Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Community health initiative/Notes

< Community health initiative

February 3, 2017

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First page of notes as I get ramped-up on the Community health initiative (CHI).

— TBolliger (WMF) (talk) 19:26, 3 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

February 6, 2017

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— TBolliger (WMF) (talk) 21:09, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

February 7, 2017

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  • Yesterday/today I met with many more members of the Community Tech team and the WMF.
  • I read https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/scaling-understanding-of-harassment/ & https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603589/collection-of-13500-nastygrams-could-advance-war-on-trolls/
  • Next steps:
    • Read list of policies above, become proficient, take & share notes of my analysis.
    • Familiarize myself with the MediaWiki tools themselves that admins use to police these policies.
    • Begin web industry analysis of how other sites conduct dispute resolution and combat harassment.
  • Open questions swirling in my head:
    • Can we build software that detects edit wars?
    • Should we set up a CHI newsletter? (like tech news)
    • What can I do to ensure the wiki project communities and the WMF work toward the same goals, in regards to preventing and dealing with online harassment?
      • What are the communities' goals?

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 00:50, 8 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

February 9, 2017

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  • Yesterday/today I participated in WMF on-boarding and performed some interviews for other CHI team positions.
  • I will be replying to https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2017-February/thread.html#6522 by EOD today
  • As an exercise to understand how to set goals and objectives around harassment, I began reading Malcom Sparrow's March 2015 "New Perspectives in Policing" which I hope will inspire and inform me how to set goals that actually result in a healthier community rather than affecting a metric: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/248476.pdf
    • Primary challenge: The ultimate goals of the CHI are to reduce harassing behavior on wikis & to more quickly, accurately and decisively resolve a conduct dispute. How do we measure occurrences of harassment? Automated or user-reported? Reducing reports of harassment could still mean the same level of harassment exists (but goes unreported). An increase in reports could mean more users are seeking assistance, potentially resulting in a healthier community in the long run.
  • I had a great conversation with Patrick E today. Some notes:
    • Both Community Engagement & Community Tech will be working on CHI, but from different angles. Community Tech will focus on the software/tools ('Tools') as outlined in the grant proposal. Community Engagement will be responsible for the social change aspect ('Policies'). Both will be intertwined and the Community Advocate (still to be hired) will be a key individual in bridging both teams.
    • 'Policies' includes an in-depth evaluations of existing conduct policies across many wiki communities to identify which are effective, which are ineffective, and gaps; then working closely with these communities to update the policies. This may also include providing assistance and training to admins (and other functionaries) in order to better enforce the new policies and to use the tools ComTech builds. This includes:
    • The topic of "how to empower users to de-escalate a conduct dispute before they need to seek admin assistance" will be a recurring topic during this entire initiative.
    • One idea that was raised, that could potentially see its way into software could be (pending proper decision making and community involvement) productizing interaction bans and topic bans.

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 00:43, 10 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

February 10, 2017

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— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 19:26, 10 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

February 13, 2017

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  • I worked on the Community health initiative page at length today, expanding and adding relevant sections.
  • Met with the Design research department to begin thinking of what audience research we will need to consider at the beginning of this project.

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 01:25, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

February 14, 2017

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— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 19:27, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

February 16, 2017

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— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 19:43, 16 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

February 17, 2017

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  • Continued work on the enwiki harassment policies page. Feedback welcomed!
    • This included a lot of research into ANI and ArbCom. I respect the level of detail these groups have put into building the policies and processes, but I must say that the heavy documentation is not welcoming for newcomers, regardless if they have experience with MediaWiki software or not.

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 00:12, 18 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

February 21-24, 2017

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This week was spent predominantly at a WMF collaboration planning event, speaking with many people on many teams about how to best achieve success with this project. Notes forthcoming.

