The Lucifer Effect

Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus in psychology at Stanford University, published a book last year called The Lucifer Effect. It's good reading for anyone who wants to understand Wikipedia dynamics.

Some readers will probably derive an analogy about the Stanford prison experiment. I'm more interested in Zimbardo's observations about the fundamental attribution error and how they relate to Wikipedia site organization. Faulty policies and processes contribute to onsite problems. Then particular disputes where those flaws play out get labeled as drama. Some Wikipedians get sucked into the minutiae of personalities and diffs while others regard it as an ethical responsibility to avoid all drama.

You may have seen the mantra. Get back to writing an encyclopedia.

Well yeah, that has its place. But when the policies themselves are flawed that doesn't do anything to fix them. We've had Wikipedians toddle along generating encyclopedic content until they encountered something or other that absolutely needed a policy level solution, and then thwack a bad policy hit the well-meaning editor upside the head like a week-old trout. From that point onward (wikisoap being in short supply) the whole situation stinks.

This ain't good. Too many of the people who have the capacity to fix policy and procedural level issues either get sucked into dramas and squeezed dry once they're there, or avoid the process side altogether.

I've got a bunch of ideas in this regard, but in order to keep things focused I'll work on one at a time.

Today's solution: a path back to good standing for sitebanned editors.

One real shortcoming in Wikipedia policies is what to do after somebody gets sitebanned. We handle returns in a piecemeal fashion, without clear guidance or guidelines. I've got a proposal for something to help straighten that out. And after floating it with a few people on various sides of the fence, it looks like a win-win situation.

1. One of the reasons English Wikipedia is such a wild and wooly place is that there isn't any clear route back to good standing after a community siteban. So some of the people who've been banned linger around the margins of the project.

2. Other Wikimedia projects complain about winding up with English Wikipedia's problem children. Actually Commons gets such people from all over, but demographics being what they are, English Wikipedia predominates.

3. Occasionally, editors who've been sitebanned from English Wikipedia can demonstrate positive reasons to have their siteban lifted if they do good work on a sister project.

Let's set up a formal cross-project mentorship system where editors in good standing on multiple projects can take an individual under their wing, as it were. Rather than wandering over to Commons with no help at all (or Simple English or Wikibooks or Wikinews, etc.), an editor who's on the outs with one project can go and seek a contact point for some other WMF project where he or she wants to contribute. The mentor would help introduce that person to the second site's policies and standards of conduct, and help guide contributions. If there are problems the mentor would be the primary point of contact (and hopefully would manage the matter himself or herself--at least providing background and helping to address the matter if the community needs to become involved). If all goes well, then after a sufficient time the mentor would open a new discussion at the original project demonstrating a good history at the second place as a reason to ease sanctions. So a siteban might become a topic ban with mentorship--something like that.

The advantage to the smaller projects of a formal program is that this would give a location where cross-project mentorships are known, and provide a reputable contact point in case concerns arise. The advantage to the larger projects is that this would offer a clear and productive route back to good standing for people who are potentially okay but just haven't worked out so far.

Obviously a few caveats are necessary: the kind of banned editor who makes violent threats is somebody I just wouldn't want anywhere. This solution is for square-pegs-in-round-holes situations and acceptance would be at the discretion of the potential mentor. Opening an unban discussion would also be at the mentor's discretion, normally in the neighborhood of 3 months if there's been good progress.

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Image credit:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Lucifer_Liege_Luc_Viatour.jpg

Nichomachean Wikipedia

Aristotle defined virtue as an equilibrium point between two vices. So courage exists somewhere between cowardice and foolhardiness, and if Aristotle were a Wikipedian, good administrative intervention would be a balancing act between interfering too much and acting too little.

Use the administrative tools too little and trolls run wild, driving away useful editors. Use them too much and you'll block the wrong people. (As everybody knows, I've been guilty of the latter. I'm sorry for it; live and learn).

So Hisperian's post reminded me of Aristotle's golden mean:

Half the posts to the admin noticeboards are exhortations to be less timid in dealing with these situations, and the other half are exhortations to be more careful. I'm not going to learn anything from this unless you spell it out for me. Hesperian 01:43, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Shoemaker's Holiday had opened a thread where he estimated a 100 hour waste of his own time interacting with one disruptive editor, and noted that he could have written 6 to 9 good articles with that lost time if administrators had addressed the problem in a timely manner.

Raymond Arritt agreed and estimated the overall cost to volunteer time:

Yes, this specific case has finally arrived at arbcom after hundreds (thousands?) of volunteer hours were wasted. But the matter could have been resolved with less cost to the community. Let's learn from this mistake. Raymond Arritt (talk) 01:11, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

In these instances the community is all too apt to commit the fundamental attribution error and interpret the problem in terms of individual personalities involved in a case. This is what we malign as drama, and the solution to drama is not ignoring it but analyzing for signs of systemic flaws that can be corrected at the policy and process level.

For example, this chain of events:

• An established but difficult Wikipeidan gradually alienates most of the community.
• Dispute resolution, friendly warnings, and perhaps an arbitration case ask the editor to reform.
• Despite these efforts and the passionate defense of a few supporters, the problem behavior gradually worsens.
• The editor becomes essentially unstoppable: someone from the small core of supporters always steps forward to undo a block.
• The problem festers and more people notice; frustration builds on both sides.
• Finally the community holds a discussion to enact a ban.
• One admin blocks.
• Another unblocks.
• The business degenerates into a game of chicken with one side citing banning policy and the other citing wheel warring policy.

If you think I'm talking about some case you know, I am. And a lot of others too. This plays out a couple of times every month because the banning policy and wheel warring policy intersect in ways that aren't well defined, and because nobody has found an effective solution for this type of editor problem.

We ought to be studying these recurring problems on a process level and analyzing them with quantifiable data. One great weakness of the present situation is the lack of organized data collection. We list and categorize bans, not the sanctions discussions themselves, and there's no effort to organize the discussions that didn't end with sanctions. The community has been short-sighted in that regard: preoccupied with keeping track of existing remedies without thought to long-term followup to see which solutions work better than others. The community sanctions noticeboard was a step in that direction because at least it kept a centralized archive, but then the community decentralized those discussions again and then disbanded the board itself.

This leaves us ill-equipped to study cases like the one Shoemaker's Holiday complained about that resulted in hundreds of hours of wasted time. And except in the narrowest of senses, we don't satisfy either Hisperian's or Raymond Arritt's call for data to learn from the experience. I'd like to conference with a statistician and a coder and parse a few hundred of these cases.

We've been relying on rumor and anecdote and drama. We could step up from that and do research.