Community health initiative/Administrators' Noticeboards

This page documents a feature the Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team may build. Development of this feature has not been decided or prioritized.

🗣   We invite you to join the discussion!

As we dig into Administrator's Noticeboards research, we’ll have plenty of assumptions and questions. We’ll list them here.

Assumptions to (in)validate

• No users think AN are effective.
• AN are not welcoming for newer users and therefore they do not report harassment.
• Because no user group is responsible for resolving cases on AN, difficult or unclear cases are ignored.
• The onus is on the reporter to prove they've been harassed and to provide a compelling reason for mediators to respond. (SP: We need to broaden the issue beyond harassment to capture more types of reports that under our purview.)

Questions to answer

• What happens when someone posts on AN, it is not resolved, then they post it again? (SP: This is too vague--need a definition of not resolved.)
• What are all the bottlenecks?
  • Posting an initial post?
  • Participating in a conversation?
  • Staying informed of an active discussion?
  • Resolving a case?
• What are the different attitudes about AN?
• Why do AN exist? What are the community’s goals for this noticeboard?
• How often (percentage, number of occurrences) are cases referred to another more appropriate location/page to resolve the issue?
• How often (percentage, number of occurrences) are cases are resolved? With a breakdown per resolution type.
• How often (percentage, number of occurrences) are cases ignored?
• How often (percentage, number of occurrences) are cases closed as NOTHERE or irrelevant?
• Who resolves cases? Admins, functionaries, AN regulars, or other passers-by?
• What happens when a case from AN is ignored or auto-archived, then the user escalated to ArbCom?
• Understanding why stuff comes to AN — is it coming to AN because the other processes on other boards? or was it escalated elsewhere?
• What is the relationship between AN and other noticeboards/venues? How are cases redirected, escalated, deescalated?
• From a user cognitive level, how do different types of users decide when to post on AN vs other venues? Do we need a central reporting location?
• What doesn't get reported on AN? What topics are avoided? (either from experience [users knowing AN is sometimes ineffective] or inexperience [users not knowing AN exists.]) What is missing that seems like it would go here?
• What do users think of the design and templates of AN compared to other noticeboards? The teahouse?