Wikipedia:Dispute Resolution Improvement Project
This is an outline of the work I will be doing for my fellowship project. I will post updates on-wiki from time to time, and well as posting a final report at the end of July (check back for updates here), and hope to have the completed survey results over the coming weeks. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me on my enwiki talk page or at szhang
wikimedia.org.
As some of you may have heard, I've been named a Wikimedia Fellow, and I will be working on building understanding and awareness of dispute resolution processes on the English Wikipedia. I will aim to identify areas of dispute resolution that appear to be effective and areas that need improvement. I will also develop a "how-to" guide for new volunteers, to help increase the amount of users active in resolving disputes. I'll be doing this in a few steps:
- Compile and present the results of the results of the dispute resolution survey. In the survey, where I have taken a sample of the community based on their activity in dispute resolution. From this sample, various questions were asked to "paint a picture" of the average DR editor. From the survey, I hope to hilight areas of improvement, and act as a catalyst for these improvements.
- Gather statistics of key dispute resolution areas to examine their effectiveness. How many disputes has a forum handled in three months? How many users came to assist, and how many were assisted? How long did it take for someone to get assistance? How many disputes were successfully resolved, and how many were unresolved or went on to other dispute resolution forums? Did the amount of time it took for a dispute to be attended to by a DR volunteer have any impact on the outcome of the dispute? Does swift assistance lead to a quicker resolution? Are any of the dispute resolution forums so ineffective that they are doing more harm than good? These are the things I will be investigating in this stage.
- Present these findings at Wikimania, and at the unconference. I will be presenting some of my findings in the fellows presentation at Wikimania, and hopefully there will be community interest in discussing this more at length during the unconference day.
- Develop a pilot dispute resolution workshop. I will be developing both practical (in-person) and on-wiki versions of a "how-to" guide to dispute resolution. In the workshop, I will provide an outline of the major different categories of disputes (including sourcing disputes, policy issues, or disputes that arise due to lack of structure in discussions - more are detailed on my fellowship page). I would then take participants (and readers) through a case study of each type of dispute, an example dispute (but made more generic) detailing a summary of the dispute, what caused the dispute and techniques that could be used to resolve that particular dispute. This would give participants a few basic "tools" to dispute resolution, so they don't feel like they're jumping in the deep end, and are more willing to help out at dispute resolution forums, thereby increasing the amount of dispute resolution volunteers we have.