While I have no objection to the administrator training, I don't think most of the problem lies with administrators. There's a lot of biting of the good-faith newbies done by "ordinary" editors (although I have seen some admins do it too). And, while I agree that there are many good folk out there on en.WP, unfortunately the newbie tends to meet the other folk first or perhaps it's that 1 bad experience has more impact than one good experience.
Similarly while Arbcom's willingness to desysop folks is good, I doubt a newbie knows how or where to complain in the first instance. Also there's a high level of defensive reaction if they do. Some of my trainees have contacted me about being reverted for clearly good-faith edits on the most spurious of reasons. When I have restored their edit with a hopefully helpful explanation, I often get reverted too. If a newbie takes any action themselves, it is likely to be an undo and that road leads to 3RR block or at least a 3RR warning. The other action they take is to respond on their User Talk page (when there is a message there to respond to). However, such replies are usually ignored, whether the other user isn't watching for a reply or whether they just don't like their authority to be challenged, I don't know. But it rarely leads to a satisfactory resolution. One of the problems we have with Wikipedia is that most of us tend to see it edit-by-edit (whether we are talking about a new edit or a revert of an edit), we don't ever see a "big picture" of a user's behaviour without a lot of tedious investigation (working through their recent contributions one by one). So, it's easy to think "I am not 100% sure that the edit/revert I saw was OK but I really don't have time to see if this is one-off or a consistent problem". Maybe we need a way to privately "express doubt" about an edit (in the way you can report a Facebook post). Then if someone starts getting too many "doubtful edits" per unit time (or whatever), it triggers an admin (or someone) to take a closer look at what that user is up to. I think if we had a lightweight way to express doubt about any edit, then we could use machine learning to detect patterns that suggest specific types of undesirable user behaviours that can really only be seen as a "big picture". Given this is the research mailing list, I guess we should we talking about ways research can help with this problem. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Pine W Sent: Wednesday, 26 September 2018 1:07 PM To: Wiki Research-l <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>; Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight <rosiestep.w...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Results from 2018 global Wikimedia survey are published! I'm appreciative that we're having this conversation - not in the sense that I'm happy with the status quo, but I'm glad that some of us are continuing to work on our persistent difficulties with contributor retention, civility, and diversity. I've spent several hours on ENWP recently, and I've been surprised by the willingness of people to revert good-faith edits, sometimes with blunt commentary or with no explanation. I can understand how a newbie who experienced even one of these incidents would find it to be unpleasant, intimidating, or discouraging. Based on these experiences, I've decided that I should coach newbies to avoid taking reversions personally if their original contributions were in good faith. I agree with Jonathan Morgan that WP:NOTSOCIAL can be overused. Kerry, I appreciate your suggestions about about cultural change. I can think of two ways to influence culture on English Wikipedia in large-scale ways. 1. I think that there should be more and higher-quality training and continuing education for administrators in topics like policies, conflict resolution, communications skills, legal issues, and setting good examples. I think that these trainings would be one way through which cultural change could gradually happen over time. For what it's worth, I think that there are many excellent administrators who do a lot of good work (which can be tedious and/or stressful) with little appreciation. Also, my impression is that ENWP Arbcom has become more willing over the years to remove admin privileges from admins who misuse their tools. I recall having a discussion awhile back with Rosie on the topic of training for administrators, and I'm adding her to this email chain as an invitation for her to participate in this discussion. I think that offering training to administrators could be helpful in facilitating changes to ENWP culture. 2. I think that I can encourage civil participation in ENWP in the context of my training project <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/Pine/Continuation_of_educational_video_and_website_project> that I'm hoping that WMF will continue to fund. ENWP is a complex and sometimes emotionally difficult environment, and I'm trying to set a tone in the online training materials that is encouraging. I hope to teach newbies about the goals of Wikipedia as well as policies, how to use tools, and Wikipedia culture. I am hopeful that the online training materials will improve the confidence of new contributors, improve the retention of new contributors, and help new editors to increase the quality and quantity of their contributions. I hope that early portions of the project will be well received and that, over time and if the project is successful as it incrementally increases in scale and reach, that it will influence the overall culture of ENWP to be more civil. Regards, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
