User:Isaacl/Community/Fostering collaborative behaviour
| This is a draft project page, to illustrate a possible starting structure for further discussion. At present, it is unknown if anyone will make use of it. Thus for now, no discussion threads have been started for brainstorming or further refinement of ideas, to avoid forking conversation. |
English Wikipedia's community comprises editors from around the world, offering diverse viewpoints, experiences, and knowledge in service of creating a general encyclopedia with broad coverage. Its success relies on editors working collaboratively to add new content and edit each others work to evolve and improve its articles. To that end, it is essential that the community fosters collaborative behaviour amongst its members. This page seeks to brainstorm and refine ideas to change processes so they encourage desired behaviour and dissuade poor behaviour.
Focus areas
- Defining community norms of behaviour
- Process and procedure changes to reward desired behaviour
Defining community norms of behaviour
Phase 1: definition
There are many essays on Wikipedia about desired and poor behaviour (see Wikipedia:Essays in a nutshell/Civility and Template:Civility for links). Although they are useful as link destinations, expanding on a concept being referred to in conversation, newcomers coming across these essays may miss the forest for the trees: the essays provide a mass of specific details without grounding them in a framework of guiding behavioural principles. Describing a baseline set of principles for expected behaviour is useful, particularly with an editing population that spans many different cultures.
Process and procedure changes to reward desired behaviour
Phase 1: ideas for changes
There are many cases where poor behaviour works as a strategy to win disputes. It can discourage participation from opponents, leaving the uncollaborative editor to have a disproportionate amount of influence on the outcome. English Wikipedia's processes and procedures should be designed to reward desired behaviour, and discourage poor behaviour, so that selective pressure will increase the amount of desired behaviour in the community.
Content dispute resolution
At the core of most conflict in English Wikipedia is resolving disputes over content. This can fall into several categories, including:
- accuracy of content in an article
- amount of weight appropriate for a specific set of information within an article
- whether a topic meets Wikipedia's standards for inclusion, which encompass notability and verifiability guidance, as well as encyclopedic standards
Wikipedia's content dispute resolution mechanisms are based around mass discussions with everyone interested, with the outcome roughly determined, as a first approximation, by consensus. Thus they are vulnerable to being stalemated as consensus does not scale up to a large group. Additionally, by Wikipedia tradition, decisions can be revisited as often as interested parties are willing to discuss a matter further. As a result, disputes can drag out over years. This provides an incentive for poor behaviour, in order to drive away opponents from discussion.
To encourage collaborative behaviour, a dispute resolution mechanism with the following characteristics is desirable:
- bounded in time: discussions should be resolved within a relatively short period of time
- definitive: decisions should be binding and only revisited if new information changes a key aspect of the dispute. (A decision review process should nonetheless be available, to allow for bad decisions to be reversed.)
- equitable: no single voice should dominate in a way that prevents meaningful discussion of all significant viewpoints