I think making available and funding conflict resolution training is a good idea (provided it's available online of course, it would not be reasonable to expect a worldwide group of people to physically attend it). Making it mandatory via a grant is a nonstarter, though, adminship standards are a community decision. It could be proposed as a requirement through the normal means, of course.
Todd
On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 1:29 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Responding to a few different points:
(1) I don't envision this training as being sufficient to make anyone an expert in harassment or incivility response; the goal isn't to train all administrators to handle large-scale harassment. Rather, the goal is to train the administrators who take this course (further discussions below on how wide the recruiting for that will be) to a baseline level of familiarity with how to handle harassment and incivility if and when they encounter it. I think of it this way: in the physical world, only a few police officers will specialize in investigating harassment cases, but all police officers ideally should have a basic familiarity with how to address incivility and harassment situations. Anecdotally, I rarely hear people complain about learning more or getting reinforcement about "people skills", communication, leadership skills, and self-awareness. On Wikimedia sites, administrators are often in the potision of being "first responders" to difficult situations, and it seems to me that training for how to handle those situations would be good. Of course, some wikis may have developed their own training programs, and this training would be in addition rather than a replacement.
(2) Let me reiterate that while I support offering this training, I am not supportive of making this training mandatory until it has been widely tested. Even if there is a desire to make the training mandatory, I think it would be preferable that the decision be made by individual wiki communities who can adapt the training to their individual circumstances. I feel that a global mandate for administrators to take this training would be 2 years from now at the earliest, after administrators and communities who voluntarily adopt the training have had considerable time to test it, adapt it, and make suggestions about how to optimize it. With widespread feedback from multiple communities, we might eventually be able to offer a set of training modules that could be adaptable globally and that WMF could mandate with reasonable certainty that the benefits are worth the costs.
(3) The training is not a panacea. It won't stop block evasion. It won't make administrators be superhumans who are always right. It won't stop the problem that there are a few administrators who cause enough problems that they shouldn't be administrators. But I feel that overall, if done carefully and well, training administrators could move us in a good direction.
Pine
On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 12:39 PM, Adrian Raddatz ajraddatz@gmail.com wrote:
Many volunteer organisations have mandatory training for volunteers, so that in itself is not a bad idea. But what about the cross-project differences that Risker brings up?
And more importantly, how could such training help when faced with the
type
of harassment that is referenced 99% of the time here - block or lock evasion after the system has already worked? Training would be a single sentence: "rinse and repeat the block/hide process until they decide to stop."
Adrian Raddatz
On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 1:18 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Hmmm. I find this recommendation concerning. There *might* be some validity on large projects with hundreds of administrators, but there
are a
lot of projects with only a few admins, and they were "selected"
because
they were willing to do the grunt work of deletions, protections, and blocks. Nobody was selecting them to handle large-scale harassment. Indeed, I cannot think of a single administrator even on a large
project
who was selected because of their ability or their interest in handling harassment incidents. There's pretty good evidence that it is not only
not
a criterion seriously considered by communities, but that absent the interest or willingness to carry out other tasks or demonstration of aptitude for other areas of administrator work, an admin candidate
would
not be selected by most communities, even large ones where harassment
is
a
much more visible concern.
There is also no basis for putting forward that mandatory training for
any
administrator function would be useful on a global scale. How does one
set
up a mandatory training program for carrying out page protection, given that every large project has a different policy? What happens if an administrator doesn't "pass" a mandatory program? Are they desysopped,
over
the objections of their community?
I'll point out in passing that there is not even consideration of a
formal
global checkuser training program - again, the local policies vary
widely,
and the types of issues addressed by checkusers on different projects
is
very different.
Risker/Anne
On 7 June 2016 at 15:01, Sydney Poore sydney.poore@gmail.com wrote:
My suggestion is to come up with a general type training that can
work
for
all administrators and functionaries since all have the freedom and permission to do all types of work on WMF projects. And that training should be mandatory.
Then people who are focusing on a particular type of administrative
or
functionaries work can take more advanced courses that could be
mandatory
for doing some types of work.
Sydney
Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wiki Project Med Foundation WikiWomen's User Group Facebook https://www.facebook.com/sydney.e.poore
On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 2:10 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Sydney,
Thanks for that link. I think that for now I would suggest avoiding
making
the training mandatory because we won't know how successful it is
until
after we've used it for awhile. After the training has been tested
and
refined based on feedback, and if the consensus is that the
training
is
helpful, then at that point we could consider making this a
required
annual
training.
I could foresee is that, on wikis that have arbitration committees
or
other systematic ways of dealing with administrators who mess up,
the
ArbComs and/or the community could say that those administrators
who
have
demonstrated weakness in areas that are addressed by the training
will
be
required to take or re-take the training as a condition of keeping
their
admin permissions.
My hope is that the training will be of such good quality, and so interesting and useful to administrators, that many administrators
will
*want* to take the training or at least be curious enough to try
it.
Big
carrot, small stick. We can escalate from there if the training
develops
a
track record of success.
I would think of success as being measured in two ways:
administrators'
feedback about the training shows a consensus that they found it
helpful,
and communities report higher levels of satisfaction with their administrators as shown in the difference between surveys that are
done
before on multiple wikis (1) before the training starts and (2)
after 6
or
12 months of the training being rolled out.
Comments welcome, including suggestions about how to measure the
success
of the training.
Pine
On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 7:58 PM, Sydney Poore <
sydney.poore@gmail.com
wrote:
Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight suggested Annual Training during the Harassment Consultation, 2015.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Harassment_consultation_2015/Ideas/Annual_tr...
If you've not seen it, it is worth your time to read the talk page discussion.
Sydney
Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wiki Project Med Foundation WikiWomen's User Group Facebook https://www.facebook.com/sydney.e.poore
On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 9:17 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com
wrote:
> I have created > >
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Training_for_administrators
> and would welcome feedback there. > > On the subject of block evasion, I have some ideas but would
defer
to
our
> experienced CheckUsers. > > Pine > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe:
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