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 20:35, 24 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

February 28, 2017

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Yesterday and today I:

  • Spent time preparing on-boarding documentation for the Sr. Product Analyst who agreed to join the WMF for the Anti-Harassment Tools team! Hooray! 🎉
  • Distilling and collating notes from last week's WMF collaboration planning event:
    • 'Harassment' is a broad word. We need to research the harassment landscape and define the types of harassment we identify. This should be built off previous research. This will help us understand, design, and articulate specifically which features address which types of harassment.
    • When the Community Advocate starts, we will need to define ownership of a communication strategy. We should remember to use metrics in our communications to ground the conversation.
    • When we research sockpuppetry, we should investigate how username changes can be a form of harassment.
    • Complexities: false reports, different interpretations of definitions of the rules, and calcification of wiki projects. How can both the policies and the tools
    • Does our community already have a database/documentation of cross-project bad actors?
    • Andrew Otto is happy to discuss real-time data streams if we need them.
    • Speaking with the Research team, we identified several areas where quantitative research will be vital: modeling wiki-hounding,  heuristic prediction of sockpuppets, and expanding Detox to include tone.
    • We spoke with the Legal team to understand how we should approach this project with our users' privacy in the forefront of our minds.
  • Documentation I'm building

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 19:19, 28 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

March 3

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How is it Friday already? Here's what I've been up to:

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 23:27, 3 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

March 15

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Recently:

  • We're compiling cases of harassment on a private document, as to not open the victims up to further trauma or problems. A lot of my work around this is to empathize with two cohorts: 1) victims of harassment who want the harassment to stop and 2) admins who receive these cases. Looking at several ANI cases, it's pretty clear that the User Interaction History tool will be incredible important in reducing the amount of time that admins take to investigate cases of harassment. Digging through multiple histories and diffs across multiple pages is very cumbersome. I'll collate my thoughts on Community health initiative/User Interaction History tool.
  • I've learned quite a bit about the AbuseFilter, which will likely be our first major project. My notes are on Community health initiative/AbuseFilter.
  • I also compiled Community health initiative/Dashboards used by admins to track reports of harassment
  • Our team's new Community Advocate starts work this week! Less than a month before our analyst starts. And we're still interviewing for the developer position.
  • The Mediawiki technical Code of Conduct is worth a read and probably something for us to learn from as we progress.

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 21:04, 15 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

March 17

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— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 19:52, 17 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

March 20

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Happy Spring solstice!

  • Prepping for a WIkimania presentation submission.
  • Continuing research on AbuseFilter at Community health initiative/AbuseFilter
  • Building out a "Harassment Ecosystem" based on our research on harassment examples. Where are the bottlenecks and failure points?

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 19:13, 20 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

March 28

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While most folks are over in Berlin for the 2017 Wikimedia Conference, this week I'm working on:

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 21:55, 28 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

April 6

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This week:

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 22:00, 6 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

April 14

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— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 19:24, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

April 20

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— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 22:32, 20 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

May 5

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Sorry about missing last week! Here's what happened over the last two weeks:

  • The big news is that we've announced the CHI on ENWP! There's some quiet discussion happening. A lot of our efforts over the past two weeks have been on making sure the announcement was successful — we want to honestly convey that we will be relying on user input to guide our work, but lay the groundwork of what we've accomplished to date. Read the announcement and see the project page here:
  • I've started posting Community health initiative/Meeting notes for those interested. Those agendas cover a lot of topics we've been discussing and thinking about lately.
  • We discussed and submitted new milestones for the Community Health program on Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2017-2018/Draft/Community Health. Here are two new milestones for FY17-18:
    1. Increase the confidence of admins with their ability to make accurate decisions in conduct disputes, measured via focus groups or consultations.
    2. Release three features which empower Wikimedia administrators to better enforce community policies and reduce abusive activity.
  • A lot of interviews for the open Community Advocate and the Full Stack developer positions. We're ready to extend an offer to one of the developers, so more news soon!
  • We met with the Coral Project (https://coralproject.net/ to discuss how their past few years building their Talk feature went, and what we should do/avoid with our work.
  • We met with Jigsaw again to discuss some options for how we can incorporate their work into our features. We'd like to open this discussion up to the larger Wikimedia community soon, once we get our ducks in a row. 🦆 🦆 🦆
  • We held two community consultation for users who have been the victims of severe harassment. We're keeping these notes private and will post a high-level summary when we've conducted enough to anonymize our findings.
  • On Wednesday the WMF held a cross-org Anti-Harassment meeting. We discussed several topics from different departments (legal, communications, HR, product). A few topics we discussed:
    • Notifications Blacklist — see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T150419 for the discussion
    • How EmailUser can be used as a vehicle for harassment. This is certainly something our team will look into.
    • A few personal rogue ideas from topics, that I want to document to think about later:
      • Is there room on our product for a "Privacy Check-In" feature like Google, Facebook, etc use? To allow users to set their notifications and email preferences without having to sift through so many pages and tabs?
      • Can we extract all the Thanks and Barnstars (or Kittens) users have received over the years and build a trophy case? A page that highlights a user's accomplishments on-wiki?
      • Someone in the meeting said "Perfect is the enemy of the good" which is brilliant and I apologize that I'll use a lot from now on.

