User:ProfGray/WCNA/Dispute resolution

Lecture (LEC) at WCNA on dispute resolution. See: https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2024/Program/Submissions

Title: Turning points in Wikipedia disputes: Research and discussion of resolution efforts

Brief history of WP dispute resolution


 * Scale and types of dispute
 * Policies
 * Structures
 * Initiatives

Academic research on WP disputes


 * Im, Jane, Amy X. Zhang, Christopher J. Schilling, and David Karger. "Deliberation and resolution on wikipedia: A case study of requests for comments." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2, no. CSCW (2018): 1-24. <23>
 * Mayfield, Elijah, and Alan W. Black. "Analyzing wikipedia deletion debates with a group decision-making forecast model." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, no. CSCW (2019): 1-26. <14> Abstract:
 * "In this work we show that machine learning with natural language processing can accurately forecast the outcomes of group decision-making in online discussions. Specifically, we study Articles for Deletion, a Wikipedia forum for determining which content should be included on the site. Applying this model, we replicate several findings from prior work on the factors that predict debate outcomes; we then extend this prior work and present new avenues for study, particularly in the use of policy citation during discussion. Alongside these findings, we introduce a structured corpus and source code for analyzing over 400,000 deletion debates spanning Wikipedia’s history, enabling future large-scale studies of group decision-making discourse."
 * Lerner, Jürgen, and Alessandro Lomi. "The free encyclopedia that anyone can dispute: An analysis of the micro-structural dynamics of positive and negative relations in the production of contentious Wikipedia articles." Social Networks 60 (2020): 11-25. Abstract:
 * We consider two rival hypotheses on the emergence of organization in open production communities. According to the first (“reputation hypothesis”), patterns of agreement and disagreement among participants in open production communities are explained by differences in individual reputation for quality of contribution. The reputation hypothesis predicts that participants will tend to agree with more reputable others and disagree with less reputable others thus contributing to establish a stable open production community. According to the second hypothesis (“balance hypothesis”), patterns of agreement and disagreement are explained by membership in sub- communities of “friends” and “enemies.” The balance hypothesis predicts that participants in open production communities will agree mainly with friends and disagree mainly with enemies, regardless of considerations about reputation for the quality of their contributions. In this paper, we examine which one of these hypotheses is more consistent with patterns of positive and negative interaction events observed during the production of the complete set of 1,206 English-language Wikipedia articles officially considered controversial. We specify and estimate new models for signed and weighted relational event networks predicting the probability that a user deletes the contributions of another user – thus expressing personal disagreement – and/or protects the con- tributions of another user against deletion from third parties – thus expressing personal agreement. In an analysis of positive and negative interaction among Wikipedia contributors consisting of more than 60 million ob- servations, we find strong support for the balance hypothesis and for the predictions of the reputation hypothesis that are more consistent with alter-centric interpretations of social status as conferred by alters through ob- servable acts of deference.""
 * Khazraie, Marzieh, and Hossein Talebzadeh. "“Wikipedia does NOT tolerate your babbling!”: Impoliteness-induced conflict (resolution) in a polylogal collaborative online community of practice." Journal of Pragmatics 163 (2020): 46-65. Abstract:
 * "Impoliteness (and responding to it) is salient in various emerging cooperative, polylogal online communities of practice. Investigating Wikipedians' negotiations quantitatively and qualitatively, the researchers analyzed discussions in 120 highly controversial Wikipedia talk pages across four general topical categories to explore impoliteness strategies, their responses, and participation patterns characterizing conflict creation, escalation, and res- olution in Wikipedians' polylogues. Both macro-analysis (i.e. number of participants, conflicts, turns across conflicts, and discoursal roles) and micro-analysis (impoliteness strategies and responses to them) along with pertinent frameworks (e.g. taxonomies of impoliteness strategies, defensive strategies, and participant response options and pat- terns) were utilized in analyzing the data. Findings emphasized the existence of impo- liteness phenomena, the prevalence of on-record impoliteness strategies rather than off- record strategies, dominance of the defensive strategy of offering an explanation, as well as a tendency among all the participants (i.e. initiators, recipients, and witnesses) to resolve conflicts. The findings are discussed in light of the asynchronous, task-oriented, interaction-focused, polylogal, natively digital and highly-policed nature of the plat- form's communications. Offering a revised model of online conflict (resolution) interaction patterns, this research sheds new light on the communicative behaviors, norms and strategies of Wikipedians, as a distinct online community of practice with implications for technology-mediated incivility."
