Incident Reporting System
The Wikimedia Foundation wants to improve how people who experience harassment and other forms of abuse report such harmful incidents to provide safer and healthier environments for communities.
The Trust and Safety Product team has been tasked with building the Incident Reporting System (IRS) (formerly Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS)). We aim to make it easy for users to report harmful incidents safely and privately.
Background of the project
Reporting and processing of harmful incidents has been a topic of interest for Wikimedia communities for many years. With the new Universal Code of Conduct being set up, it is crucial to also have a discussion about user reporting systems.
The way incidents, misconduct and policy violations are dealt with across Wikimedia spaces and projects has developed organically and varies across different communities.
Each Wikimedia project or community has their way of managing things. Reporting and processing of incidents happen in a variety of ways:
- via wiki talk pages
- via noticeboards
- via email
- via private discussions on off-wiki communication channels (Discord, IRC)
For many users, it is unclear what to do if an incident happens: where to go, who to talk to, how to report, what information to include in the report, how the report is processed, what happens afterwards etc.
Users must know how to report an issue and where to do so. There is also very little information on what will happen once a report is made and what expectations the user should have.
Some users do not feel safe reporting incidents when they occur because of the complexity of the reporting process and because of privacy concerns.
There is currently no standardised way for users to file reports privately.
Focus of the project
The high-level goal of this project therefore is to make it easier to address harassment and harmful incidents and ensure those reports reach the appropriate entity that needs to process them.
We want to ensure the privacy and safety of those reporting. We also want to ensure that reports have the right information and are routed to the appropriate entity that needs to process them, while not putting extra pressure on the ones who do the processing.
The Trust and Safety Product Team is looking at this incident reporting system as part of the larger Wikimedia community incident management ecosystem. We are studying how the individual systems work and how everything can connect together.
Updates
Incident reporting update: November 7, 2024
We’re continuing the work on the Incident Reporting System.
The next step is to develop an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that we can test in production on a few pilot wikis. Following our Minimum Testing Product (MTP) user testing some months ago, we have made improvements to the design:
- Emergency incidents - Incidents relating to immediate threats of physical harm. These incidents need to be handled by the Wikimedia Foundation emergency team.
- Non-emergency incidents - Incidents that are not immediate threats of harm, for example bullying, sexual harassment and other unacceptable user behavior. These incidents are handled through local community processes.
The Emergency user flow will direct users to file a report that will be sent to the Wikimedia Foundation emergency team.
The Non-emergency user flow will direct users to reach out to their local community for support, as outlined in community policies. This will be done through a “Get support” page that will contain links and information specific to each community. The intention is to have configuration options on this page so that each local community can add the relevant links as necessary.
We have some screenshots to demonstrate how this might work. For the next deployment the main focus is to test the emergency user flow in production.
Designs
Emergency flow:
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IRS emergency report button -
Design showing how users can describe an emergency incident when reporting -
Design showing how users can add additional information when reporting immediate threat of harm -
Design showing confirmation users see after reporting immediate threat of harm
Non-emergency user flow:
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IRS non-emergency report button -
Design showing how users can describe an incident when reporting -
Design showing the types of unacceptable behaviour users will see when reporting -
Design showing how users can get support for unacceptable behaviour on the wikis -
Design showing how users can get support for unacceptable behaviour on the wikis
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the current designs! Please comment on the discussion page.
Test the Incident Reporting System in Beta – November 2023
We invite editors to test the initial version for the Incident Reporting System. It makes it possible file a report from the talk page where an incident occurs. This version is for learning about filing reports to a private email address (e.g., emergency
wikimedia.org or an admin group). It doesn't cover all scenarios, like reporting to a public noticeboard. We need your opinions to see if this approach is effective.
To test:
1. Visit any talk namespace page on Wikipedia in Beta that contains discussions. We have sample talk pages available at User talk:Testing and Talk:African Wild Dog you can use and log in.
2. Next, click on the overflow button (vertical ellipsis) near the Reply link of any comment to open the overflow menu and click Report (see slide 1). You can also use the Report link in the Tools menu (see slide 2).
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Slide 1 -
Slide 2
3. Proceed to file a report, fill the form and submit. An email will be sent to the Trust and Safety Product team, who will be the only ones to see your report. Please note this is a test and so do not use it to report real incidents.
4. As you test, ponder these questions:
- What do you think about this reporting process? Especially what you like/don’t like about it?
- If you are familiar with extensions, how would you feel about having this on your wiki as an extension?
- Which issues have we missed at this initial reporting stage?
5. Following your test, please leave your feedback on the talk page.
If you can't find the overflow menu or Report links, or the form fails to submit, please ensure that:
- You have logged in
- Your Beta account email address is confirmed
- Your account has been created for over 3 hours and you have at least 1 edit.
- You have enabled DiscussionTools because the MTP is integrated with DiscussionTools
If DiscussionTools doesn’t load, a report can be filed from the Tools menu. If you can't file a second report, please note that there is a limit of 1 report per day for non-confirmed users and 5 reports per day for autoconfirmed users. These requirements before testing help to reduce the possibility of malicious users abusing the system. Please see the research section of the page for more.
Process
As this is a complex project it needs to be split into multiple iterations and project phases. For each of these phases we will hold one or several cycles of discussions in order to ensure that we are on the right track and that we incorporate community feedback early, before jumping into large chunks of work.