Have a nice weekend!

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 22:14, 5 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

May 12

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It's Friday already? Wow.

  • We have a developer! We found a great candidate for the full stack position and have received a verbal acceptance. We're excited to have them join the team, details forthcoming. 🚀
  • A lot of time this week has spend on a game plan to get Notifications blacklist to the ENWP and meta communities for input. The meta page is still a draft, more details and a test environment to come soon.
  • We've been responding to questions from the Annual Plan published on meta & on the Community health initiative project page on ENWP.
  • We're considering what projects to start on, and how to get the community involved in our prioritization process. Stay tuned!

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 18:56, 12 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

May 26

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During the week of May 26:

  • This week we began in-depth research into Administrator's Noticeboards, specifically ANI. We're still defining the exact research — so notes and ideas to come. This will be tracked on Community health initiative/Administrators' Noticeboards.
  • We discussed how we want to support harassment that occurs as a result of group participation — e.g. a specific edit-a-thon or WikiProject. No firm decisions now but we did agree to focus on one-to-one user-to-user harassment for the moment.
  • Notifications blacklist is available for testing on beta Wikipedia. We'll be announcing it shortly.

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 21:18, 30 May 2017 (UTC) (apologies on the delay.)[reply]

June 9

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Oops! Missed last week, sorry.

  • We have a developer! David joined last week as our Full Stack dev. He's already burning through all our onboarding tasks. We're lucky (and excited!) to have him. 😎
  • We're continuing our communication efforts for the Notifications Blacklist. We hope to have the blocker resolved soon so we can release it to several communities.
  • Sydney and I began working on Community health initiative/IdeaLab — a collated list of IdeaLab proposals about user conduct or harassment.
  • I've been looking a lot more into AbuseFilter — I hope to start talking about it with both the meta and ENWP communities soon.
  • We have a prioritized backlog in Phabricator. Take a look: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/2660/
    • I hope to post an update about how to read the board and affect our prioritization on ENWP and meta soon.
  • We participated in the Strategy consultation for Healthy, Inclusive Communities.
  • We met with Riot Games about their anti-harassment efforts on League of Legends. It was very insightful!

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 22:54, 9 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

June 16

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A lot this week!

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 00:29, 17 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

June 23

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  • Our Back-end developer accepted our offer and signed! He begins in early July. 🙌
  • Monday was a WMF holiday, so it was a 4-day week.
  • Some WMF colleagues and I attended an event hosted by Creative Commons about building pro-social online communities. They're doing some interesting work and we'll continue to be a part of it.
  • Met with User:∑ about Edit Interaction Analyser and potential future collaboration
  • Posted about AbuseFilter on ENWP and meta and participated in discussions about how it could be extended to warn or prevent more types of harassment.
  • Caroline and I are talking about about how to synchronize our work on building tools and then influencing the ENWP community to clarify and modernize their Harassment and Civility policies. It'll be a thread that runs for the entirety of our project.
  • Did some prep work for Wikimania, our roundtable and speech were both accepted! I'm looking for an infographic designer to help create our poster.

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 19:31, 26 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

June 30

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  • Many of the team members were at conferences or speaking engagements! Sydney and I attended a workshop at the Harvard Law School about Harmful Speech Online. Caroline spoke at a conference in Minneapolis and at the Brussels Media Summit.
  • I performed further research on the Edit Interaction Analyser.
  • I discussed AbuseFilter on ENWP and meta with several interested users.

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 21:29, 6 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

July 21

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Sorry for the delay, I've been busy and became forgetful!

