Research:Mapping Non-Emergency Help Pathways
This project mapped community-created and maintained help pathways on four wikis (Vietnamese, Turkish, Portuguese, Japanese) as well as global help pathways, in order to inform the development of the non-emergency flow for the Incident Reporting System.
Methods
[edit]This research project was conducted by examining existing on-wiki documentation. This research project did not involve human subjects.
We began by identifying different on-wiki reporting venues and policies, typically beginning at the sidebar links to Help and Community pages. We created an assessment framework to provide a standardized way to assess these reporting venues and policies, so that we could compare them against each other and see where the most common overlaps were. This assessment framework looked at:
- What policy violations each reporting venue or guideline addressed
- What types of incidents it covered
- How structured reports could be (freeform text, template, prefilled text, etc.)
- Who would be notified if reports were created, modified, or closed
- Whether or not reports received status updates, and whether or not those updates were public or private
- The visibility of any reports made
- Whether or not the guideline or reporting venue would take reporters off-wiki
- How far down the screen, in pixels, was the first element that would allow a user to submit a new report
- Whether or not the policy page linked to the reporting page, and vice versa
- Number of clicks required to get to the reporting page from a given article page, talk page, or user page
- Number of wikilinks and redirects for the reporting venue
- What user group(s) were responsible for acting on reports filed in that venue
We additionally created flowcharts describing the ideal course of action through global support systems. These covered help workflows that are generally handled by global sysops or stewards.
Results
[edit]Key takeaways on the four studied Wikipedias (Portuguese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Turkish) include:
- Conflict resolution pages are often not well maintained and prone to incomplete localization. Conflict resolution guideline/help/policy pages on the four studied Wikipedias closely mimicked each other in structure, and we theorize that they share a common source in an older version of English Wikipedia's Dispute Resolution page. Additionally, Vietnamese Wikipedia's Conflict resolution page links to the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee; Japanese Wikipedia's Conflict resolution page has a section on arbitration, but it simply notes that it has not had an arbitration committee since 2016 and again discusses the status of English Wikipedia's ArbCom.
- Pages for assistance deal with a broad range of issues, most commonly vandalism, spam and other content issues. This means it may be hard for a newcomer to realize they have arrived at the appropriate reporting venue for interpersonal conflict, as there are few examples of how to report interpersonal conflict as compared to content issues.
- The default assumption is that conflicts should be resolved, where possible, on the talk page by the people directly involved in the dispute. Policy pages are generally written with the assumption that the reader bears responsibility for de-escalation, as opposed to (for example) a reader seeking help to de-escalate a situation. Readers are encouraged to leave heated arguments in many of these conflict resolution guidelines. While this is suitable for low-level disputes, it may not align with best practices for more serious incidents of harassment or bullying on-wiki.
- Smaller wikis have more generalized request venues, more frequently merge policy pages with reporting venues, are less likely to use bespoke templates or page preloads, and tend to have their "make a report" button further up the page. This aligns with our assumption that larger wikis, with more volunteer editors, tend to create more structure around incident reporting and more formalized procedures around the same.
- Maintenance and content requests tend to be specific or specialized; dispute resolution requests are less clear-cut. Request pages are generally organized by desired outcome: for instance, a page to request moves, a page to request page protection, etc. This streamlines things for maintainers and people who are expected to carry out these requests. However, this model doesn't fit as nicely for conflict resolution as the desired outcome can change over time.