Last year's winner of Wiki Loves Monuments: Chiajna Monastery, on the outskirts of Bucharest, the capital of Romania, by photographer Stratoreaper. Completed in 1790, the building is 43 m (141 ft) long and 18 m (59 ft) high, with walls between 1 and 2 m (3 ft 3 in and 6 ft 7 in) thick. The jury remarked on the "outstanding composition, fully reflecting the mysterious character of this ruin". Nearby traffic to and from Bucharest airport is apparently hastening its degradation.
2012 Wiki Loves Monuments seen as driving new contributors
Some of Wikimedia's most valuable photographs have been shot and uploaded under free licenses as a direct result of the annual Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) event each September. Last year, the project was conducted on a European level, resulting in the submission of an extraordinary 168,208 free images from 18 countries, making it the world's largest photographic competition (winners and finalists).
In 2012, the volunteer-run competition aims to produce images of a wide range of cultural heritage sites ("monuments") across the globe. Organising the event—which has just opened and will run for the full month of September—has required input from chapters and volunteers in 35 countries. Throughout the month, Wikimedians and visitors to Wikipedia are invited to submit photographs of monuments to this competition. This year, for the first time, the project will cover cultural sites beyond Europe.
Global participation in 2012Finalist last year ... one of two stables in Sant Ferran Castle, Catalonia, Spain. The judges were impressed by "the architectural features and the texture of this historical site", as well as the angle and lighting, although slight overexposure on the ceiling was noted.A double spiral staircases in Grazer Burg, Styria, one of the ten pictures shortlisted by the Austrian project.Finalist ... Church of Saint Alexandr Nevsky ("Capella") in the Alexandria Park, Peterhof, Russia. The jury praised the clarity and sharpness of KoMiKor's image, and observed that the evening lighting captures "exactly the right neogothic atmosphere for this kind of monument." Smallbones, the coordinator of the American WLM event, told the Signpost that "the aim is to work toward complete photographic coverage by Wikimedia of cultural heritage sites around the world, giving an overview of the cultural heritage in a country or region, even though this is a goal we'll never be able to fully achieve.
"The contest is organized by teams in each participating country. In the US we might get 50,000 entries. The huge task we'll facing is to properly short-list these photos down to about 500—just 1%—so that our distinguished jury can reasonably evaluate them. They'll pick the best 10, which will go on to the international final and a global jury. We're particularly proud of the US jury, which includes people like Carol M. Highsmith and Rick Prelinger, as well as several top Wikipedians. Our main goal is to attract and keep new editors and photographers—the individuals who make Wikipedia the best site on the internet. On that count we've already been successful. I'll just point out one guy who's uploaded photos from almost half the sites in one state, all of a consistently high quality."
There are already encouraging numbers of uploads globally, only a few days since the opening of the competition. Spain has nearly 4000, Germany more than 2600, with Poland, France, and India in the 2000s.
While collecting a large number of images is the immediate aim, the underlying goals are broader. The project in part sees itself as a way of engaging the general readership of Wikimedia projects as contributors. Organisers hope that normally passive readers who've never thought of becoming Wikimedians might realise that they can contribute—even if it's something as simple as an image of a nearby building that is culturally notable. WLM is designed to make people familiar with Commons, using a simplified upload interface with fewer options; this minimises the barriers to uploading for new users. The competition is also an opportunity to improve the international collaboration among Wikimedia chapters. The event appears to be one of the best ways of encouraging collaboration among "offline volunteers" all over the world.
How WLM evolved
The idea behind WLM had its origins in the highly successful Wiki Loves Art project in 2009 (Signpostcoverage) in the Netherlands. The following year, the scope was significantly changed from indoor heritage in museums to outdoor heritage such as windmills, houses, bridges and other monuments recognised by the government as significant, and attracted more than 12,500 images. This digital documentation of a significant part of the Dutch cultural monument heritage (Rijksmonument) was made possible through collaboration with several partners in the Dutch cultural heritage world.
