Re: [Wiki-research-l] Results from 2018 global Wikimedia survey are published!
Again, to bring this back to some research question, why do female newbie editors get reverted more? Possible research question. Where (topic space) are the reverts happening and what types of reason given? Is there any sign that male/female are affected differently? To what extent does level of editing experience affect this? One research side-question. Should we just be comparing male vs female or should we look at the unknowns? I know some people think that we have more women than we think but that they choose not to self-identify as such on Wikipedia. If we compared various statistics for no-gender editors with that of self-identifying male and female editors, does it give us any insight on what the likely gender composition of the no-gender group are. For example, if among self-identifying editors we known there is a 90-10 gender split, then if the no-gendered are also 90-10 split, then statistics about the non-gendered editors should show corresponding averages (male stat * 90 + female stat * 10). If they do not, then can we use a range to statistics to back calculate the likely gender split of the non-gendered group? Has anyone ever done this? Kerry -Original Message- From: Kerry Raymond [mailto:kerry.raym...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, 28 September 2018 10:05 AM To: 'Research into Wikimedia content and communities' Subject: RE: [Wiki-research-l] Results from 2018 global Wikimedia survey are published! Pine This paper has some good studies about gender and new editors and reverting https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shilad_Sen/publication/221367798_WPClubhouse_An_exploration_of_Wikipedia's_gender_imbalance/links/54bacca00cf253b50e2d0652/WPClubhouse-An-exploration-of-Wikipedias-gender-imbalance.pdf It shows that both male and female newbies are equally likely to drop out after being reverted for good-faith edits, BUT that female newbies are more likely to be reverted than male newbies, leading to a greater proportion of them dropping out. It also shows that male and female editors tend to be attracted to different types of topic. "There is a greater concentration of females in the People and Arts areas, while males focus more on Geography and Science." (see Table 1 in the paper). And their engagement with History seems lower. So why are newbie women reverted more? This paper does not investigate that. But I think it has to be either than they are reverted because they are women (i.e. conscious discrimination) or because women's edits are less acceptable in some way. I have *hypothesised* that newbie women may get reverted more because women show higher interest in People but not in History suggesting women are more likely to be editing articles about living people than about dead people. BLP policy is stricter on verification compared with dead people topics, or with topics in male-attracting topics like Geography and Science, so women are perhaps doing more BLP edits as newbies and more likely to be reverted because they fail to provide a citation or their citation comes from a source which may not be considered reliable (e.g. celebrity magazine). If this could be established as at least a part of the problem, maybe there might be targeted solutions to address the problem. E.g. maybe newbies should not be allowed to edit articles which are BLP or have a high revert history (suggesting it's dangerous territory for some reason, e.g. real-world controversy, "ownership") and are deflected to the Talk page to suggest edits (as with a protected article or semi-protected article). Currently we auto-confirm user accounts at 10 edits or 4 days (from memory). But these thresholds are based on the likelihood of vandalism (early good-faith behaviour is a good predictor of future good faith behaviour). But, having trained people, I know that the auto-confirmation threshold should not be used as "beyond newbie" indicator; they are newbies for many more edits. How many edits do you need to stop being a newbie? I don't know, but as I know myself with over 100k edits, if I edit an article outside my normal interests, I am far more likely to be reverted than in my regular topic area, so we can all be newbies in unfamiliar topic spaces. There is a lot of convention, pre-existing consensus and other "norms" in topic spaces that the "newbie to this topic" doesn't know. All editors in this situation may back off, but the established editor has a comfort zone (normal topic space) to return to, the total newbie does not. Kerry ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Results from 2018 global Wikimedia survey are published!
Pine This paper has some good studies about gender and new editors and reverting https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shilad_Sen/publication/221367798_WPClubhouse_An_exploration_of_Wikipedia's_gender_imbalance/links/54bacca00cf253b50e2d0652/WPClubhouse-An-exploration-of-Wikipedias-gender-imbalance.pdf It shows that both male and female newbies are equally likely to drop out after being reverted for good-faith edits, BUT that female newbies are more likely to be reverted than male newbies, leading to a greater proportion of them dropping out. It also shows that male and female editors tend to be attracted to different types of topic. "There is a greater concentration of females in the People and Arts areas, while males focus more on Geography and Science." (see Table 1 in the paper). And their engagement with History seems lower. So why are newbie women reverted more? This paper does not investigate that. But I think it has to be either than they are reverted because they are women (i.e. conscious discrimination) or because women's edits are less acceptable in some way. I have *hypothesised* that newbie women may get reverted more because women show higher interest in People but not in History suggesting women are more likely to be editing articles about living people than about dead people. BLP policy is stricter on verification compared with dead people topics, or with topics in male-attracting topics like Geography and Science, so women are perhaps doing more BLP edits as newbies and more likely to be reverted because they fail to provide a citation or their citation comes from a source which may not be considered reliable (e.g. celebrity magazine). If this could be established as at least a part of the problem, maybe there might be targeted solutions to address the problem. E.g. maybe newbies should not be allowed to edit articles which are BLP or have a high revert history (suggesting it's dangerous territory for some reason, e.g. real-world controversy, "ownership") and are deflected to the Talk page to suggest edits (as with a protected article or semi-protected article). Currently we auto-confirm user accounts at 10 edits or 4 days (from memory). But these thresholds are based on the likelihood of vandalism (early good-faith behaviour is a good predictor of future good faith behaviour). But, having trained people, I know that the auto-confirmation threshold should not be used as "beyond newbie" indicator; they are newbies for many more edits. How many edits do you need to stop being a newbie? I don't know, but as I know myself with over 100k edits, if I edit an article outside my normal interests, I am far more likely to be reverted than in my regular topic area, so we can all be newbies in unfamiliar topic spaces. There is a lot of convention, pre-existing consensus and other "norms" in topic spaces that the "newbie to this topic" doesn't know. All editors in this situation may back off, but the established editor has a comfort zone (normal topic space) to return to, the total newbie does not. Kerry ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Results from 2018 global Wikimedia survey are published!
Hi Kerry, Your comments are well taken (at least by me)! I like the idea of letting users upvote or downvote edits, and having a time-weighted average of those scores be public or at least visible to administrators. Users who accumulate a significant number of downvotes would be good for admins to review, especially if those downvotes come from multiple users in a short period of time. Upvotes could be closely linked to the "Thanks" feature, except that users could be offered the option to thank anonymously or thank non-anonymously. I suggest that you propose your suggestions in IdeaLab, and I may make some comments on the IdeaLab post. The Anti-Harrassment Tools Team might be interested in that idea for their own reasons. Regarding reversions, I think that I heard Jonathan Morgan once say that reverting good-faith new editors makes them significantly more likely to stop editing. Perhaps he could share some research or thoughts on that point, and any other thoughts about the problem with excessively aggressive reversions and/or comments on reversions. Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 4:47 AM Kerry Raymond wrote: > 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 ; Rosie > Stephenson-Goodknight > 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