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 20:13, 24 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

July 25

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I wasn't sure exactly where to put these, so I'll put them here: my personal notes from Community Engagement Insights/2016-17 Report

Wikimedia communities

  • People attempt to coerce others. (110.02) — 28% agree
  • People can be hyper competitive and see others as adversaries, seeing conflict as a battle to win at any cost. (109.03) — 48% agree
  • People are sincerely interested in supporting each other. (109.01) — 58% agree
  • I often think about quitting as a Wikimedia contributor. (107.04) — 13% agree
  • People have a difficult time understanding and empathizing with others. (112.05) — 39% agree
  • People are aware of their biases and patterns of behavior. (112.02) — 25% agree
  • People are sincerely willing to talk and negotiate and are able to separate “people issues” (110.04) — 41% agree
  • People are committed to seeking fair solutions that are responsive to the interests of all parties. (110.03) — 57% agree

Harassment on Wikimedia

  • Have you ever felt unsafe in any Wikimedia online or offline space, including being harassed, bullied, attacked, etc.? (105) — 32% yes
  • In the past 12 months, how often have you been sexually harassed on Wikimedia projects or at Wikimedia events, such as sexual remarks made toward you or someone touching your body inappropriately?
    • Wikimedia events (offline) (116.02) — 5% yes
    • Wikimedia projects (online) (116.01) — 13% yes
  • During the past month, on how many days have you avoided Wikimedia Projects because you feel uncomfortable or unsafe in the space? (115.03) — 49% have skipped avoided 1+ days
  • Do you feel unsafe contributing to Wikimedia projects online because of… (Please select all that apply to you.) (124) — 18% do not feel unsafe, 19% “none of the above” and 35% “other”
  • In the past six months, how often did you report to the following groups for being harassed or attacked:
    • Functionaries (117.01) — 32% yes
    • Other volunteers (117.02) — 36% yes
    • WMF staff (117.03) — 9% yes
    • Staff of chapters or affiliates (117.04) — 9% yes
  • To what extent was the problem resolved the last time you reported it to:
    • Functionaries (119.01) — 60% not at all resolved
    • Other volunteers (119.02) — 56% not at all resolved
    • WMF staff (119.03) — 76% not at all resolved
    • Staff of chapters or affiliates (119.04) — 79% not at all resolved
  • Overall, how useful was the response you received the last time you reported it to:
    • Functionaries (118.01) — 54% not at all useful
    • Other volunteers (118.02) — 48% not at all useful
    • WMF staff (118.03) — 77% not at all useful
    • Staff of chapters or affiliates (118.04) — 75% not at all useful
  • In the past 12 months, how often have you been attacked (name-calling, threats, etc. directed at you) when contributing to a Wikimedia project because of…
  • The following community processes are used for dealing with user behavior. To what extent do they need improvement?
    • Tools and processes for reporting users (113.01) — 50% Quite a bit+
    • Noticeboards (113.02) — 43%
    • Blocking tools (113.03) — 43%
    • Admin selection and review process (113.04) — 48%
    • Policies (113.05) — 49%
    • Other (113.06) — 58%
    • Banning tools (113.07) — 43%
  • In the past 12 months, how often have you been bullied or harassed on Wikipedia? (126.01) — Forty-seven percent of participants indicated that in the past 12 months they have sometimes, often or almost always been bullied or harassed on Wikipedia.

Communicating with users

  • What do you use to find out about new Wikimedia features and services from the Wikimedia Foundation? (select all that apply) (138) — 50% of survey respondents use any Wikimedia project page
  • I feel that my voice is heard in Wikimedia Foundation decisions (139.04) — 22% yes
  • I feel I am consulted sufficiently by the Wikimedia Foundation in decisions, through surveys, consultations or other means (139.03) — 36% agree
  • I know how to contact the people I need at the Wikimedia Foundation (139.02) — 38% agree
  • I feel well informed about projects being led by the Wikimedia Foundation (139.01) — 36% agree
  • To what extent did the Wikimedia Foundation support help to protect against abusive community members (121.03) — 58% effective
  • Have you contacted the Wikimedia Foundation or received support from the Wikimedia Foundation with the following issues? (120) — 49% general help, 11% emergencies, 11% dispute resolution

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 22:29, 25 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

August 4

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— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 20:35, 4 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

 