Last year, volunteers in other European countries indicated their interest in joining the contest, so the project was expanded to a Europe-wide event (Signpostcoverage). The competition was publicly endorsed by no less than the European Commission, Europa Nostra, and the Council of Europe—all significant players in European cultural preservation—with the first two institutions also contributing one of the international jury members. The 18-country event attracted more than 5,000 contributors.
The statistics show that the 2011 competition achieved a key goal of broadening the movement's base of contributors. Most striking was that some 70% of the 5000 participants made their first edit during the competition month; 90% of survey participants said they were likely to take part in another round, and 87% said they'd recommend the project to their friends.
Volunteers from countries without their own contests, such as Portugal and the UK, can take part if they submit photos of monuments in countries that are participating in this year's competition.
Innovations in 2012
This month marks the first global WLM. Among the participating countries are Argentina, South Africa, India, Canada, and the US, and there will be a number of regional events. The 2011 competition relied on a special upload campaign; this year will also feature new apps with the help of the WMF mobile team (WMF Android) and Mair Dumont (iPhone). These apps have been developed to enable participants to easily find monuments in their vicinity—a technological innovation that is likely to be particularly important in countries like South Africa, where smart phones are the most accessible way of connecting to the internet.
WMF RfC on legal fees help
On 1 September, the Wikimedia Foundation published a proposal to establish a legal fees assistance program for volunteers in Wikimedia community support roles like administrators and arbitrators (list of eligible user groups) in the unlikely scenario where they face role-specific legal actions despite having performed their administrative community role properly. At the WMF’s sole discretion, the program would assist volunteers on a per-request basis in covering the costs of legal defense. The scheme would not involve legal guarantees, create WMF attorney–client relationships, or pay for damages awarded to plaintiffs, or their costs.
Volunteers not performing in such supportive roles, i.e. article authors, photographers, and functionaries while not performing their official roles, can rely on the general defense of contributors policy, which was reformed in July–August 2012 (changes). The community is invited to take part in the Request for comment on the new proposal, set to be open until 10 October.
In brief
FDC candidates shortlist: The WMF published its shortlist for membership candidates for the volunteer Funds Dissemination Committee, which is set to look at how to distribute more than US$11M among Wikimedia organisations in 2012–13. The WMF board will appoint seven FDC members and one ombudsperson from the short-list.
English Wikipedia report
Pending Changes: The first request for comment on pending changes since May has been opened at WP:PC2012/RfC 1, after extensive discussions. From the introduction: "This RfC is on one of the less controversial questions – the role (if any) of Pending Changes Level Two – in the hope that the community will be able to come to a quick decision on this one, and in the process, join in developing a more elaborate RfC to follow."
Arbitration Committee: There continue to be no open cases before the committee, and one potential case remains on hold. Five clarifications and requests for amendments are currently open, which arose from decisions reached in the Sathya Sai Baba (2006), The Troubles (2007; three separate requests), and Race and intelligence (2010) cases.
New administrator: Bagumba, an editor active in American sport articles, was granted administrator tools on 27 August. The successful request was the tenth over the last two months, a figure which matches the total number of administrators promoted in the first six months of 2012.
2011 WLM finalist ... The central part of the ceiling of the Galerie des Batailles at the Palace of Versailles. The judges liked the simplicity and "monumental appeal" of this picture of highly significant "European heritage". (Picture by donald)
A new MediaWiki Foundation would also seek to acquire or license the relevant trademarks – including the MediaWiki logo – from the WMF, though the latter is unlikely to oppose such a move per se.
Developers are currently discussing the possibility of a MediaWiki Foundation to oversee those aspects of MediaWiki development that relate to non-Wikimedia wikis. The proposal was generated after a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about generalising Wikimedia's CentralAuth system.
