 Hello everyone from Berlin, Germany. I'm welcoming you to my first week in Romania session. It's my first week in Romania. I'm very honored and excited and also a little bit nervous. So, yeah, I hope everything's going to work out just fine. Today's session is about communication culture, about conflict culture, about how we can support a gentle discussion in the Wikipedia. The project online communication culture from Wikimedia Germany is now running for two years and we conducted some results. And today I want to talk to you about these results. And yeah, I'm very curious what you think about it and how I can keep on working with these results. Also, the topic would be the role of research in raising awareness in order to bring about change. So, I'm very excited. The agenda for this session, I have a short intro question for you guys. And then I will quickly present to you the state of research. We conducted so far in terms of problems and challenges for the communication culture in the German Wikipedia. Then I want to talk about raising awareness or the questions that I ask myself all the time. And then we will hopefully have time for a Q&A and I'm very curious about your answers to the question, how can we use these findings, how can we use research findings to activate community members and raise awareness for a kinder and more considerate communication. So, my intro question for you. I was thinking how and through what have you gained awareness for a certain topic in your life? What really made you at some point change your behavior or thinking or talking about a certain topic? You don't have to answer it right now. But maybe throughout the presentation you can think about it and talk to me about it in the end. Yeah, maybe it's the famous documentary about factory farming that made you stop eating meat or an encounter with a person or a book or a stroke of fate. So, yeah, really curious from your experience what made you change certain things in your life. Until then, I want to talk to you about the key findings we conducted so far in the project. We had different community workshops where we tried to analyze the problems in the communication culture. Yeah, we started with community events and then did some scientific research and we did different workshops with different community groups. We had an overall community workshop open for everybody. Then we had a workshop for just the administrators to see how they are challenged by the communication culture or what the special communication is about communicating as an administrator. And then also we asked only women what their challenges are in communication culture. So, yeah, and all these community groups had these four points in common. They all struggle and are challenged by destructive communication so, yeah, bullying, mobbing, also harassment and they all struggle with also the conflict resolution and also the conflict resolution bodies. I mean, it differs from language version to language version so, of course, keep in mind these are the findings for German Wikipedia. What all the community members also told us that in Germany we have this weird welcoming culture. I don't know if it's also an English word but they are talking a lot about the welcoming culture for the newbies. So, in that context, communication is also a problem. Then a lot of community members tell us that people struggle with the fact that there are too many rules and the rule application is a little bit dodgy so sometimes it's not really clear which rule in which context counts or, yeah, so it's not really, people cannot really understand at some point when to use which rule. Women especially struggle with the fact that in the German Wikipedia there is an ongoing rejection of gender-sensitive language I mean, yeah, it's an ongoing struggle I think at some point maybe we will be there but I think it needs time. After these workshops, because we came across and all workshops we came across the term destructive communication and for the German Wikipedia this term harsh tone is always used and I wanted to know more about this harsh tone or what in the workshop was called destructive communication. So we did, via a research agency, qualitative study with ten volunteers we interviewed about how they experienced destructive communication, how they define it and how they react to it and what we found out is that unconstructive criticism in early stages of volunteer work is a problem or is also called destructive communication and the fact that users rather experience a deletion of their articles than a support for improvement. Frequently, which means seven out of ten volunteers experience vicky-hounding, stalking and sexist insights rarely, which was one out of ten people are experiencing doxing, hate-mail and death threats. What triggers these conflicts or these destructive communication behavior is especially informal hierarchies because they create power structures. By informal hierarchies I mean that people told us that of course as a volunteer you need to know a lot before you can really move in the Wikipedia. You need to know a lot of rules and people also edit us with a lot of edits and who are there for a long time who have kind of a vicky fame. They are also more powerful than others and when they communicate destructively they are dealt with in a better way or people think like yeah okay maybe this was not fair but yeah he's a great author or writes a lot of articles so yeah we have to cut some slack. What also triggers destructive communication is admin's decisions. I think it's pretty obvious administrators they have to take more decisions have more responsibilities so of course they experience more conflicts. Then also what was already conducted in the community workshops is the confusing set of rules. Again in the study this was repeated that volunteers are very challenged by the huge set of rules in the German Wikipedia and you don't know or you need a lot of time to find the rules or the rules that are important for your everyday work. Last but not least what also triggers conflicts is citation and the problem is that of course you need a lot of sources for your article but then again volunteers or a lot of volunteers don't really have access to scientific databases for example sometimes it's really hard to find good citation sources. Then again in community workshops we wanted to find out more about the causes of conflicts and there also the key findings were very specific and you might already see that the findings repeat itself for example also here we have the problem with the set of rules that is for us a good sign because we hope we have