. We have released https://figshare.com/projects/Wikipedia_Talk/16731 a corpus of 95M user and article talk page comments as well as over 1M human labels
produced
by 4000 crowd-workers for a set of 100k comments. Documentation on our methodology and future work can be found in our paper Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08914 (to appear at WWW2017) and on our project page on meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Detox. If you are
interested
in contributing to the project, please get in touch via the project
talk
page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Detox. Another great way to get involved is to label a set of comment in the Wikilabels discussion quality campaign http://labels.wmflabs.org/ui/enwiki/.
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Hi Pine,
On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 2:03 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
At the same time, I'd appreciate getting a more precise understanding of how WMF is defining the word "harassment".
This is a policy question and wiki-research-l and analytics mailing lists are not the best place to discuss it. (I'm not sure where it is, maybe policy public list?)
If you are interested about learning how a specific research effort has handled this question, I suggest you reach out to the researchers in that effort. In the case of Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08914, Section 3 should give you a relatively detailed description of how this question was approached.
Best, Leila
Pine
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 2:08 PM, Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your note. :)
On the Research end, Dario is still a big supporter of the efforts around research to help us better understand harassment (as you noticed in our commitments to the annual plan) and with Ellery's departure, I've been helping him a bit to make sure we can move forward on this front. More specifically, and while we're continuing the research with Nithum and Lucas who were Ellery's collaborators on the Detox project, we recently initiated https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Study_of_harassment _and_its_impact with Cristian and Yiqing from Cornell University. We are very excited about this new collaboration as Cristian has years of experience in spaces that are very relevant to the socio-technical problems related to harassment. I think you will enjoy reading that page which signal the early directions of the research.
The whole harassment research team meets every 2 weeks, if you're curious what's going on on this front and on our end and you want to listen in, please ping me. And, thank you for the offer to help. We may take you up on that. :)
Best, Leila
-- Leila Zia Senior Research Scientist Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 7:55 PM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Dan -- we are actually in touch with Detox as part of the Community Health initiative. They are doing their first quarterly check in this quarter so expect some updates then. Ping me offlist if you want more
info.
-Toby
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Dan Andreescu <
dandreescu@wikimedia.org>
wrote:
I'm reflecting on this work and how awesome it was. I see that it's continued in our annual plan under the Community Health Initiative,
but I
am afraid it's taking a secondary role without Ellery and others to
drive
it. On https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/
AbuseFilter
it's only featured as a question under the #Functionality section.
I just wanted to point this out and offer to help if I can be of use.
On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 5:16 PM, Ellery Wulczyn <ewulczyn@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Today we are announcing
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/scaling-understanding
-of-harassment/>
the first results of the collaboration between Wikimedia Research and
Jigsaw
on modeling personal attacks and other forms of harassment on English Wikipedia. We have released https://figshare.com/projects/Wikipedia_Talk/16731 a corpus of 95M user and article talk page comments as well as over 1M human labels
produced
by 4000 crowd-workers for a set of 100k comments. Documentation on our methodology and future work can be found in our paper Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08914
(to
appear at WWW2017) and on our project page on meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Detox. If you are
interested
in contributing to the project, please get in touch via the project
talk
page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Detox. Another great way to get involved is to label a set of comment in the Wikilabels discussion quality campaign http://labels.wmflabs.org/ui/enwiki/.
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
I agree you can probably never pin down these terms to everyone's satisfaction. But, at the end of the day, is the real issue here the definition of harassment or is it the issue of people leaving Wikipedia because of unpleasant interactions with other people or perhaps retaliating in some inappropriate way. Harassment may not even be occurring on a Talk page. If someone stalks you on-wiki and reverts each of your edits, you are probably being harassed without a word being said on Talk.
This is the problem. Two people can see the same set of events or the same commentary from very different points of view. The question of "harassment" isn't completely decidable in the real world for the same reasons. But if we train the algorithms based on human assessments (provided that a wide range of people were making those assessments), we do have something useful to work with to begin to test hypotheses in the lab before taking real-world action.
For example, I find it very interesting that a small group of experienced users appear responsible for a lot of apparently obvious personal attacks. It does indeed suggest that these people think themselves unstoppable, whether that is being they believe themselves "unblockable" or perhaps they feel safe in the knowledge that their less-experienced victim is unlikely to know how to complain. Or perhaps they are just bantering among themselves, like a bunch of mate at the pub? But it certainly seems to suggest that there is a way to start identifying potential problem users for a human-based investigation.
But does the "community" really care about harassment to investigate them? Would it really take action against experienced users who engaged in harassment? Past events suggest not.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Pine W Sent: Thursday, 22 June 2017 10:04 AM To: A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics. analytics@lists.wikimedia.org; Wiki Research-l wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] [Analytics] Wikipedia Detox: Scaling up our understanding of harassment on Wikipedia
I'm glad that work on detecting and addressing harassment are moving forward.