Proponents are clear that they do not intend any new creation to compete directly with the Wikimedia Foundation, which has historically considered MediaWiki development within its remit. Indeed, the initial proposal has shied away from even critiquing the WMF's software priorities, focussing instead on filling in the gaps by providing funding to projects that were of benefit to the wider MediaWiki ecosystem but not necessary to Wikimedia wikis. How a "MWF" would generate its own funding is unknown; the problem has historically dogged proposals to overhaul MediaWiki governance.
More realistically in the short term, the new body (if it materialised) could take over responsibility for generating so-called "tarballs" – snapshots of MediaWiki software for external wikis. As the desire for a MediaWiki 1.20 release grows, this aspect of the WMF remit has come under increasing scrutiny, especially because the complete detachment of Wikimedia deployments (now fortnightly) from external releases (six-monthly) means that the WMF has no clear incentive to ensure tarballs are released on time.
One possible complicating factor with this proposal would be the presence of security releases – code changes that are then "backported" to previous versions in a process increasingly reliant on the WMF's security expertise. Indeed, this week saw just such a release, with six fixes being backported to MediaWikis 1.17, 1.18 and 1.19 (wikitech-l mailing list).
Google Summer of Code: Incubator improvements
Continuing our series looking at this year's Google Summer of Code students, this week the Signpost caught up with Belgian student of public administration Robin Pepermans, who spent his summer working on an element of the Wikimedia universe few large-wiki editors ever encounter: the Wikimedia Incubator. The Incubator provides a space for new language versions of Wikimedia projects to prove their sustainability before a wiki is created for them. Pepermans explained to the Signpost what he had been doing:
“
Example info page of non-existing Slovak Wikinews (with German as user language)
I have been working for quite some time to make it as easy as possible for anyone to start a new language version of Wikipedia or another Wikimedia project on the Wikimedia Incubator. For this broad project, I had in particular created a MediaWiki extension which improves the usability of the Incubator and makes maintenance of the wiki easier. Being also active as a volunteer MediaWiki developer in general, I had considered working on another topic for MediaWiki in Google Summer of Code 2012, but I chose to focus on the Incubator extension and language support in MediaWiki.
On the Incubator, all existing or possible language versions have an automatic "info page"; see for example the Slovak Wikinews page, which invites anyone to start on Incubator this particular language edition which does not exist yet. I had already coded this function before GSoC, but improved it during the project. One of the new features that integrates with these info pages is a special page called IncubatorFirstSteps which guides new interested contributors through creating an account and getting started working on a test project. A core aspect of my GSoC project was to include all ISO 639 language names, which would display the correct language name "Bagri" on Wp/bgq instead of not recognizing the language code (at present a more restrictive list of language names is used); this has however not been deployed yet as opposed to my other work.
During the project, I have also continued working on improving MediaWiki's "page content language" feature, which does not only benefit Incubator, but MediaWiki in general by allowing pages to be marked as being in a certain language and making MediaWiki language features behave differently depending on that language. The most visible outcome of this is the writing direction, e.g. Pashto pages on Incubator are right-to-left without any extra HTML in the page content; during the GSoC period specifically I converted {{#formatdate:}} and dates in sortable tables to the page content language.
”
Robin, who has stated his intention to continue his development work outside of the programme, runs a blog documenting his progress. He added that if you speak a language that lacks one or more Wikimedia projects, you are encouraged to start or contribute to the wiki and that anyone is welcome to contact him or the Incubator community for ideas, problems or suggestions.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
MediaWiki 1.20wmf11 begins deployment cycle: 1.20wmf11 – the eleventh release to Wikimedia wikis from the 1.20 branch – was deployed to its first wikis on September 3 and will be deployed to all wikis by September 12. The release incorporates about 250 changes to the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia, comprising 118 "core" changes plus a similar number of patches for WMF-deployed extensions. Among the changes (the product of some 14 days of development time) are fixes for bugs #39431 ("That an SVG is animated is shown to user in ugly fashion", #39284 ("Improve the tablesorter for currency") and #39297 ("Show a warning if thumbnails won't be animated").