 * Chhabra, Anamika, Rishemjit Kaur, and S. R. S. Iyengar. "Dynamics of edit war sequences in Wikipedia." In Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, pp. 1-10. 2020. <19> Abstract:
 * "In any collaborative system, cooperation and conflicts exist together. While in some cases these conflicts improve the output, they also lead to increased overhead. This requires examining the dynamics of these conflicts with the help of underlying data. In Wikipedia articles, the conflicts are captured by edit wars which may be ex- amined through the revision history of these articles. In this work, we perform a systematic analysis of the conflicts present in 1,208 controversial articles of Wikipedia captured in the form of edit war sequences. We examine various key characteristics of these sequences and further use them to estimate the outcome of the edit wars. The study indicates the possibility of devising automated coordination mechanisms for handling conflicts in collaborative spaces."
 * Tchubykalo, Evgueni. "Wikipedia Conflict Representation in Articles of War: A critical discourse analysis of current, on-going, socio-political Wikipedia articles about war." PhD diss., University of Westminster, 2020. Abstract:
 * "With the help of a discourse-historical approach, a textual corpus composed of the talk pages of three controversial, socio-political Wikipedia articles about ongoing wars was analyzed in order to shed light on the way in which conflict is represented through the editing and discussion process. Additionally, a rational discourse was employed in order to unravel communication distortions within the editing process in an attempt to improve communication and consensus-seeking. Finally, semi-structured interviews of participating contributors within studied articles were used in order to better understand Wikipedian experience in a controversial collaboration scenario. Results unveiled a set of discursive practices in which Wikipedians participate, as well as the creation of a Wikipedian argumentation topoi framework useful for further Wikipedia-specific discourse analysis involving the content change-retain negotiation process."
 * Ziembowicz, Karolina, Magdalena Roszczyńska-Kurasińska, Agnieszka Rychwalska, and Andrzej Nowak. "Predicting conflict-prone disputes using the structure of turn-taking: the case of Wikipedia." Information, Communication & Society 25, no. 13 (2022): 1987-2005. <3> Abstract:
 * "Detection of conflict-prone discussions on online social platforms can help moderate debates and prevent negative social processes such as the formation of echo chambers or polarization of opinions. Here, we examined how controversy of a discussion topic can be estimated from formal characteristics of discussion threads on the English Wikipedia. We discovered that dyadic turn-taking patterns tended to convey highly emotional, personal content, disagreement, and words relating to the conflict. Using the fraction of such two-person patterns in the multi-person discussion as a predictor, we were able to classify effective and conflict-prone discussions with 80% accuracy. These results show that monitoring of turn-taking patterns may become one of the easy heuristics that help detect conflicts in task-oriented online groups."
 * Rijshouwer, Emiel, Justus Uitermark, and Willem de Koster. "Wikipedia: a self-organizing bureaucracy." Information, Communication & Society 26, no. 7 (2023): 1285-1302. <9> Abstract:
 * "Many authors have argued that digital technologies enable collaboration without central oversight or authority, obviating the need for the hierarchical bureaucracies that characterize industrial capitalism. In this context, Wikipedia is often mentioned as a paradigmatic example. We draw on the classical accounts of Robert Michels and Max Weber to study mechanisms pushing towards or away from power concentration and bureaucratization. Our historical analysis of bureaucratization and power concentration in Wikipedia is based on 118 conversations and interviews as well as extensive archival research. While most studies on Wikipedia only consider the online encyclopedia itself, we also scrutinize the Wikimedia Foundation. Our analysis uncovers alternating processes of power concentration and power diffusion. While we observe power concentration for reasons anticipated by Michels, we also find strong counter-tendencies. Consequently, power concentration does not follow an ‘iron law’ but is the contingent outcome of struggles among stakeholders. In line with Weber, we identify a process of progressive bureaucratization. This does not only result from the pursuit of organizational manageability, but from a quest for democratic equality and minimization of domination as well. We introduce the concept of self-organizing bureaucratization to highlight how bureaucratization is the unintended and emergent outcome of efforts to increase democratic accountability."