At the same time, I'd appreciate getting a more precise understanding of how WMF is defining the word "harassment". There are legal definitions and dictionary definitions, but I don't think that there is One Definition to Rule Them All. I'm hoping that WMF will be careful to distinguish debate and freedom to express opinions from harassment; we may disagree with minority or fringe views (even views that are offensive to some) but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should use policy and admin tools instead of persuasion and other tools (such as content policies about verifiability and notability) to address them (and in some cases Wikipedia may not be a good place for these discussions). Other distinctions include (1) the distinction between a personal attack and harassment ( https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/scaling-understanding-of-harassment/ appears to have equivocated the two definitions, while English Wikipedia policy makes distinctions between them), and (2) the distinction between a personal attack and an evidence-based critique.
Also note that definitions of what constitutes an attack may vary between languages; for example an expression which sounds insulting to someone in one place, culture, or language may mean something very different or relatively benign in a different place, culture, or language. I had an experience myself when I made a statement to someone which from my perspective was a statement of fact, and the other party took it as an insult. I don't apologize for what I said since from my perspective it was valid, and the other party has not apologized for their reaction, but the point is that defining what constitutes a personal attack or harassment can be a very subjective business and I'm not sure to what extent I would trust an AI to evaluate what constitutes a personal attack or harassment in a wide range of contexts. I get the impression that WMF intends to flag potentially problematic edits for admins to review, which I think could be a good thing, but I hope that there is great care being invested in how the AI is being trained to define personal attacks and harassment, and I wouldn't necessarily want admins to be encouraged to substitute the opinion of an AI for their own.
I understand the desire to tone down some of the more heated discourse around Wikipedia for the sake of improving our user population statistics, and at the same time I'm hoping that we can continue to have very strong support for freedom of expression and differences of opinion. This is a difficult balancing act. I think that moving the needle a bit in the direction of more civility would be a good thing, but I get the impression that there are plenty of edits that are blatant personal attacks that we don't need to move the needle a lot, and could instead focus on more rapidly and thoroughly addressing instances where there is ample evidence that people's intentions were malicious.
Pine
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 2:08 PM, Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your note. :)
On the Research end, Dario is still a big supporter of the efforts around research to help us better understand harassment (as you noticed in our commitments to the annual plan) and with Ellery's departure, I've been helping him a bit to make sure we can move forward on this front. More specifically, and while we're continuing the research with Nithum and Lucas who were Ellery's collaborators on the Detox project, we recently initiated https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Study_of_ harassment_and_its_impact with Cristian and Yiqing from Cornell University. We are very excited about this new collaboration as Cristian has years of experience in spaces that are very relevant to the socio-technical problems related to harassment. I think you will enjoy reading that page which signal the early directions of the research.
The whole harassment research team meets every 2 weeks, if you're curious what's going on on this front and on our end and you want to listen in, please ping me. And, thank you for the offer to help. We may take you up on that. :)
Best, Leila
-- Leila Zia Senior Research Scientist Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 7:55 PM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Dan -- we are actually in touch with Detox as part of the Community Health initiative. They are doing their first quarterly check in this quarter so expect some updates then. Ping me offlist if you want more
info.
-Toby
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Dan Andreescu <
dandreescu@wikimedia.org>
wrote:
I'm reflecting on this work and how awesome it was. I see that it's continued in our annual plan under the Community Health Initiative, but
I
am afraid it's taking a secondary role without Ellery and others to
drive
it. On https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/AbuseFi lter it's only featured as a question under the #Functionality section.
I just wanted to point this out and offer to help if I can be of use.
On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 5:16 PM, Ellery Wulczyn ewulczyn@wikimedia.org wrote:
Today we are announcing
understanding-of-harassment/>
the first results of the collaboration between Wikimedia Research and
Jigsaw
on modeling personal attacks and other forms of harassment on English Wikipedia. We have released https://figshare.com/projects/Wikipedia_Talk/16731 a corpus of 95M user and article talk page comments as well as over 1M human labels
produced
by 4000 crowd-workers for a set of 100k comments. Documentation on our methodology and future work can be found in our paper Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08914 (to appear at WWW2017) and on our project page on meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Detox. If you are
interested
in contributing to the project, please get in touch via the project
talk
page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Detox. Another great way to get involved is to label a set of comment in the Wikilabels discussion quality campaign http://labels.wmflabs.org/ui/enwiki/.
