Research talk:Wikihounding and Machine Learning Analysis/Work log/2018-01-22

Monday, January 22, 2018

Some findings and considerations about the project.

• Hounding and ‘stalking’ are used more or less interchangeably. Across 905 AN/I archive pages, I found 188 threads that had the word ‘stalk’ in the title, and 100 with the term ‘hound’ in the title. A quick check of many of the ‘stalking’ threads confirms that the term is generally used in the same way as hounding. This is despite the fact that ‘hounding’ is the preferred nomenclature, and WP:STALK and WP:Wikistalking both redirect to the section of WP:Harassment on Wikihounding. In some rare cases, ‘stalking’ can instead refer in some cases to real-life stalking behavior, beyond the wiki.
• The vast majority of reported Wikihounding incidents on AN/I have no formal resolution. I looked for several of the standard archive templates in Wikihounding/stalking threads, and only found them in 43 out of 288 (15%) of cases where ‘hound’ or ‘stalk’ was in the thread title. Just eyeballing it, the lack of formal resolution for AN/I reports is pretty widespread, and not unique to reports on WikiHounding.
• When there is resolution, the conclusion is usually ‘not wikihounding’. Out of 42 AN/I threads that had ‘stalk’ or ‘hound’ in the title…
  • 28 were not deemed to be hounding
  • in 7 cases, the resolution was not clear enough to determine from reading the thread
  • In the 9 cases where wikihounding was determined, IP addresses or sock puppets were the perpetrator in 5 of them.
• The person reporting the hounding is not necessarily a victim of hounding.
  • Frequently, the person reporting the hounding is, over the course of the discussion, accused on hounding or other disruptive behavior themselves—by one or more editors other than the alleged perpetrator. I frequently saw people citing WP:BOOMERANG, which redirects to an essay that cautions editors to consider their own actions before making public accusations against others.
  • Sometimes the person reporting the hounding is not the alleged target of hounding, but a concerned third party.
• Wikihounding is reported across multiple venues, not just AN/I.
  • Close to 797 hits when you search incident reports that mention ‘hound’ across all AN subpages: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=500&offset=0&profile=default&search=hound+prefix%3AWikipedia%3AAdministrators%27+noticeboard&searchToken=5cqnws83uuzcsvo1t1uwqu4td
  • Majority (531) at AN/I: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=hound&prefix=Wikipedia%3AAdministrators%27+noticeboard%2FIncidentArchive&fulltext=Search+Incident+archives&fulltext=Search&searchToken=e6gh75s76bpw9lwp5e1193bjk
  • ..but AN/3RR lists 111: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=500&offset=0&profile=default&search=hound+prefix%3AWikipedia%3AAdministrators%27+noticeboard%2F3RR&searchToken=em43hj2ac2yp2d1l297ybu5cq
  • ...and AN/Archive lists 118: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=hound&prefix=Wikipedia%3AAdministrators%27+noticeboard%2FArchive&fulltext=Search+Noticeboard+archives&fulltext=Search&searchToken=8wmztszg5vs8zt9zm7zt7l5a6
  • ...and Arbitration/Requests list 223 (not included in above total, since it’s a separate board) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=500&offset=0&profile=default&search=hound+prefix%3AWikipedia%3AArbitration%2FRequests&searchToken=9z93wz5dsfxqijxbbxxvsrk00
• Wikihounding accusations are often leveled at multiple accounts/editors/IP addresses.
  • Accusations of sockpuppetry are often made in WikiHounding reports. Essentially, the accuser says that multiple accounts controlled by the same editor are being used to follow them around.
  • IP editors are frequently accused of hounding. Because unregistered editors often edit across multiple IP addresses, it can be hard to pin down whether a series of reverts/talk page posts against a single target by multiple IP addresses are hounding, or not.
  • Sometimes a group of editors are accused of hounding a single editor. It is harder to make build a hounding case for this so-called ‘tag-teaming’, assuming the accused hounds are not easily identified as socks, because Wikipedia’s norms and policies around consensus-based decision making favor majority rule, and it’s easier to avoid running afoul of 3RR if multiple people are fighting against a single person.

Below find a set of wikihounding cases where an archive template was added to the top of the thread, indicating it had been officially closed with some resolution. We had hoped that these cases, which were not common, would at least provide us with a set of canonical examples that represented Wikihounding in a straightforward way. However, most of these cases were not in fact determined to be wikihounding at all.