a good overview about the problems that people have with the communication culture. Also here we have the problems of conflict resolution bodies we have the problem of the set of rules there are too many it's too complex to move around. Also which is a new thing is the technical requirements which don't support a constructive conflict solution so people are of course thinking about a flagging system or something a tool to give those people a voice who really experience harassment or stalking. And then also what I find is very interesting in a lot of times people are really fighting about the self-conception of what Wikipedia is in the German Wikipedia there's a page about what the Wikipedia is not but I think there are very different or many different interpretations of what the Wikipedia is. So what I'm asking myself right now is we have conducted all these findings we have conducted them through community workshops and we have also this research, this study and the problems repeat itself and we hope we have a good overview now after two years of running the project but now we're at a point where we're asking ourselves okay we have these findings and all the yeah when we talk to community about it everybody says like yeah of course yeah we know all this it's a problem but what to do? So yeah I'm asking myself and you today how can we transfer the things we find out into community better and of course the overall goal is to raise awareness for a more gender and considerate communication culture so I wanted to answer the question in the end better also think a little bit about what raising awareness is it's of course in the first moment an irritation for people because people are a lot of times confronted with a change in their behavior and sometimes also they have to admit they did something wrong and also they need a willingness to unlearn the things they did so far that's why I also ask you in the beginning to think about what make you change your behavior in your life at some point because that's really the point that I want to talk about today then I was thinking a lot about transfer these findings I think it also has a lot to do with timing there's a lot of information out there in the wiki universe a lot of research a lot of projects and everybody's always eager to share it but I think the timing can be better or worse to share certain information or to confront volunteers with the latest research also the personal relation to the problem might be a crucial point because if I don't feel that this problem is a problem for me personally I might not be too open to change something and also the participation in conducting all these findings and making the transfer the participation of the community is crucial and then also by talking about research findings or findings we conducted for me it's always very important to know what's already there I mean this problem about communication or harassment or even hate speech how it's called on other platforms we know it's there and everybody knows it's there so we need to also see what has been done before us and maybe we can learn from projects for example in the German Wikipedia there were already community workshops about for example setting up moderation or another way of conflict resolution so these were the factors I tried to come up with while transferring the knowledge or the findings we conducted so far into the community very open if you can add something so now I want to ask you what's your opinion in all of this how can we use findings we conducted with the community via research in order to activate maybe new or different community groups and raise awareness for a more considerate communication also what's the best way to address problems with science or keep findings we conducted through science spoiler alert I don't think there's one solution I think it's always a combination of everything but maybe you guys from your experience know more about it or want to share your experience yeah that's it for the presentation that's my last slide but maybe I will leave the question open a little bit longer yeah maybe you want to share your experience about when something in your life happened and you changed your behavior what I said in the beginning and then also let me check the questions in the etherpad there's one question about what's wiki-hounding wiki-hounding is I also put the link in the presentation when a group of authors tries to follow one other volunteer and systematically bullies this person or systematically changes their edits or reverts their edits I hope this helps you the second question is can you say a bit more about what successful conflict resolution looks like in this context it's a very good question I think we should also ask volunteers about that maybe also some Wikipedia authors are here and might want to add something in the etherpad what a successful conflict resolution for you is I think it depends on the conflict I think it's important to hear everybody's voices in a conflict I think it's important to know when to stop or to know when it's only about different opinions about a thing so I think there's always it's always okay to say agree to disagree because I experience a lot of conflicts in the Wikipedia are about who's right and I don't think that a discussion is about who's right I think it's always about different perspectives and I think a conflict resolution is about looking at all these perspectives and find a common way to move forward that would be my definition but also maybe some authors can add something the third question you mentioned the need for introducing tools for flagging or reporting problematic context what if any other communication moderation tools did workshop a participant's request I think this was the only technical technical issue they meant I think also this is the first overview of the problems and we're not too far in finding the solution part yet there wasn't anything else that I can remember someone is talking about I think this refers to the transfer of findings that from their personal experience they found podcasts transformative at times because it introduces them to new ideas podcasts I mean they're a really big thing right now everybody's making podcasts but I can see the point oh and also this person has started a podcast for non-vikipedia that's great maybe you can share it's called the world according to Wikipedia okay we have a podcast non-vikipedia maybe you can tell us where to find it if it's on Spotify or anything yeah ultimate pandemic activity definitely okay next question I find context with discussion with more experienced editors to go better as most