August 18

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  • No updates from last week due to Wikimania. Here's what happened in Montreal:
    • Caroline gave a successful lecture about Defining Conflict vs. Harassment on Wikipedia. Slides here.
    • Sydney and I held a productive roundtable on per-page and per-topic blocking. Notes here (redundant notes here)
    • Sydney and I held a productive roundtable on "Building a Better Dispute Resolution System" which generate a lot of really good problems to solve and ideas to consider. Notes here.
    • We displayed our poster and distributed several hundred hand-outs. See it on the right 👉
    • I gave a lightning talk on the Community Health Initiative. Slides here.
    • We all attended several other panels.
      • The most pertinent other panel was Benoit and Léa's roundtable on "How toxic environment affects the community health and which way forward?" Notes here.
      • I also really enjoyed Asaf and Anasuya's roundtable on "Patterns and Antipatterns in Volunteer Leaders." My key takeaways are:
        • Be explicit of the decision making process when asking for input about features on wiki. Include all parts ("considerations") up front. Be clear.
        • Have the decision maker participate in the consultation.
        • Acknowledge and say it back. People want to FEEL heard, even if their input isn't ultimately incorporated.
        • How can the Community Health Initiative take advantage of the concept of mentorship? Trained admins in disputes to mentor other admins?
    • We networked with potential collaborators and participants in our work.
    • We ate too much poutine.
  • This week was abridged due to travel and a WMF holiday, but included:
    • Concluding Sprint 2.
      • You can view what we accomplished here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/2918/query/all/ 
      • Highlights include our Wikimania participation, reaching some initial conclusions about the ANI data generated in Sprint 1, and some bugfixes to AbuseFilter.
    • Starting Sprint 3!
      • You can view our new sprint at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/2931/query/all/
      • Sprint 3 goals:
        1. Measure AbuseFilter performance
        2. Investigate making Mute global
        3. Consult ENWP and Meta about adding Special:EmailUser to Mute
        4. Decide how to measure Admin Confidence
    • A lot of discussion on making Mute global — T171624
    • Preparing for the community consultation about adding Special:EmailUser to the Mute feature. Read more at Community health initiative/User Mute feature.

See y'all next week! — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 21:34, 18 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

August 25

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  • Now that we're all back and documented from Wikimania — and we're 5 weeks away from the end of Q1 — a big push of this week was to evaluate how we're tracking on our AHT team Q1 goals.
    • Measure Admin confidence of conduct disputes — Caroline is working on a list of requirements, and by next Friday we want to decide if we will do a survey or a focus group. We appear to be on track.
    • Prepare research methodology for ANI — Caroline and Patrick are making pretty good progress here. The current plan is to combine both automated methods of scraping the noticeboards for information with human review. Information forthcoming.
    • AbuseFilter — performance measurement is in Code Review T161059, and today we decided on several AntiSpoof tickets we'll work on this quarter. T166816
    • User Interaction History feature — I created three prototypes in Google Spreadsheets based on three real-world ANI cases. It works! It feels like the timeline concept will be helpful. We will want to use dummy data before we share these concepts with anyone outside of our team. I'm very excited about this. See Community health initiative/User Interaction History tool for more info.
    • Page-specific blocking — we conducted a roundtable at Wikimania, but now we want to talk with users on ENWP and Meta. We're changing the scope to be more about "supporting editing restrictions" — see Community health initiative/Editing restrictions for more info.
    • Mute — We decided to ship two mute features this quarter. Echo Mute, which will release next Monday! T173838 Sp:EmailUser Mute, design forthcoming, will be released in late September. T138166 See Community health initiative/User Mute features for more info.
  • I'm also looking into the 'Thanks' rate limiting on pl.wikipedia. Should it be undone? Kept? Altered? Stay tuned!

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 23:52, 25 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

September 8

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  • Short week due to Labor Day, but it was still productive!
  • Made a lot of good process on the Admin Confidence survey. It's built and we submitted a Central Notice submission to raise awareness to drive participation.
  • Reviewed my spreadsheet-based 'prototypes' for the User Interaction History tool. This week we will create some anonymized Invision prototypes to share with ENWP and meta users
  • We will be reaching out to users who have linked to the Edit Interaction Analyser and asking them for what works and what doesn't work about it.
  • Responded to Mute discussions on ENWP
  • Prepared for discussing Editing Restrictions discussion on wiki.

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 17:30, 11 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

September 29

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See y'all in Q2! — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 23:21, 29 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

October 13, 2017

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Have a nice weekend! —‚ Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 22:14, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

October 27, 2017

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I missed last week's update due to wedding obligations, so I'll combine it with this week's:

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 23:38, 27 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

November 3, 2017

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— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 00:10, 4 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

November 22, 2017

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Apologies on missing the last few weeks! Let me try to summarize the past three:

— Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 22:42, 22 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

January 9, 2018

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Given other responsibilities and how forgetful I already am at keeping these notes, I will not be keeping this page updated for 2018. ✌️ — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 19:43, 9 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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