Initiatives
Online Social Behavior
Examining the prosocial and disruptive dimensions of online culture - on and off-wiki
Overview
This initiative focuses on understanding a wide range of social behaviors on the Wikimedia projects and on other digital platforms, with the goal of identifying and amplifying patterns of healthy engagement and of tracking and mitigating socially destructive norms, practices and policies. The studies here include original ethnographic work and quantitative studies as well as literature reviews of prior industry and academic research.
Studies
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Incident reporting system
Research exploring current harassment reporting workflows and harassment target/responder pain points on Korean and Indonesian wikis. -
IP Editing on Japanese Wikipedia
An inquiry into why some editors don’t log in and how they might be encouraged to through a comparative study of Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, and Japanese Wikipedias. -
The Future of IP-based editing
A project that investigates the difficulties with moderating anonymous edits and how best to mitigate those issues. -
HabLatAm
A cross country study on the internet skills, habits, and behaviors of youth in Latin America.
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Digital Spaces // Topical Neighborhoods
This project combined conversations with WMF employees and global volunteers with a literature review to support the internal conversation around the Digital Spaces // Topical Neighborhoods proposal. -
Wikimail Harassment
An analysis of community initiatives regarding Wikimail abuse over the past five years and general perspectives on harassment. -
Targets of Harassment
In order to support the Universal Code of Conduct’s phase 2 drafting committee, the Wikimedia Foundation has conducted a research project focused on experiences of harassment on Wikimedia projects. -
Taxonomy of Harassment
A taxonomy of negative social interactions on Wiki projects and a methodology to prioritize those in need of intervention. -
CheckUser Improvements
Past research and Steward feedback surfaced many pain points in the CheckUser extension, the tool used by moderators to reverse vandalism of articles. These are multiple iterative rounds of usability tests of the enhanced tool. -
Patrolling Anonymous Edits
A study of how patrollers handle edits by logged-out users, and what pieces of information from IP addresses are necessary for their work in maintaining the overall health and quality of Wikimedia projects. -
Content Moderation Explained
An overview of how a global community of volunteer moderators determine which contributions to Wikipedia are accepted and rejected. -
Interpersonal Communication on Wikipedia
A review of the available academic literature on interpersonal communication and coordination within the Wikipedia community, in particular the role of talk pages in creating and maintaining Wikipedia’s content. -
Community Health Survey
An inquiry into the unique challenges faced by volunteer administrators in conflict resolution situations and what types of resources would be most beneficial to this work. -
IP Masking Impact Report
An examination of how edits by users who have not logged-in effect administrator workflows. -
Reporting System Rubric for the Community Health Initiative
A review of best practices in reporting systems for disputes and abuse across different platforms. -
Harassment on Arabic Wikipedia
This study aimed to establish a baseline understanding of the frequency of harassment, trolling, and threatening communicative practices on Arabic Wikipedia, to explore the effects of these practices on editing and community health, and to guide future investigation and strategic decisions for the Anti-Harassment Tools team. -
Steward Spambot Workflow
An investigation into one of the most common tasks performed by stewards, global locks of suspected spambots that are active across multiple wikis.