Re: [Wiki-research-l] Power law and contributions:

2020-01-22 Thread Pine W
Hi Jan,

I think that we may have given you a lot more than you had in mind when you
asked your question. I'm aware that you were thinking of "power law" in a
way that can be very different than "power dynamics", but I have the latter
more on my mind, partially because of recent discussions on Wikimedia-l
related to strategy.

I remain interested in knowing what the goal of your research is.

I'll be busy with non-Wikimedia activities for the next few days, but I'll
try to get back to the Wikiverse by this Saturday. If you don't hear back
from me after about two weeks then please feel free to email me off list if
you'd like me to follow up. In the meantime, Kerry and other capable people
may be able to help with any further questions regarding your research
interests.

Best wishes,

Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Power law and contributions:

2020-01-22 Thread Kerry Raymond
As someone who would qualify as a "very active editor"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits

I can honestly say that power and activity are definitely not the same thing on 
Wikipedia.  

Do I have power? I don't think so. I am not an administrator or other 
functionary that has power over anyone else.

As a person who is principally a content writer, I get my time wasted every day 
by vandals, by content cited to reliable sources being removed by someone who 
simply doesn't agree with it but provides no sources to the contrary buts 
simply writes "Fact!" as an edit summary, that I have to explain to yet another 
American that we spell things differently in Australia and that is why there is 
a {{Use Australian English}} template on the top of that article, that "City of 
Brisbane" cannot be changed as "Brisbane City" as they are NOT the same thing 
(one is a local government area, the other a suburb, one about 100 times the 
area of the other) even if they do happen to "look like the same thing" or 
"think it reads better than way". I wish I did have the power to just "whack a 
mole" and NOT have to have these *same* conversations over and over and over 
again with me being WP:CIVIL and them often being not civil (some even track me 
down in real life and send me abusive e-mail off-wiki, including sexual remarks 
because I'm a self-identified female contributor). But in Wikipedia, that's OK 
because ArbCom decided that calling a female contributor "a cunt" isn't that 
bad. It's Wikipedia not Wokepedia! If I share the contents of that email 
on-wiki, I'm the one in trouble (their right to privacy), so I just delete 
them. If I spot a user name whitewashing a politican's article that just 
happens to be very similar indeed to the real life name of their media advisor, 
I cannot say that on-wiki, because that's WP:OUTING.

My "community health" is pretty damn poor precisely because we give the same 
power to every first time anonymous editor as we do to very active editors and 
we give it effectively to the most persistent and the most unpleasant. BRD is 
all very well if all involved are seriously trying to get the content right and 
well-cited. It fails completely when the other party is not engaging with it, 
being unpleasant, or just returning time and time again to re-do a problematic 
edit based on "I know this". We have problems with acts of vandalism that get 
repeated time and time again by a series of different IP addresses. This is 
impossible to block, we have no solution for it. If you want to see the scale 
of it, there's series of IP addresses that collectively exhibit similar 
patterns of thousands of problematic edits in my topic space going back to at 
least 2013 and were still active in 2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:IamNotU/History_cleanup

Do we have the power to "whack a mole" the first time we see any of these 
behaviour YET AGAIN? No, we don't. We have a lot of tedious process of having 
to find the right admin noticeboard, submit a request with the right templates, 
provide endless diffs, and then have nothing happen. We make it easy for people 
to create problems, but extremely difficult to get them stopped and incredibly 
tedious to clean up after them (you often can't "undo" because of intervening 
edits etc and these folk can do 100s of edits in a day). Here's one:

https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec/en.wikipedia.org/Shelati

An editor who did a mass change over every suburb of Sydney over a couple days. 
I suspected them immediately as being a sockpuppet (behaviour was 
characteristic of  "sockpuppet") but unless you can identify the sockmaster, 
you can't report it. So, instead the changes being made were discussed on the 
appropriate topic noticeboards, disagreed with, but then the editor was blocked 
by someone who figured out who the sockmaster was (a sockmaster dating back to 
2009). The account was blocked, but the problematic edits have never been 
cleaned up.

Most active contributors who retire do so because of the behaviour of other 
"contributors" wears them down.

In summary, power in Wikipedia is not where you think it is on the curve. It is 
the power we give to the many people to do the same vandalism, the same "meant 
well but I'm stupid" edits, the same "I don't know any policies and they don't 
apply to me anyway" edits, and the sockpuppets and conflict-of-interest editors 
 who carefully hide themselves among them.

I wish I had just a little power to exercise in topic spaces where I am 
knowledgeable and have a long history of positive contribution. I don't want it 
for baseball players or Icelandic musicians or Pokemon characters, just for 
Queensland history and geography. That's all I ask.

Kerry

-Original Message-
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On 
Behalf Of Jan Dittrich
Sent: Wednesday, 22 January 2020 8:31 PM
To: Wiki Research-l 
Subject: [Wiki-research-

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Power law and contributions:

2020-01-22 Thread Pine W
Hi Jan,

There are many issues involved in power dynamics. I would prefer to look at
this issue from a wide angle perspective.

How do you define "community health"?

Are the people who have power competent and focused on public service, are
they incompetent and selfish, or some other combination of those factors?

There are also powerful non-community forces such as paid editors who have
conflicts of interest, nations which make legal and political decisions
that affect the community, trolls, political activists, WMF, and more.
These can have significant effects for better and for worse. I suggest that
you take these into your account in analyzing power dynamics.