Phase 1
Preliminary research: collect feedback, reading through existing documentation.
Conduct interviews in order to better understand the problem space and identify critical questions we need to answer.
Define and discuss possible product direction and scope of project. Identify possible pilot wikis.
At the end of this phase we should have a solid understanding of what we are trying to do.
Phase 2
Create prototypes to illustrate the ideas that came up in Phase 1.
Create a list of possible options for more in-depth consultation and review.
Phase 3
Identify and prioritize the best possible ideas.
Transition to software development and break down work in Phabricator tickets.
Continue cycle for next iterations
Research
July 2024: Incident Reporting System user testing summary
In March 2024, the Trust & Safety Product team conducted user testing of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of the Incident Reporting System to learn if users know where to go to report an emergency incident, and if the user flow makes sense and feels intuitive.
We learned the following:
- During user testing, all participants found the entry point to report an incident and the current user flow is well understood.
- There was some confusion over two of the reporting options: “someone might cause self-harm” and “public harm threatening message”.
- Two participants also made assumptions about the system being automated. One participant was concerned about automation and wanted a human response, whereas the other participant felt assured by the idea it would check if the abuser had any past history of threats and offences, and delete the offensive comment accordingly. All participants expected a timely response (an average of 2-3 days) after submitting a report.
September 2023: Sharing incident reporting research findings
The Incident Reporting System project has completed research about harassment on selected pilot wikis.
The research, which started in early 2023, studied the Indonesian and Korean Wikipedias to understand harassment, how harassment is reported and how responders to reports go about their work.
The findings of the studies have been published.
In summary, we received valuable insights on the improvements needed for both onwiki and offwiki incident reporting. We also learned more about the communities' needs, which can be used as valuable input for the Incident Reporting tool.
We are keen to share these findings with you; the report has more comprehensive information.
Please leave any feedback and questions on the talkpage.
The following document is a completed review of research from 2015–2022 the Wikimedia Foundation has done on online harassment on Wikimedia projects. In this review we’ve identified major themes, insights, and areas of concern and provided direct links to the literature.
The Trust and Safety Tools team has been studying previous research and community consultations to inform our work. We revisited the Community health initiative User reporting system proposal and the User reporting system consultation of 2019. We have also been trying to map out some of the conflict resolution flows across wikis to understand how communities are currently managing conflicts. Below is a map of the Italian Wiki conflict resolution flow. It has notes on opportunities for automation.
Frequently Asked Questions
We have renamed the Private Incident Reporting System as Incident Reporting System. The word "Private" has been removed. In the context of harassment and the UCoC the word “Private” refers to respecting community members’ privacy and ensuring their safety. It does not mean that all phases of reporting will be confidential. We have received feedback that this term is therefore confusing and can be difficult to translate in other languages, hence, the change.
Q: Is there data available about how many incidents are reported per year?
A: Right now there is not a lot of clear data we can use. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, issues are reported in various ways and those differ from community to community. Capturing that data completely and cleanly is highly complicated and would be very time consuming. Second, the interpretation of issues also differs. Some things that are interpreted as harassment are just wiki business (e.g. deleting a promotional article). Review of harassment may also need cultural or community context. We cannot automate and visualize data or count it objectively. The incident reporting system is an opportunity to solve some of these data needs.
Q: How is harassment being defined?
A: Please see the definitions in the Universal Code of Conduct.
Q: How many staff and volunteers will be needed to support the IRS?
A: Currently the magnitude of the problem is not known. So the amount of people needed to support this is not known. Experimenting with the minimum viable product will provide some insight into the number of people needed to support the IRS.
Q: What is the purpose of the MVP (minimal viable product)?
A: The MVP is an experiment and opportunity to learn. This first experimental work will answer the questions that we have right now. Then results will guide the future plans.
Q: What questions are you trying to answer with the minimum viable product?
A: Here are the questions we need to answer:
- What kind of reports will people file?
- How many people will file reports?
- How many people would we need in order to process them?
- How big is this problem?
- Can we get a clearer picture of the magnitude of harassment issues? Can we get some data around the number of reports? Is harassment underreported or overreported?
- Are people currently not reporting harassment because it doesn’t happen or because they don’t know how?
- Will this be a lot to handle with our current setup, or not?
- How many are valid complaints compared to people who don't understand the wiki process? Can we distinguish/filter valid complaints, and filter invalid reports to save volunteer or staff time?
- Will we receive lots of reports filed by people who are upset that their edits were reverted or their page was deleted? What will we do with them?
Q: How does the Wikimedia movement compare to how other big platforms like Facebook/Reddit handle harassment?
A: While we do not have any identical online affinity groups, the Wikimedia movement is most often connected with Facebook and Reddit in regard to how we handle harassment. What is important to consider is nobody has resolved harassment. Other platforms struggle with content moderation, and often they have paid staff who try to deal with it. Two huge differences between us and Reddit and Facebook are the globally collaborative nature of our projects and how communities work to resolve harassment at the community-level.
Q: Is WMF trying to change existing community processes?
A: Our plan for the IRS is not to change any community process. The goal is to connect to existing processes. The ultimate goals are to:
- Make it easier for people who experience harassment to get help.
- Eliminate situations in which people do not report because they don’t know how to report harassment.
- Ensure harassment reports reach the right entities that handle them per local community processes.
- Ensure responders receive good reports and redirect unfounded complaints and issues to be handled elsewhere.