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Kerry, I think that I agree with you. Awhile back, my impression from English Wikipedia arbitration pages was that there is a relatively small number of users who stir up trouble repeatedly and are sometimes sanctioned but rarely blocked. I don't want to speak for the Arbitration Committee, and since Arbcom changes membership periodically I'm reluctant to criticize current arbcom members for decisions of the committee in prior years. My impression is that over the years Arbcom has become more willing to sanction administrators who use their admin tools in ways that Arbcom feels are not okay, which I think is progress, but there's much more besides dealing with problematic administrators that ideally would be done to address incivility, personal attacks, and harassment.
That brings me to Chris' email, and unfortunately I don't have answers for most of his points. Differing interpretations and values are likely to be a fact of life in the Wikiverse regardless of good intentions. I think that some of us have more emotional armor than others, and some of us are more willing than others to participate in uncomfortable or contentious discussions. Similarly, people have a variety of emotional triggers that, from my perspective, have little to do with reason and a lot to do with other factors, some of which we probably don't control any more than we control our autonomic reflexes. I don't think it's other people's responsibilities to try to delicately work around someone's reflexes (which I would guess vary significantly from person to person and are often unpredictable), but neither should one intentionally try to trigger someone else, and people who accidentally overreact when triggered should apologize for doing so (I can recall making such an apology myself on one occasion, and I think I've gotten better over the years about handling myself in difficult situations). Public discourse in the Wikiverse, in politics, and in any number of other requirements requires one to have a certain amount of willingness to take risks and hear things that we might not want to hear and might find offensive. In attempting to reduce the frequency and intensity of personal attacks and harassment, I think that we need to be careful that we don't go so far as to say that people "have a right not to be offended", since others' beliefs and statements are very likely to seem different or strange or alienating from time to time. However, I also hope that we can reduce some of the more aggressive behavior for which I think there is consensus has no purpose in Wikimedia that could be compatible -- or at least not opposed to -- Wikimedia's goals.
That brings me back to the training of the AI, and what it will be flagging for admins to review. I recall getting the impression from Maggie's presentation at a metrics meeting that the AI was catching some edits that come across to me as very likely to meet the ENWP definition of a personal attack, and I think that having an AI that could help admins might indeed be useful. However, there's another dimension to this problem which we haven't addressed, which is the limited human resource capacity of the admin corps, and the limited number of individuals who are willing to spend their free time policing Wikimedia and dealing with controversial or even dangerous situations. So I think that the AI, and attempts to detoxify Wikimedia, if designed well, can indeed be good -- but I can't help but wonder if they will be insufficient unless the capacity of the admin corps with skilled and selfless administrators is also increased in proportion to the need, and I'm not sure what the solution to that problem will be. Human resources are constraints throughout the Wikiverse, and I think that they may be a problem with detoxification efforts as well.
Chris, returning to your point about emotional literacy: I don't know how to address that systemically, although perhaps training might be beneficial. I get the impression that in the western world, police officers and military personnel (who seem to be disproportionately male, although perhaps lightly less so than Wikipedia's population) are increasingly trained in emotional resilience, communications, and other psychological issues. Perhaps training is something that we could think about doing on a large scale, although that would be complicated. WMF has already started some limited training for functionaries, and I think that expanding training might indeed be useful. Training probably won't be a cure, but it might help to move the needle a bit. I would encourage WMF to consider doing research into what kind of training might be beneficial for Wikimedia's social environment, and how best to deliver that training, on a large scale.
Pine
No right to be offended? To say to someone "you don't have the right to be offended" seems pretty offensive in itself. It seems to imply that their cultural norms are somehow inferior or unacceptable.
With the global reach of Wikipedia, there are obviously many points of view on what is or isn't offensive in what circumstances. Offence may not be intended at first, but, if after a person is told their behaviour is offensive and they persist with that behaviour, I think it is reasonable to assume that they intend to offend. Which is why the data showing there is a group of experienced users involved in numerous personal attacks demands some human investigation of their behaviour.
Similarly for a person offended, if there is a genuinely innocent interpretation to something they found offensive and that is explained to them (perhaps by third parties), I think they need to be accepting that no offence was intended on that occasion. Obviously we need a bit of give and take. But I think there have to be limits on the repeated behaviour (either in giving the offence or taking the offence).
Kerry
I would be interested to see how much of the offence and how many of the attacks are in Wikipedias known and usually obvious stress areas.
Wikipedia tries to neutrally cover every topic that would be considered controversial in real life, and it also brings together people from diverse parts of the globe who may not previously have encountered people of each other's views. It also has whole areas of contention itself, in particular the deletion process.
Many organisations that aim for a civil discourse discourage or ban discussion of contentious topics such as politics and religion. If anything we do the reverse. I'm not suggesting that we amend that, but it would be good to know whether the tactic of avoiding contentious topics is an effective way of avoiding toxic behaviours.
There's also the issue of collateral damage - snarkiness between editors might be based on previous encounters on a more contentious topic, or even on perceptions of one editor based on their interactions with others who they have clashed with in a contentious area. If so we'd expect relatively few incidents where regulars are toxic to newbies who haven't stumbled into a heated discussion about abortion, alternative medicine, the Armenian genocide etc.
