Wikipedia talk:Community health initiative on English Wikipedia/Interaction Timeline

Archive: 1

Timeline V1.1 changes
Hello all! We thought we reached a stopping point with the Timeline but found there were a few changes we want to make after some initial feedback. These changes will go live shortly, and we'll post an update when it's complete.


 * T189849 — Change 'N time between interactions' to 'N time between edits'
 * T189847 — Make the start date use a default start date of 30 days before current calendar date
 * T189237 — Change definition of "pages where both users have edited" to respect the start and end dates

We believe this will make the Timeline easier to use by removing clutter from activity not pertinent to the selected date range. Feedback welcome here or on Phabricator. Thank you! — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager (t)  23:42, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

Real case feedback
Hello, The Anti-Harassment Tools team has completed V1.1 and the tool is ready for use. The Interaction Timeline shows a chronologic history for two users on pages where they have both made edits.

The purpose of the tool is to better understand the sequence of edits between two users in order to make a decision about the best way to resolve a user conduct dispute. Here are some test cases that show the results and also some known limitations of the tool. We would like to hear your experience using the tool in real cases. You can leave public feedback on this talk page or contact us by email if the case needs discretion or you would prefer to comment privately. SPoore (WMF), Trust &#38; Safety, Community health initiative (talk) 15:31, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

How can the Interaction Timeline be useful in reporting to noticeboards?
Hi everybody,

I’m Trevor, a Wikimedia Foundation product manager with an update about the Interaction Timeline. We built this tool to make it easier to understand how two people interact and converse across multiple pages on a wiki. The Interaction Timeline compliments a few related existing tools such as the Interaction Analyzer and Intertwined Contribs because it shows one consolidated chronologic list of edits by two users, only on pages where they have both made edits within the provided time range. This tool has the attention of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Anti-Harassment Tools for new feature development and maintenance. We have dozens of ideas for new features but need your input on how to make this tool even more useful as you look into incidents of user misconduct.

Today we’re interested in how we can make the Interaction Timeline generate a summary of results with links and data. Our goals are to assist users to make well informed decisions in incidents of user misconduct and to keep on-wiki discussions civil and focused on evidence. We think the Timeline fits into the important workflows for evaluating user misconduct:


 * 1) You become aware of an incident of user misconduct (in the wild, or it has been reported on a noticeboard)
 * 2) You investigate the situation with your tools of your choice
 * 3) You report back what you’ve found to help the decision move forward.

We’d like to build functionality that can bridge the gap between 2 and 3. The Timeline already generates some statistics about the users and their interactions (the number of pages where they both edited, the number of edits they both made, the amount of time between edits, etc.) and we think generating some wikitext with this information could be beneficial. This wikitext could then be copied+pasted into an on-wiki discussion. For example:

Between 2017-01-01 and today on test.wikipedia.org and  both made 37 edits to the same 13 pages. The shortest amount of time between edits occured on the article Candy on 2018-03-23 when User:Test-apples made this edit and a few seconds later User:Test-bananas made this edit. You can see a chronological list of all their edits on the Interaction Timeline or a table view on the Interaction Analyser. — ~

Which would render as:


 * Between 2017-01-01 and today on test.wikipedia.org and  both made 37 edits to the same 13 pages. The shortest amount of time between edits occured on the article Candy on 2018-03-23 when User:Test-apples made this edit and a few seconds later User:Test-bananas made this edit. You can see a chronological list of all their edits on the Interaction Timeline or a table view on the Interaction Analyser.

Would this type of shortcut prove beneficial in your harassment or wikihounding investigations? If so, what type of information would you like to see included in the wikitext? Thank you! — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager (t)  21:57, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

Suggestions: Something you may want to add is a list of selected diffs. Perhaps add a check-box on each edit. The user can then mark each edit of interest. If any edits are marked, you add one blank line and add:
 * Instead of Between [date] and today just say Between [date] and [date]. People will be reading it over the next several days, so we avoid the need to back-translate 'today' into three days ago. Also the range won't always run to 'today', and for consistency it's probably better to avoid special-casing 'today'.
 *   - You might want to avoid relying on an EnWiki template? I realize the text is in English anyway, but several other wikis also use English. I don't know if they all have that template.
 * Instead of both made 37 edits to the same 13 pages I suggest edited 13 pages in common. The combined total 37 edits is a somewhat odd statistic, either state the count separately for each editor or skip it. And I think pages in common feels a bit more clear and natural.
 * The shortest amount of time between edits occured on the article Candy on 2018-03-23 when User:Test-apples made this edit and a few seconds later User:Test-bananas made this edit. Just skip this sentence. You're citing one arbitrary pair of edits, which may not be significant. Even if it is significant, there's no context saying why it's significant.
 * I think you should drop the ~ signature. I don't think anyone should really be copy-pasting this as an isolated comment, with no text of their own.
 * Significant diffs:
 * Special:Diff/35001
 * Special:Diff/35002
 * Special:Diff/35005
 * Special:Diff/35018

If everything is copy-pasted without editing, it naturally compacts like this:

Between 2017-01-01 and [date] on test.wikipedia.org and  edited 13 pages in common. You can see a chronological list of all their edits on the Interaction Timeline or a table view on the Interaction Analyser.

Significant diffs: Diff/35001 Diff/35002 Diff/35005 Diff/35018

The user can copy-paste the whole thing and add formatting and relevant text explaining the significance of each diff. The diffs should be listed in chronological order. I considered adding more info for each diff, such as username and/or pagename and/or date. However I expect most of that info would just get in the way / get deleted when building the diffs into meaningful text. This does leave the diff-list opaque to casual inspection, but speaking for myself I'd use preview and open individual diffs in a new tab as I built text explaining why each diff is significant. Alsee (talk) 06:31, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

I just noticed that both Interaction Timeline and Interaction Analyser fail if only one user is entered. While single user is not the expected mode of usage, it can be good to avoid unnecessary failure. For a single user you can simply show that user's edits without filtering for pages-in-common. That would result in a potentially interesting alternate view of contribution history. The inline-diffs here are nice, and there might(?) be other perks. Alsee (talk) 07:17, 15 June 2018 (UTC)