Gerrit to receive professional improvements: Current MediaWiki code review system Gerrit, barely out of the news in recent weeks, will receive WMF-funded development in the form of a specialised contractor, it was announced this week (wikitech-l mailing list). Development will initially be focussed on GitHub-compatibility and comes after the conclusion of a long debate over the selection of Gerrit as MediaWiki's official code review tool. In related news, WMF Git guru Chad Horohoe started a discussion addressing developers bypassing review even on the "master" branch of certain extensions, while a series of new Gerrit tables were also published, marking a return of the "wall of shame", listing developers by the number of changesets they have contributed code later shown to be bad but without a later patch (also wikitech-l).
Double-counting causes overestimate of "active editors": There are approximately 4.4% fewer Wikimedians than previously thought, according to a statistical update detailed on the Wikimedia blog. The difference surrounds the need to avoid counting users editing on multiple projects more than once, which was previously done by excluding Wikimedia Commons from the aggregation. This method has been replaced by a new aggregation that includes Commons but counts each username only once: by no means a perfect measure (despite improvements proposed in February this year, global account convergence is still patchy), but almost certainly an improvement. The result was approximately a drop of 4.4% in the headline number of active Wikimedians, although the impact on the "fall from peak" figure was less significant.
Protection for @wikimedia.org spoofing: An obviously fraudulent email apparently sent from a @wikimedia.org address prompted concern on the wikitech-l mailing list on Thursday. Despite the content of the message being of a spam rather than a phishing variety, Wikimedians were concerned that more dedicated spammers could exploit the same vulnerability. It was revealed in the discussion that the WMF does not take advantage of the Sender Policy Framework, a system that allows domain name owners to block others from spoofing their email addresses by tying the domain to a specific IP address. When asked why such a system had not yet been implemented, WMF Operations Engineer Jeff Green cited the difficulties inherent in getting the outgoing mail of the many different @wikimedia.org email address users routed through the same IP address, though he suggested that process might now begin in earnest.
Google and WMF tips for good development: Two of this week's developer mailing list threads centred on good working practices. One, based on advice from a Google "Insider", resulted in the advice that "participating in code review, even as a peripheral commenter rather than a key reviewer, gives a participant much greater understanding", among other things, while the other, started by WMF Engineering Community manager Sumana Harihareswara, focussed on 5 tips to get your code reviewed faster. The tips included "write smaller commits" and "Add reviewers", as well as "Respond to test failures and feedback", "Don't mix rebases with changes" and "Review more".
Translatewiki.net in developer plea: After at least 84 open bugs were found to have a substantive internationalisation component, administrators of translatewiki.net (which facilitate the translation of MediaWiki's interface messages) appealed to developers for help, both fixing those bugs and preventing the need for new ones (wikitech-l mailing list). All developers were advised to consult what is currently considered best practice and to check back regularly.
English Wikipedia considers Memento deployment: The English Wikipedia is considering the deployment of the externally developed Memento extension, which exposes the content of an article's history page in a specific machine-readable format, ready for use by the Memento project. The project, funded by the U.S. Library of Congress, aims to better and more completely expose the history of pages across the web. As of time of writing, the proposal looked to have gathered enough support, subject to approval by WMF Engineering, who will need to ensure that the extension scales and will not pose maintenance issues further down the line.
Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror, a newly featured video from NASA. The video explains the Curiosity rover's complicated landing on Mars. (This video is available in a 720p high-definition format, and may be played full screen. For help playing the video, see Wikipedia:Media help.)
Iraq War in Anbar Province (nom) by Palm dogg. Also known as the Al Anbar campaign, the Iraq War in the Iraqi province of Anbar lasted from 2003 to 2008, causing the deaths of almost 9,000 Iraqis and 1,335 Americans. Initially marked by urban warfare, later years of the campaign saw ambushes against American forces with improvised explosive devices. Both Iraqi insurgents and American soldiers committed human rights violations.