people involved are aware of a lot of the points yeah of course it really also depends on the experience and when it comes to conflict resolution but with new editors they have not heard of the policies and they just say well that stupid or simply persists with right to want to do it this way yeah but then maybe also for this point that new editor say that's stupid rather than find the rule that this may be also caused by the fact that the rules are very hard to find or it's very hard to get an overview I think this is also an onboarding problem next questions are the escalation and conflict issues similar on all language wikipedia are some better than others very good question as I said I can only speak for the German wikipedia I think it also depends on the tools and I can imagine that the dynamics the conflict dynamics are the same in all wikipedia but as all wikipedia versions slightly differ in the tools I can imagine that there are some differences another user says and the idea that they experienced editors have some advantages not true in my experience I have over 200k edits but I have power I have yet to experience it but I am a woman so if you disagree with me log out and as an IP and then write something sexually disgusting about me you can prove who did it but generally have a strong suspicion this is a person who has tried very hard to help new users in the English wikipedia and they find it very few newbies stick around question number 8 does the wikipedia group meet regularly I don't really understand which wikipedia group you mean I think for the German wikipedia there are different subgroups and different meetings for example in the different cities and there are special subgroups who meet regularly I can tell for the German wikipedia I will post the results of the research it's not in English yet I am very sorry it's only in German but maybe at this point we can offer a translation or I can give a summary at some point okay I think I can stop sharing the screen yeah thank you already for your participation and the ideas you shared and maybe we can come back to the point where you experienced transformation in your life if you want to share things about that or also have experience about transfer of findings into a certain community you can share that as well I will leave the discussion open for that I think we had the last question already what other communication or moderation tools the workshop participants did request I answered that it was only the flagging and reporting tool and everything around that okay I may wait two more minutes and then I can wrap up because there are no new questions I will wait like two minutes okay there was one more question what other websites may have ideas for better healthy community dynamics for example Twitter is generally even more hostile than Wikipedia I read a lot about the Reddit community because I think it's not active anymore but they came up with the idea to take the conflict resolution from the actual Reddit website to another website which was called Change My View and there they had this format for the conflict resolution where every member of the conflict or every person who was involved had to answer the same questions and was really forced to put their perspective in a view that everybody can understand and I really like this idea to be like okay we cannot solve this conflict here right now let's go somewhere else let's follow these questions in order to come up with a solution or in order to come up and move forward yeah it's some kind of a mediation I really liked it maybe you can look it up it's from the Reddit community it was called Change My View I think it's not they're not running it anymore but they did for quite some time can you tell us stories of success unfortunately not I mean to be clear I don't think that everybody communicates destructively I think most of all the volunteers they're just doing their work on articles but there are always people who are bullying, harassing and unfortunately when we read this rather than talk to each other it has a stronger effect so it's also a problem of online communication yeah but maybe if someone in the audience has a story of success to share I'm also very happy to hear about that okay nothing is happening in the Etherpad anymore okay someone is sharing have you heard of Rethink? I haven't heard about it but thanks for sharing meeting with people helps yes of course that's also what we hear a lot from the German community people who know each other personally who have met on the events they are they experience a lot less of destructive communication because they know each other it helps to move around in the online world if you know the username but still I think it should be possible to be kind and helpful to people that you don't know but sure it helps also with conflict resolution I think it helps to move away from the Wikipedia and talk about it we also talked about that in a workshop where it might be possible to offer that to the community that when some people can't resolve a conflict by themselves they have the possibility to say I want to meet this person or I want to talk with them in person and maybe try to resolve so yeah that's a very good point and that's also a very positive experience that we always hear from the community okay I leave the the pet open to you I think we have a lot of nice suggestions and ideas and yeah oh there's another question is that a worldwide problem yeah I guess so discussions especially in the internet especially about politics they are polarizing more and more and I think and I don't think I know that a hate speech is becoming a stronger problem especially around elections especially around the time where more fake news has spread it so yeah someone said it in the chat like all sorts of problems Wikipedia reflects on them I think that's a very good wrap up I can totally agree yeah let me wrap up real quick I'm very grateful for your attention and all your nice inputs in the etherpad if somebody wants to contact me I will also leave my email in the etherpad and I'm very happy if you want to share your ideas or experiences with me and I think right now there are no more questions but a lot of nice ideas in the etherpad but there were not anymore questions so I would say I will stop here but I will of course follow the etherpad a little bit longer put my email in there and you can also contact me and yeah of course you can come in the conference as well to continue the discussion ok thank you very very much for my side and yeah I will stick to the etherpad to the conference and there we might continue the discussion bye