 * Ren, Yuqing, Haifeng Zhang, and Robert E. Kraut. "How Did They Build the Free Encyclopedia? A Literature Review of Collaboration and Coordination among Wikipedia Editors." ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 31, no. 1 (2023): 1-48. <2> Abstract:
 * "Wikipedia has been the poster child for large-scale online open collaboration while few other online open collaboration initiatives have achieved similar success. How did Wikipedians do it? Besides the technical infrastructure, what social dynamics and processes are critical to its success? This essay reviews 217 articles that examined aspects of the behaviors of Wikipedia editors and the processes through which they coordinate and collaborate. Using the Input-Mediator-Output-Input model (IMOI) as the organizing framework, we summarized the key insights in an integrative review. The input factors include editors, their motivations, and the tools they use to support their work. The mediating factors include coordination, governance, leadership, conflict, newcomer socialization, and roles. The outcome focuses on measuring and predicting contribution quantity and quality. We hope our work serves as a road map for researchers who are interested in Wikipedia to learn about prior research and "identify future research directions."
 * Ajmani, Leah, Nicholas Vincent, and Stevie Chancellor. "Peer Produced Friction: How Page Protection on Wikipedia Affects Editor Engagement and Concentration." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 7, no. CSCW2 (2023): 1-33.
 * Morris-O'Connor, Danielle A., Andreas Strotmann, and Dangzhi Zhao. "The colonization of Wikipedia: evidence from characteristic editing behaviors of warring camps." Journal of Documentation 79, no. 3 (2023): 784-810. <6>
 * Baker, Michael J., and Françoise Détienne. "Arguing across spaces in an online epistemic community: Case studies in controversial Wikipedia articles." Journal of Argumentation in Context 13, no. 1 (2024): 1-48.
 * I have a pdf from interlibrary loan. Abstract states (bold added):
 * Wikipedia is the most consulted source of information on the web, on a global level. The collective writing of articles, open to the participation of all, can give rise to major conflicts between contributors, in texts and debates, given the high stakes involved in achieving agreement on a public presentation of controversial topics. We present analyses of how disagreements are managed across socio-technical and dialogical spaces in French Wikipedia, with respect to two case studies, on Freud and the Turin Shroud. We adopt a mixed methods approach, combining results of analyses of interviews with moderators in these articles and argumentative discussions underlying them, within a broadly pragma-dialectical framework. We show, on one hand, that moderators’ attempts to resolve disagreements by requiring participants to cite sources simply displace conflicts to the nature of those sources, their validity, their authors and the good faith of their proponents. Debates concerning sources themselves draw on social actors’ perspectives in dialogical spaces, beyond the discussion itself. Disagreements are managed rather than resolved dialectically by displacing them to alternative socio-technical spaces, such as different sections of the text itself, or participants’ personal pages.""
 * Al-Nasr, Sharif Abdul Rahman. "Virtual Communities on the Edge of Political Confrontation: Wikipedia and the Middle East Informatics Crises." Siyasat Arabiya 8, no. 44 (2020): 57-76. Arabic. English abstract:
 * In an effort to understand the characteristics of "virtual communities" and specifically "information societies," this study attempts to test the argument that virtual communities, with their networked structure, pose a challenge (or represent an alternative) to traditional hierarchical structures, due to the former's ability to self-organize, and settle their internal disputes without the need for authoritative intervention. The study uses the case study approach, applied to 3 Wikipedia's edit wars. The chosen cases are related to a number of Middle East informational crises. The study concludes that mechanisms of virtual societies (e.g. self-organization) can work efficiently in cases of limited disputes, but in cases of sharp disagreements, traditional (hierarchical) mechanisms that include authoritative intervention and exercising some form of power, in a "top-down" approach, remain essential for conflict resolution. This implies that the factor of "authority" remains significant even in the context of virtual communities.

Discussion