Truly difficult to comment on this study without being able to see the attacks that they found. But one area I can evidence, Wikipedia is big, especially behind the scenes. Most user pages are very low audience, and an isolated attack on an individual editor in their user space might not be noticed or acted on by anyone. Tools that help manage and find that would be useful. I have in the past trawled user space and deleted swathes of attack pages. Some of it is venting by editors who have just had their article deleted, and it is unlikely that anyone but themselves actually reads what they write on their own talkpages - I very much doubt the tagger who dropped a deletion template on their talkpage will go back and read their response.
Regards
WereSpielChequers
On 24 Jun 2017, at 10:49, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
No right to be offended? To say to someone "you don't have the right to be offended" seems pretty offensive in itself. It seems to imply that their cultural norms are somehow inferior or unacceptable.
With the global reach of Wikipedia, there are obviously many points of view on what is or isn't offensive in what circumstances. Offence may not be intended at first, but, if after a person is told their behaviour is offensive and they persist with that behaviour, I think it is reasonable to assume that they intend to offend. Which is why the data showing there is a group of experienced users involved in numerous personal attacks demands some human investigation of their behaviour.
Similarly for a person offended, if there is a genuinely innocent interpretation to something they found offensive and that is explained to them (perhaps by third parties), I think they need to be accepting that no offence was intended on that occasion. Obviously we need a bit of give and take. But I think there have to be limits on the repeated behaviour (either in giving the offence or taking the offence).
Kerry
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 2:49 AM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
No right to be offended? To say to someone "you don't have the right to be offended" seems pretty offensive in itself. It seems to imply that their cultural norms are somehow inferior or unacceptable.
I'm not sure that I worded my comment clearly as I would like. I would like to reduce the intensity and frequency of toxic behavior, but there's some difficulty in defining what is toxic or unacceptable. If person X says something that person Y finds offensive, that in and of itself doesn't mean that person X was being intentionally malicious. Cultural norms and personal sensitivities vary widely, and there is a danger that attempts to reduce conflict will be done in such a way that freedom of expression is suppressed. As an example, there are statements in British English that I am told are highly offensive, but to me as an American seem mild when I hear them through an American cultural lens. Having an AI, or humans, attempt to police the degree to which a statement is offensive seems like a minefield. Perhaps a better way to approach the situation is to try to a look at intent, which I think is similar to your next point:
With the global reach of Wikipedia, there are obviously many points of view on what is or isn't offensive in what circumstances. Offence may not be intended at first, but, if after a person is told their behaviour is offensive and they persist with that behaviour, I think it is reasonable to assume that they intend to offend. Which is why the data showing there is a group of experienced users involved in numerous personal attacks demands some human investigation of their behaviour.
I think that looking at intent, rather than solely at the content of what was said, sounds like a good idea. However, I'm not sure that I'd always agree that if person X is told that statement A is offensive to person Y that person X should necessarily stop, because what person X is saying may be seem reasonable to person X (for example "It's OK to eat meat") but highly offensive to person Y. I think maybe a more nuanced approach would be to look at what person X's intent is in saying "It's OK to eat meat": is the person expressing or arguing for their views in good faith, or are they acting in bad faith and intentionally trying to provoke person Y? Fortunately, in my experience, the cases where people are being malicious are usually clearer, such that admins and others are not usually called on to evaluate whether a statement was OK. "Calling names" in any language seems to not go over very well, and I think that most of us who have a tool to create blocks would be willing to use that tool if a conversation degenerated to that point. Unfortunately, like you, my perception in the past was that there were some experienced users on English Wikipedia (and perhaps other languages as well) where needlessly provocative behavior was tolerated; I would like to think that the standards for civility are being raised.
I'm aware of WMF's research into the frequency of personal attacks; I wonder whether there are charts of how the frequency is changing over time.
Similarly for a person offended, if there is a genuinely innocent interpretation to something they found offensive and that is explained to them (perhaps by third parties), I think they need to be accepting that no offence was intended on that occasion. Obviously we need a bit of give and take. But I think there have to be limits on the repeated behaviour (either in giving the offence or taking the offence).
In general, I agree.
There are some actions for which I could support "one strike and you're out"; I once kicked someone out of an IRC channel for uncivil behavior with little (perhaps no) warning because the situation seemed so clear to me, and no one complained about my decision. I think that in many cases that it's clear whether someone is making a personal attack, but some cases are not so clear, and I want to be careful about the degree to which WMF encourages administrators to rely on an AI to make decisions. Even if an AI is trained extensively in with native language speakers, there can be significant differences in how a statement is interpreted.
Pine
Kerry
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org