Metropolitan Railway (nom) by Edgepedia. The Metropolitan Railway was a passenger and goods railway in London and the world's first underground railway. Opened in 1863 initially with a single line, the Metropolitan Railway was greatly expanded over the next 40 years. Electric traction was introduced in 1905, and in 1933 the Metropolitan Railway was amalgamated with several other underground railways.
Pavle Đurišić (nom) by Peacemaker67 and PRODUCER. Đurišić (1909–1945) was an officer of the Royal Yugoslav Army who became a Montenegrin Serb Chetnik commander. He fought against Yugoslav Partisans and massacred Muslims in several countries. Captured by the Germans in 1943, the following year he began collaborating with the Nazis before being killed in an apparent trap.
Otto Graham (nom) by Batard0. Graham (1921–2003) was an American football quarterback who played for the Cleveland Browns and is regarded as one of the most dominant players of his era despite starting his career in basketball. Upon retiring as a player in 1955 Graham became a coach, spending nearly thirty years in various capacities at the Coast Guard Academy.
Learie Constantine (nom) by Brianboulton and Sarastro1. Constantine (1901–1971) was a cricketer, lawyer and politician who served as Trinidad's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. The first black peer (through life peerage), he was an advocate against racial discrimination and influential in passing the Race Relations Act. Having spent ten years as a cricketer, Constantine qualified as a barrister in 1954 and was active in both British and Trinidadian politics.
Rodrigues Solitaire (nom) by FunkMonk. The Rodrigues Solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria) is an extinct, flightless bird closely related to the Dodo. The swan-sized bird demonstrated pronounced sexual dimorphism, grey and brown plumage, and highly territorial behaviour. First mentioned during the 17th century, within 200 years it was extinct owing to hunting and predation.
"Give Peace a Chance" (Grey's Anatomy) (nom) by TRLIJC19 and Nikkimaria. "Give Peace a Chance" is a 2009 episode of the American television medical drama Grey's Anatomy which follows an operation on a hospital technician's "inoperable" tumor. The episode saw several actors in guest roles and was generally well received, garnering an NAACP Image Award for director Chandra Wilson.
Albertus Soegijapranata (nom) by Crisco 1492. Soegijapranata (1896–1963) was the first native Indonesian to become a Roman Catholic bishop. He is remembered for his pro-nationalistic stance. Born a Muslim, Soegijapranta converted while at a Jesuit school and became a priest, becoming Apostolic Vicar of Semarang in 1940. During the Japanese occupation and national revolution he helped keep the peace; after the war he continued to serve as an advisor.
Louis Riel (comics) (nom) by Curly Turkey. Louis Riel is a 2003 historical biography in comics by Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown which deals with the titular figure's antagonistic relationship with the newly established government. The work includes a full scholarly apparatus and was researched over more than two years. Done in a minimalist art style, the comics were originally published in a serial format despite Brown's protests.
Featured lists
Four featured lists were promoted this week:
List of songs recorded by Faith No More (nom) by Grapple X. San Francisco-based band Faith No More has recorded approximately 100 songs over the course of their thirty-year existence; all songs so far released were recorded in the band's first twenty years.
The Simpsons discography (nom) by Theleftorium. The American animated television sitcom The Simpsons has been popular enough to have several soundtrack albums and singles of material from the show released. The most popular as of 2012 is The Simpsons Sing the Blues, which achieved double platinum.
List of international cricket centuries by Steve Waugh (nom) by Vensatry. The Australian cricketer Steve Waugh scored 35 centuries in his 19 years in international competition, scoring his first in 1989 against England. His only double century was against the West Indies in 1995.
List of Delhi Daredevils cricketers (nom), written by Vibhijain and nominated by Strike Eagle. The Indian franchise cricket team Delhi Daredevils has had a cumulative total of 55 individual players since being established in 2008. Virender Sehwag has represented the team in more matches than any other player, while Amit Mishra is the leading wicket-taker.
