thank you, Kerry, any other opinions on techno-(non)-determinism and on how mediawiki software has "an influence on" Wikipedia community climate?
What if alot of bullying is undertaken by users who prefer to act undercover with multiple accounts but a mediawiki registration page encourages you to simply create a new account? anyway, two comments > Why are thanks so low on Wikipedia compared with Facebook LIKEs? mainstream research, I guess, would point at gender ratios (counting just two genders, however) yet, thanking someone in a chatty environment may be a different matter to thanking someone in a "serious" knowledge-oriented project (whose social network aspects are often renounced) > It may even be that letting user's see their own "sentiment" score may cause self-correcting behaviour. my guess is that self-correcting one's behaviour is precisely not what users who tend to bully others come to Wikipedia for ;-) what makes people stay might rather be ample proofs of how much fun it is not only for oneself but also for others to bully or "correct" others it might this proof of how much fun prolonged disputes can be that makes people stay who happily keep gaming in this environment... so I guess we should look more into how the culture of "correction" (mainly directed towards others...) is given too large a playing field among community members of the English version of Wikipedia (am I right in guessing that the majority of users still has a background in protestant/evangelical training and maybe world view?) also, looking into dispute culture vs. discussion culture -- relative to respective cultural habits and perceptions of how these work and if they are distinguishable at all -- might yield interesting outcomes, has anyone studied this for the community climate on English language Wikipedia? best, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:"Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raym...@gmail.com> To:"'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'" <wiki-research- l...@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Thu, 19 Feb 2015 09:04:02 +1000 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > On the question of whether "mediawiki enables > users to behave like bullies" ... > > Like many technologies, we can use them for good > or bad. A car can carry a sick person to a > hospital in time to save their life. A car can run > down and kill a person. Etc. But we do know that > we can design cars to make them safer, both for > their occupants (roll cages, seat belts, etc) and > for other road users (e.g. banning the use of bull > bars), but if I really want to kill myself or > others, I can still do so with a car, I just have > to try a bit harder. > > In the same vein, MediaWiki can be used in > different ways. A User Talk page can be used to > leave a Barnstar or call the person a "cunt" (to > pick a recent topical example). Thanks to the user > contribution page, I can easily find and revert > every change you make. Now, maybe they were all > bad edits > (e.g. unsourced allegations about a living person) > that were justified. Or maybe I am just harassing > you or taking retribution for something you did or > said to me or about me. What if I could not see > your user contribution page? Would that make it > harder for me to harass you? > > At the moment, a couple of clicks reverts an edit. > What if we substituted a long form, where you had > to click a box to select a primary policy under > which you were reverting the edit, and then select > a drop-down for a specific aspect of that policy, > and then fill in a text box with 100 words > explaining your concerns? I think it's fair to say > that there would be less reverting, but whether > that is for better or worse is hard to say until > you try it. > > What if we got rid of User Talk pages and only had > article Talk pages? Would our interactions change? > > Interestingly, it's as easy to thank someone for > an edit as to revert an edit (not using any tools), > yet the number of thanks are incredibly low. How > low ... take a look at the stats for January: > > https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? title=User:F%C3%A6/sandbox&oldid=1 > 49050523 > > (and woo hoo I made the top-10 on something in > Wikipedia!) > > Why are thanks so low on Wikipedia compared with > Facebook LIKEs? Why don't we let the Wikipedia > readers click on a Thank-you button if they like > an article, which delivers some kind of warm fuzzy > message to its top contributors or recent > contributors or all contributors or adds to their > "good karma" score or something? I note that > Facebook took away their old "thumbs down" button > (was that an example of redesigning an interface > to make it harder to be nasty to someone?) > > But it would seem that, with A/B testing, we can > measure how changing the interface of MediaWiki > changes behaviour quantitatively (it may be harder > to assess how it changes it qualitatively). > > But maybe we can even do some kind of qualitative > assessment of the change. Aaron and others > (apologies if I am not giving credit where it is > due) have developed a tool to make reasonable > machine assessments of article quality. Could we > develop some kind of metric of "sentiment" in user > interaction and see if that is changing under A/B > testing? It may even be that letting user's see > their own "sentiment" score may cause self- > correcting behaviour. Maybe we don't realise we > are becoming older and grumpier. > > Kerry, older and grumpier (some times) > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki- > research-l ------- End of Original Message ------- _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