I also suggest taking into account that even if someone is high on the
power curve, that doesn't mean that they are necessarily having a good time
at others' expense. I think that some people such as English Wikipedia
functionaries are sometimes under a lot of stress, and are subject to
criticism and scrutiny from many directions. Also, there may be good
reasons for not distributing power more widely in some cases, such as with
the Checkuser tool.

I worry that someday the community will be overwhelmed by organizations
and/or nations which want to alter Wikimedia content for selfish reasons
and who can afford to hire or manipulate large numbers of people into doing
what they want.

What is the goal of your research?

Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )


On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 10:31 AM Jan Dittrich 
wrote:

> Hello Researchers,
>
> Contribution patterns in online communities follow a power distribution
> which is known as the 1% rule [1], as Wikipedia told me.
>
> However, the steepness of the distribution can be more or less strong: 50%
> of your edits could be contributed by 2% or by 0.002%, the latter showing a
> stronger imbalance.
>
> I wonder if there are any estimates/rules-of-thumb of what imbalance is
> problematic when seen from the perspective of community health.
>
> I also wonder if there is research on how technology contributes to such
> imbalances and how it might be mitigated – e.g training, user-friendliness,
> documentation…
> (based on my assumption that a steep curve is less desirable, since the
> power is more  concentrated, the system more fragile and the redistribution
> of power more constrained)
>
> Jan
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
>
> --
> Jan Dittrich
> UX Design/ Research
>
> Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
> Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
> https://wikimedia.de
>
> Unsere Vision ist eine Welt, in der alle Menschen am Wissen der Menschheit
> teilhaben, es nutzen und mehren können. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
> https://spenden.wikimedia.de
>
> Wikimedia Deutschland — Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
> Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
> der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
> Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
> ___
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> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] New Office hours for WMF/Research&Analytics starting in January 2020

2020-01-22 Thread Leila Zia
This is happening now and for the next 54-min. :) Instructions for how
to attend at 
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours#How_to_attend
(#wikimedia-research channel in IRC freenode).

L

On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 8:02 AM Leila Zia  wrote:
>
> A friendly reminder that the first joint Analytics and Research office
> hours will take place on 2020-01-22 at 17.00-18.00 (UTC). Bring your
> Wikimedia related research and data questions to us during these
> office hours. More at
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours
>
> --
> Leila Zia
> Head of Research
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 3:35 AM Martin Gerlach  wrote:
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > We, the Research team at Wikimedia Foundation, have received some requests
> > over the past months for making ourselves more available to answer some of
> > the research questions that you as Wikimedia volunteers, affiliates' staff,
> > and researchers face in your projects and initiatives. Starting January
> > 2020, we will experiment with monthly office hours organized jointly by our
> > team and the Analytics team where you can join us and direct your questions
> > to us. We will revisit this experiment in June 2020 to assess whether to
> > continue it or not.
> >
> > The scope
> >
> > We encourage you to attend the office hour if you have research related
> > questions. These can be questions about our teams, our projects, or more
> > importantly questions about your projects or ideas that we can support you
> > with during the office hours. You can also ask us questions about how to
> > use a specific dataset available to you, to answer a question you have, or
> > some other question. Note that the purpose of the office hours is to answer
> > your questions during the dedicated time of the office hour. Questions that
> > may require many hours of back-and-forth between our team and you are not
> > suited for this forum. For these bigger questions, however, we are happy to
> > brainstorm with you in the office hour and point you to some good
> > directions to explore further on your own (and maybe come back in the next
> > office hour and ask more questions).
> >
> > Time and Location
> >
> > We meet on the 4th Wednesday of every month 17.00-18.00 (UTC) in
> > #wikimedia-research IRC channel on freenode [1].
> >
> > The first meeting will be on January 22.
> >
> > Up-to-date information on mediawiki [2]
> >
> > Archiving
> >
> > If you miss the office hour, you can read the logs of it at [3].
> >
> > The future announcements about these office hours will only go to the
> > following lists so please make sure you're subscribed to them if you like
> > to receive a ping:
> >
> > * wiki-research-l mailing list [4]
> >
> > * analytics mailing list [5]
> >
> > * wikidata mailing list [6]
> >
> > * the Research category in Space [7]
> >
> > on behalf of Research and Analytics,
> >
> > Martin
> >
> >
> >
> > [1] irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-research
> >
> > [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours
> >
> > [3] https://wm-bot.wmflabs.org/logs/%23wikimedia-research/
> >
> > [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> >
> > [5] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
> >
> > [6] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
> >
> > [7] https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/tags/research
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Martin Gerlach
> > Research Scientist
> > Wikimedia Foundation
> > ___
> > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

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[Wiki-research-l] Power law and contributions:

2020-01-22 Thread Jan Dittrich
Hello Researchers,

Contribution patterns in online communities follow a power distribution
which is known as the 1% rule [1], as Wikipedia told me.

However, the steepness of the distribution can be more or less strong: 50%
of your edits could be contributed by 2% or by 0.002%, the latter showing a
stronger imbalance.

I wonder if there are any estimates/rules-of-thumb of what imbalance is
problematic when seen from the perspective of community health.

I also wonder if there is research on how technology contributes to such
imbalances and how it might be mitigated – e.g training, user-friendliness,
documentation…
(based on my assumption that a steep curve is less desirable, since the
power is more  concentrated, the system more fragile and the redistribution
of power more constrained)

Jan

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

-- 
Jan Dittrich
UX Design/ Research

Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
https://wikimedia.de

Unsere Vision ist eine Welt, in der alle Menschen am Wissen der Menschheit
teilhaben, es nutzen und mehren können. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
https://spenden.wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland — Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
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