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Research:Patrolling on Wikipedia/Interviews

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Requirements

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  1. primary project is a Wikipedia, but not English Wikipedia
  2. must be comfortable communicating verbally in English
  3. patrolling is one of their core activities
  4. They don't necessarily need to have patroller/rollbacker/checkuser etc. (though ideally I'd like to speak to at least one person who has these userrights)
  5. they don't need to use any particular tools e.g. Huggle/AWB (though I'd ideally I'd like to speak to at least one person who is familiar with the relative benefits/drawbacks/target use cases of some patrolling/anti-vandal tools)

Interview guide

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This is a semi-structured interview guide. Not all questions will be asked in every interview, and the investigator may ask additional probe questions if interesting things come up.

When possible, the investigator will ask the participant to share links to pages that they talk about or diffs that point to particular actions or events which are referred to over the course of the interview. The investigator will also encourage the participant to share their screen as they describe their workflows.

First, I'd like to get a little information about who you are and what you do on Wikipedia

  • Which Wikipedias do you edit most regularly?
  • Which non-Wikipedia projects do you edit most regularly?
  • What kind of work do you do on Wikipedia?
  • What kind of work do you do on non-Wikipedia projects?

Now I'd like to learn about the anti-vandalism activities you participate in most frequently...

  • which anti-vandalism activities have you participated in most during the past year?
  • how do these activities relate to other work you do?

Now, let's talk about an anti-vandalism process that you've been heavily involved with recently...

  • tell me a little bit about the process and its goals
  • How collaborative is this activity?
    • Who (what people/roles) do generally coordinate, discuss, or alert when performing these activities?
    • Where and how does coordination, notification, or discussion take place?
  • In a normal week, how many hours do you spend working on this activity?
  • how would someone who had never participated in this process learn that it exists?
    • How would they learn how to participate?
    • If the activity requires specific userrights, how does one attain those?

Tell me a little bit about how it is organized...

  • What tools are used in the course of this activity?
    • Which tools do you use?
    • Which tools do others who you coordinate with (if any) use?

Now I'd like to learn a little more about how you participate in this process. Thinking about the 'work' you do...

  • How do you decide when to participate, and for how long?
  • How do you keep up to date with what's going on, when you’re not actively working on this activity?

Now I'd like to hear about what you think about the activity in general...

  • Tell me about a recent fun or satisfying experience you had while participating in this process
  • Tell me about a situation where you were frustrated while working participating in this process
  • How successful is this process? How do you measure the success of a particular discussion? Of the process as a whole?
  • How important is this process to Wikipedia? Why?
  • Is there any tool that you use that you wish worked differently or better? How would it help you?
  • Is there any tool that your project doesn’t have that you wish it did? How would it help the project?
  • Are there improvements that would be especially useful for getting more people involved?