Wikipedia:Community health initiative on English Wikipedia

Community health initiative
Helping the Wikimedia volunteer community to reduce the level of harassment and disruptive behavior on our projects.

The Community health initiative

Over the past several years the Wikimedia Foundation has researched and learned how harassment affects participation on Wikipedia and have received numerous requests from the English Wikipedia community for better tools and preparation to deal with negative behavior. In January 2017 we received funding via a Newmark Foundation grant to address this problem over the next two years.

We're calling these efforts the 'Community health initiative' and our work contains four equally important parts:

1. Researching the causes of harassment and workflows of those who report and resolve harassment
2. Building anti-harassment tools for the MediaWiki platform
3. Fostering an environment for the Wikipedia community to evaluate and grow their policies on harassment
4. Identifying and training Wikipedia contributors to properly mitigate reports of harassment

Research

The Research team's Anti-Harassment Research project will aim to understand and model the characteristics of harassment in Wikimedia projects in order to inform the development of anti-harassment tools and recommendations for community-specific behavioral policies and enforcement processes.

Anti-harassment tools

We want to build software that empowers contributors and administrators to make timely, informed decisions when harassment occurs. Four focus areas have been identified where new tools could be beneficial in addressing and responding to harassment:

1. Detection: We want to make it easier and more efficient for editors to identify and flag harassing behavior. We are currently questioning how harassment can be prevented before it begins, and how minor incidents be resolved before they snowball into larger uncivil problems.
2. Reporting: According to Detox research, harassment is underreported on English Wikipedia. No victim of harassment should abandon editing because they feel powerless to report abuse. We want to provide victims improved ways to report instances that are more respectful of their privacy, less chaotic and less stressful than the current workflow. Currently the burden of proof is on the victim to prove their own innocence and the harasser's fault, while we believe the MediaWiki software should perform the heavy lifting.
3. Evaluating: We want to build tools to help volunteers better understand and evaluate harassment cases, and inform the best way to respond. Current processes are time consuming and a high level of proficiency is necessary for an user to be able to analyze and evaluate the true sequence of events of a conduct dispute. We want to reduce the workload on people evaluating cases.
4. Blocking: We want to improve existing tools and create new tools, if appropriate, to remove troublesome actors from a wiki, or certain areas within a wiki, and to make it more difficult for someone who's blocked from the site to return.

Policy growth

We will work with the community to research and analyze how behavioral issues on English Wikipedia are a) covered in policy, and b) enforced in the community, particularly noticeboards where problems are discussed and actioned. We will provide research on alternate forms of addressing specific issues, researching effectiveness, and identifying different approaches that have found success on other Wikimedia projects. We believe this will help the Wikipedia community make informed changes to existing policies and guidelines.

Training

To help functionary and community governance groups better coordinate their work, we will facilitate in the development of a training platform and will guide the establishment of a modules based around the critical area of addressing harassment.

After consultation with functionaries (stewards, global admins, Arbitration Committees, admins), community members, and outside experts an initial group of modules about Online harassment and Keeping events safe was created and is now available for training. We will further collaborate with the community to development of future training modules.

More background about the Community health initiative

For more background about the Community health initiative see Community health initiative

The team

The Anti-Harassment Tools team includes Wikimedia Foundation employees, partnering with members of the Wikipedia community who want to participate. The software we build will be useless if it doesn't address real-world workflow problems for the existing Wikipedia community, so we will heavily rely on your input to make our efforts a success.

How to get involved

We're just getting started, and we look forward to your participation every step along the way. As we've prepared for the grant and and on-boarded the new team members we've collated some notes on meta, most of which we've moved here to Wikipedia:Community health initiative. These plans and notes will almost certainly change base on the Wikipedia community's input.

Want updates or learn more about how to participate? Sign up for the Community health initiative mailing list or the Community health initiative Newsletter or follow our progress on the Community health initiative on English Wikipedia work space.

We'd love to hear your initial thoughts on Wikipedia talk:Community health initiative on English Wikipedia. There's a lot to discuss and we hope to hear from you. Thank you! —