Wikipedia talk:Community health initiative on English Wikipedia/Research about Administrators' Noticeboard Incidents

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Discussion about survey results

What this discussion is about

In 2017, Wikimedia Foundation Support and Safety team (SuSa) and the Anti-Harassment Tools team surveyed English-language Wikipedia contributors about their perception of Administrators' Noticeboard/Incidents (AN/I), a noticeboard that is a key part of the conflict resolution process on the English Wikipedia. This research was prepared as part of a larger project to give Wikimedia communities more data when making decisions about their policies, and the processes used to enforce them. Support and Safety and the Anti-Harassment Tools team are committed to providing resources for community-supported change, be that technical development, further research, or coordination support. This discussion will help us to understand other potential topics for research related to conflict resolution as well possibly inform community decision making.

Discussion about Quantitative data analysis

To supplement the AN/I Survey, the Foundation's Support and Safety team and Anti-Harassment Tools teams looked at several ways to gain insights on the AN/I process through an Quantitative data analysis of its archives. Gleaning useful data from the AN/I archives is a difficult task. Reports are not structured, and there are a wide variety of templates, formats, and practices used by participants. We are aware that this is new area of study, and have been refining the queries used to get this data. However, we recognize that this is just a start to understanding AN/I from a quantitative perspective, and welcome suggestions on both how to improve the current approach, and how to use new queries to reveal more insights.

General discussion

I have only a handful of edits to ANI, never initiating a report and never as the target of a report. I have certainly run into conflicts before, and there are usually ways to defuse conflicts or deal with problem individuals without escalating to ANI. I would not consider myself very experienced or knowledgeable on ANI, other than peripheral knowledge from quite a few discussions about ANI that occur elsewhere.

I hope that the team is taking into account that the response sample is going to contain a significant number of people who are the cause of various conflicts (either as the subject of a report or as an at-fault complainant). They are likely to give critical responses about appropriate-outcomes that went against them. Even where someone at ANI isn't at fault (either as the subject of a report or as a complainant), the case may have escalated to ANI because they may deal poorly with conflicts. They too probably tend to be unhappy. Improvements are certainly welcome, but the difficulties are primarily of a human nature. Anyone involved in an ANI process, civil litigation process, or criminal trial process, is likely to describe it as an unpleasant and ugly process no matter how it turns out.

One theme of the research results is that ANI works well for 'clear cut cases'. If one person is engaging in harassment, sockpuppetry, or other disruptive behavior, no problem. We bock, ban or topic-ban the problem individual. The hard cases are often where two-or-more people both deal with a conflict poorly. Those cases often get deeply entangled with content arguments. If two parties are making multiple aggressive reverts on opposite sides of an issue (i.e. politics or abortion or gun control), deciding which party was making "inappropriate reverts" can be deeply colored by which set of reverts someone agrees with. Both sides were revert warring, no matter which side you agree with. Both sides may need to be sanctioned (boomerang), no matter which side you agree with. That content issue cannot/should-not be decided on ANI. One of the two parties should have halted the revert warring and started a content-RFC instead. Once there is an RFC result, the losing side usually backs off. If the losing side does continue to battle an established consensus, that's a "clear cut case".

Now that Ive thought about it and wrote this, perhaps I see a possible valuable ANI reform. When an issue becomes badly entangled in a content dispute, maybe ANI needs to explicitly declare a need for a content-RFC. Then the ANI discussion can focus on whether there is a sufficiently clear decision to sanction one-or-more involved parties irrespective of a future result on the content issue. Again I'll note that I've spent little time on ANI itself. Maybe this is a poorly informed idea, or maybe my ability to avoid ANI is the valuable insight. Alsee (talk) 19:47, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

Hello Alsee, I appreciate you taking the time to read the findings and leave a comment. We (Community health initiative team members) are interested in knowing opinions about the survey from all user, those active on AN/I and other who rarely or never post there. I agree that content disputes are commonly at the center of discussions on AN/I. AN/I's relationship to other noticeboards (including content related noticeboards) is something that I'm documenting now and will publish in a few weeks. This new information might help clarify if there ways to improve case outcomes at AN/I by changing the process for settling content disputes by introducing a process like you mention. Look for more reports over the next few weeks as more analysis is finished. I hope this data driven approach will be helpful for the community when considering changes. SPoore (WMF), Community Advocate, Community health initiative (talk) 18:26, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

Article and discussion in The Signpost

Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2018-04-26/In_focus

Blue Rasberry (talk) 23:30, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for posting the link. I'm following along and will make a post there in reply. SPoore (WMF), Community Advocate, Community health initiative (talk) 19:11, 1 May 2018 (UTC)