Featured pictures
Five featured pictures were promoted this week:
Line Integral of Scalar Field (nom; related article) by Kieff. A line integral is an integral where the function to be integrated is evaluated along a curve, calculated as the sum of values of the field at all points on the curve, weighted by some scalar function.
Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror (nom; related article), created by NASA and nominated by Pine. The recent landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars was a complicated feat of engineering. The final seven minutes of Curiosity's descent—the most hazardous in the mission up to that point—were called "the seven minutes of terror".
Matsumoto Castle (nom; related article), created by 663highland and nominated by Tomer T. Matsumoto Castle is a historic castle in Matsumoto, Japan, built in the 16th century. Owing to its black colour, it is sometimes known as the Crow Castle.
Jebel Akhdar (nom; related article), created by Philipp Weigell and nominated by Tomer T. Jebel Akhdar ("The Green Mountain") is part of the Al Hajar Mountains in Oman; the area's highest point is Jabal Shams, at around 3,000 metres (9,800 feet).
The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author only. Readers are invited to respond or offer critical commentary in the comments section, while those wishing to author their own op-ed may use the Signpost's opinion desk.
The effectiveness of dispute resolution, according to the survey. Purple and light-blue on the right-side edge of each bar indicate favourable community attitudes to each form of dispute resolution.
Since May 2012 I've been a Wikimedia Foundation community fellow with the task of researching and improving dispute resolution on English Wikipedia. Surveying members of the community has revealed much about their thoughts on and experiences with dispute resolution. I've analysed processes to determine their use and effectiveness, and have presented ideas that I hope will improve the future of dispute resolution.
How far have we come in 11 years?
Dispute resolution has existed on Wikipedia from day one. Until late 2003, Jimmy Wales acted as the arbiter for all major disputes. Following the founding of the Mediation and Arbitration Committees, Wales delegated the mandate to resolve these disputes to those bodies.
A number of informal, community-created processes were developed over time to resolve disputes, including third opinion, requests for comment, informal mediation and a variety of noticeboards targeted at issues surrounding biographies of living persons, the use of reliable sources, the neutrality of content, and the presence of original research or fringe theories in articles. Most recently, a noticeboard was created to address a variety of disputes, the dispute resolution noticeboard.
Most of my four years on Wikipedia has involved the development and management of dispute resolution processes. While I've made some progress, it became increasingly clear to me that to make the improvements to these processes that such a large, complex, and often fractious project has needed, more information was required.
Where we are now
I presented some of the findings of my research in a presentation at Wikimania 2012, in Washington DC. From the survey I conducted in April, there were four key findings I learned from editors who had participated in dispute resolution:
The main problems given for dispute resolution are its complexity, its inaccessibility, and the number of understaffed resolution processes available. Respondents want stricter action taken against problematic editors, and a simplified, more accessible process where closure can be brought to a dispute quickly
94% of respondents have requested assistance from a dispute resolution forum at some point, and are generally unhappy with their experiences (only one in five were satisfied); 62% have participated in dispute resolution in the last year.
Opinions of dispute resolution are overall negative – while respondents rate arbitration as the best dispute resolution forum (one in three respondents rate it as good or very good), Wikiquette assistance is regarded as the worst (only 1 in 12 rate it as satisfactory).
Dispute resolution volunteers do so because they feel the process is critical to Wikipedia's functioning, like helping people, or are motivated by the fact they've already received assistance as parties in the forum. Some respondents haven’t volunteered to help run the forum due to the unpleasantness of disputes, the prolonged nature of dispute resolution, poor past experiences or a lack of knowledge of how disputes can be resolved.
Stage one of the dispute resolution noticeboard request form. Here, participants fill out a request through a form, instead of through wikitext, making it easier for them to use, but also imposing word restrictions so volunteers can review the dispute in a timely manner.
