Talk:Wikimedia Fellowships/Project Ideas/Dispute resolution

Hi Steven! Thanks for submitting this great proposal :-)

2 initial questions:

1. Re "When dispute resolution fails, people stew over the issues, get frustrated and at times lash out or even leave the project altogether. People leave every day, and the dispute resolution processes being muddled up, disjointed and at times unorganised is a major contributor to this issue." I'm not disagreeing with this at all, but I think you'd make a stronger case for your proposal if you can provide some evidence or concrete examples - qualitative or quantitative - of how dispute resolution gone wrong is driving active editors away in significant numbers. Proposals that are most likely to move the needle on editor retention are a top priority for Community Fellowships this year, so anything you can provide to back this statement up will be really helpful! Though I know these kind of metrics are often fuzzy and hard to come by, and part of the research project might be to gather them, I'm curious if you have anything to point to already.
2. Do you imagine the scope of work for this proposal might include working together with other community members to enact any of the recommendations for changes to dispute resolution that come out of your research, or are do you expect the final outcome to be purely a presentation of findings for others to pick up and work on?

Siko 22:40, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

Methodology

It is interesting. So if I understand it well, you will be describing how the disputes were handled and what were the results. Will you send to the parties of dispute a questionnaire that they can evaluate dispute process and how they feel about the results?--Juandev (talk) 17:57, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

I'd suggest once you have assembeled a catalog of incidents type use the theory of games to investigate the more abstract the technical side of the dispute (costs, payoffs, options, and strategies) to make protocols for rational resolution/arbitration. (e.g. the edit war is a form of what is called a war of attrition) Taking this scientific aproach will make your suggestions more robust and more authority. OrenBochman (talk) 15:25, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Adoption by actual groups

How do you think that results will be adopted by people, who takes care of conflicts now? How it will be presented to other than English communities? As you are saying, you and others do that on English Wikipedia, which is plus for English Wikipedia, but for other groups it might be kinda alien material.--Juandev (talk) 18:05, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Accepted for fellowship

Congratulations to Steven Zhang, who has been awarded a fellowship to work in the area of dispute resolution! I'll be archiving this proposal, and those who are interested can follow Steven's work on English Wikipedia going forward. Siko Bouterse (WMF) (talk) 23:50, 30 May 2012 (UTC)