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Community health initiative/User interaction investigation tools

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Investigating disruptive user interactions

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Disruptive users sometimes evade corrective measures by administrators or more experienced users because it is difficult to recognize how their contributions are violating Wikipedia policy and norms.

  • Their disruptive edits occur in talk pages interactions with other users; such disruption may not directly harm an article, but it often prevents other users from reaching consensus on how to improve it.
  • Their contributions occur over a long period of time, in which case no single user interaction may be clearly disruptive but the overall pattern is so.
  • Their edits may be distributed over a wide range of pages and makes less likely for a single edit to show a violation of policy.

User interaction analysis tools

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A group of tools exist to evaluate the contributions of two or more editors and can help to investigate disruptive user interactions. Each tool uses a different method to compare the contributions of the users.

Interaction Timeline

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Screenshot of the Interaction Timeline

Interaction Timeline shows a chronological history of two users' across pages where they both made edits.

Enter two usernames and a wiki, and the Interaction Timeline will display a chronologic list of edits made by the two specified users on pages where both users have edited. The Timeline works best when using a narrow date range.

The edits are displayed on a vertical timeline, with the edits made by one user on the left and the edits made by the other on the right. Clicking on the edit card opens a diff in the Timeline for quick review. The diff can be opened in a new tab by middle click. All dates and times on the Timeline are displayed in UTC. When activity shifts from one user to the other, the Timeline calculates and displays the amount of time between interactions in small red text.

Editor Interaction Analyzer

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Editor Interaction Analyzer compares the edits of two to three specified editors to see which articles overlap, sorted by minimum time between edits by both users. Only works on the English Wikipedia.

Intersect Contribs

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Intersect Contribs, compares the edits of two to eight editors at any WMF wiki to see which articles overlap.

Intertwined contributions

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The Intertwined contributions merges the contributions of two editors at any WMF wiki into a single list.

Use cases

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Scenario 1: Accusations of wikihounding

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User:Derby pie and User:Sweets lover have made accusations about each other each in noticeboard report.

  • edit warring across articles
  • AN/I report with accusations of wikihounding.
  • ban discussion.

Link to Interaction Timeline query User:Derby pie and User:Sweets lover on test wiki

Scenario 2: Edit warring with disruptive talk page interactions

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User Tinker toys and User Baby rattle are edit warring across several different articles and engaging in disruptive interactions on talk pages.

Link to Interaction Timeline query User:Tinker toys and Baby rattle

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