In summary, while some aspects of dispute resolution are viewed positively, there are many areas for improvement. The participants graded both their personal experiences and their perception of the effectiveness of the processes poorly. Experienced forum volunteers and co-operative fellow editors contributed to a positive outcome, but the lack of guidance and support from forum volunteers, and uncooperative fellow editors, made the experiences unpleasant. 70% had volunteered with dispute resolution at some point; however, only 40% did so in the month before the survey. This reluctance appears to be due to the complexity of dispute resolution or a lack of understanding on how to resolve disputes effectively. Particular issues are the complexity of requesting dispute resolution, with a lack of uniform handling, along with the time-consuming nature of the processes. The lack of forum volunteers to run the forum is also a problem.
To follow this up, I undertook an analysis of a few dispute resolution forums in May (full results are at this page). Among aspects I examined were forum volunteer counts, response times by volunteers, the time a thread was open, and success rates. Response times ranged from 5 to 24 hours, thread times from 2 to 28 days, and resolution rates from 0 to 100%.
Since the dispute resolution noticeboard was the most used forum in May, I focused my efforts there during August. We made some changes to the setup of the noticeboard – creating a robot to help manage cases, a template to keep track of disputes and a form (see right) to make filing disputes easier. We also set some goals: decrease the first response time by 40% to 10 hours or less, increase the success rate by 22 points, to 70%, increase the number of active volunteers by at least 17% (to 30), and decrease the resolution timeframe by at least 19% (to seven days).
The results for August showed some encouraging stats – a reduction of 67% to first response times, 60% reduction in discussion times, 25% reduction in thread size, an average of 2.85 volunteers to a thread (up from 1.5), and a success rate of over 64% – however the number of volunteers decreased by 20%. This shows that while the forum volunteers handled disputes in a quicker timeframe compared to May, it was from a small group of volunteers – so essentially they had just worked harder this month. This emphasises the need for more volunteers – if the existing volunteers burnout, the processes will suffer.
How did we get here?
It's been somewhat clear to me for some time what the problems with dispute resolution are. From the perspective of a participant, they need to wade through a bunch of dispute resolution forums to find the correct one, and then find the process unstructured, inefficient, confusing and lacking support from experienced volunteers. From the perspective of a volunteer, discussions are too long to read, consume too much of their time, and result in little recognition for the amount of work involved. There is also a lack of support and guidance for new volunteers – they essentially need to jump into it from the deep end. The results of the survey suggest that the community's views mostly resonate with my prior understanding.
There are other things to consider. Due to a lack of structure in some dispute resolution forums, discussions can easily get out of hand, and become extremely long and unproductive. Discussion often is retrospective as opposed to prospective, and thus does not focus on resolving the dispute. Every day, our volunteers are learning how to tackle these problems, but participants need to focus on the issues at hand and work together to find a way to resolve them.
A listing of just some of the noticeboards on Wikipedia.
Where we need to go, and how we can get there
Changes need to be made to make dispute resolution more effective and efficient. The alphabet soup of noticeboards needs some sort of universal request form like the one demonstrated above to help foster structured, productive discussions, while making them clearer and easier to use for volunteers and participants. We're on the right path with the closure of the mediation cabal earlier this year, and we continue to discuss changes to other forums – but we also need to make participation less ambiguous and time-consuming, and make it easier to actually get involved in resolving disputes. Volunteers are the lifeblood of the system, without whom it would not function.
But we can't make these changes alone. We need your input. We want you to share with us your experiences with dispute resolution, and how you think it can be improved. We'd also love to hear advice you have for volunteers, whether they're working within a DR process or if they're just editors on a talk page trying to cool down a discussion. Also, if you're interested in volunteering, please drop by the dispute resolution noticeboard or leave us comments here and we will help you get started.
Over the next month, I'll also be soliciting input from the community through an RFC to work towards further streamlining dispute resolution. I envision a dispute resolution system that is efficient and effective, and which has an abundance of volunteers. I hope you will join me in my efforts.
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