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Indic Wikimedia Portal/Community Health Initiative

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Indic Wikimedia Portal

The Wikimedia Foundation's Community health initiative plans to design and build a new user reporting system to make it easier for people experiencing harassment and other forms of abuse to provide accurate information to the appropriate channel for action to be taken. The success of this project depends on collecting ideas and feedback from people in a variety of different roles in the Wikimedia movement. To this end, there will be a multi-phased consultation where you can participate in ways that you are most comfortable. Please visit the User reporting system consultation page to learn more about the process, ask questions, or offer feedback. You also can sign up to be a liaison for  community or to translate messages or join a focus group.

Considerations about a User reporting system for harassment

Liaisons for Community

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Goal

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The high level goal of this project is to build a new harassment reporting system that produces higher quality reports that can be successfully processed and does not further alienate victims of harassment.

Expected outcome of the User reporting system consultation 2019

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By the end of this consultation, the Community health initiative will have an overall direction for a single feature or group of features that a software development team will be able to build starting in July 2019. We'll have a rough agreement with content contributors and movement organizers across multiple languages of Wikimedia projects about the direction the project will take.

The result will not be a complete, detailed product specification or the introduction of a fully formed new policy, processes or workflows. Detailed plans will be developed over time with continued consultation with the community of users.

By the last phase of the consultation, we'll be able to answer these questions:

What are the the essential components of a user reporting system? Which of these are missing from current method of handling cases of harassment?
Will we build one feature, or more than one?
Will some aspects of the user reporting that we build be public and other aspects be private?
What are the important open questions that the product team should investigate and test prior to starting development?

Introduction

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The aim of starting this discussion is to understand the need to have discussion around building wiki a safer space, to understand the concerns we usually face, the issues wikimedians encounter and which act as hindrance in their wiki journey and stop them from being active on wiki.

Need

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Many wikimedians have reported instances of harassment and other forms of annoyance caused online or offline (See sample case)

Timeline for Discussion

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Liaisons for Community
Name Community
Sushma Sharma Hindi Wikipedia
आर्या जोशी Marathi Wikipedia
Parvathisri Tamil Wikipedia
Sumita Roy Dutta Bengali Wikipedia
Durga Bhat Bollurodi Tulu wikipedia
Chinmayee Mishra Odia Wikipedia
Suswetha Kolluru Telugu Wikipedia
Manavpreet Kaur Punjabi Wikipedia
Dhanalakshmi K T Kannada and Tulu Wikipedia
Nitesh Gill Punjabi Wikipedia
Navya Muppavarapu Telugu Wikipedia
Rajeeb Dutta Bengali Wikipedia
Content cell Content cell
Saranya C Malayalam Wikipedia
  Timeline for the discussion and design phase of User reporting system
  Phase   Date   Process
Phase 0 - Planning & Research July 2018 - February 2019 Gathering preexisting consultations, doing preliminary research, cross Wikimedia Foundation department coordination.
Phase 1- Community Consultation; Set framework & call to participate February 15 - March 15 Getting the word out, form focus groups, identify volunteer liaisons for wikis and affiliates, offer existing research for review, explain scope of the project and decision making, solicit feedback about the process
Phase 2- Community Consultation; Options April 1 - April 30 2019   Gather and present to the community the existing options, collect new ideas, solicit feedback. Create a list potential options for more in depth legal & technical analysis and focus group review.
Phase 2.5 Analysis and winnowing of options May 1- June 30 Focus group, User interviews, business case, prioritization
Phase 3 - Community Consultation; Summary of options and prioritization July 1 Present a direction forward with the product(s) prioritized for development by Anti-Harassment Tools team and the next steps for other non-technical solutions.
Phase 4 - Transition to software development and reorg community policy or processes   July 2019 - ? Transition to software development on Phabricator and Meta Community health initiative pages project pages. Further, explore the role of volunteers working within the system and how reports can escalate to different levels.

Decisions

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To make a good decision about a new user reporting system, it is essential to listen and learn from the Wikimedians. So your inputs and suggestions are Welcome.

Local wiki self-governance

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The Wikimedia Foundation’s general approach is to respect local self-governance of the volunteer communities it supports where possible. For building a healthy community, the team is interested to learn about existing community practices for handling cases of harassment and other types of abusive user conduct. It is essential for a new user reporting system to integrate into the local wiki methods of self-governance. Local policies remain primary on all Wikimedia projects, as explained in the Terms of Use, and Trust and Safety office actions are complementary to those local policies.

Wikimedia Foundation Trust & Safety

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There are some rare instances when Wikimedia Foundation Trust and Safety will take actions to protect the safety of the community and the public. This happens where actions on local community governance level are either insufficient or not possible. There may be some rare cases where the Wikimedia Foundation must override local policy, such as to protect the safety of the Wikimedia communities or the public. See Trust & Safety Office actions for more details.

Reference Material

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Enwiki Reporting system summary

English Wiki reporting system is available as a summary report, with an accompanying diagram of formal reporting spaces on English Wikipedia.

This project provides a summary of existing reporting systems, both formal and informal, that exist on English Wikipedia. It also defines some key terms for future conversations in this topic, such as involved users, the difference between formal and informal systems, and language for discussing broader concerns of community values and issues of labour. We find that some key issues with the current reporting system include its difficulty of access, eroded trust in current systems, the unstructured nature of noticeboards, and the clash between a desire for transparency and concerns over safety and privacy. We also find that informal systems, relying on existing relationships between editors, serve as an ad hoc private reporting system, as well as a complementary structure to formal systems that can guide reporters through the often-tricky process of going through the official reporting procedures.

 
Enwiki Reporting system workflow

Previous research

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The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team wants to better understand these existing systems to identify any pain points or shortcomings that we can address with improved software. Our research will heavily focus on English Wikipedia as the largest wiki community but we aim to build a tool that can be used by any wiki of any size. Research completed to date includes:

Help us spread the word

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The success of this project depends on collecting ideas and feedback from people with a variety of different roles in the Wikimedia movement.

  • Translate this consultation page.
  • Sign up to volunteer to share information about this consultation on your wiki or to your Wikimedia affiliate organization.


Questions

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We know this might sound new to some members and that is why we have listed the relevant resources here. In case you have any question or doubt, please list them here-

  • Question 1

The hangouts sessions will be planned with the interested wikimedians for explanation and elaborate discussion on the subject.


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