Is the plan to share the draft with enwik ArbCom in February or March?

@Barkeep49 If ArbCom has capacity and interest to give feedback more than once, I'd like to request one round of feedback in February to start. The primary goal (to the extent I can foresee it now) is to flag any major item we may have missed in our thinking. We will likely need another feedback in March. If time is limited on you all's end, we will aim for one round of feedback in March. Let me know.

@leila: The Committee is in favour of two rounds of feedback. Thank you for your work on this.

acknowledged and thanks.

We are going to aim to have our first batch of questions or points that can benefit from your feedback ready for you in 2 weeks and if there is time in the agenda and a need for a venue with higher bandwidth capacity for discussion, we can use part of the February ArbCom/WMF meeting to discuss the specific points (@NForrester thank you for this suggestion that you shared in a separate conversation.)

weekly update:

• We fully onboarded Michael to our team and it's been great working with him in discussions and the content already. I think I speak for both Eli and I when I say: we feel relieved to have an expert on ethics onboard. (announcement)
• We have started discussing what the first round of feedback collection can look like. NForrester has offered to help us developing a community engagement strategy (thanks!).
• We have prepared the skeleton along with some questions for the ArbCom folks in preparation for the February 6th meeting.

What we need:

1. It would be great if prior to the February 6th meeting (which is going to be very short) folks from ArbCom have a look at the skeleton. Our primary question for the Tuesday meeting then will be: can you confirm that we are on the right track? Your response to that question will help us with accelerating drill down in the skeleton or iterating (I'm really hoping it's mostly the former;).
2. If ArbCom folks have time to engage with one or more of our questions in the linked doc, that would be great.

To save time at tomorrow's meeting I will confirm that I think this is on the right track.

A couple ideas that I see missing (though perhaps intended to be covered as they are somewhat granular), but which were incredibly relevant to the inciting incident is what changes when a person edits under their real name or clearly links to their real name versus someone who edits under a pseudonym and given the ways that Wikipedia is an inviting research playground, what are ethical ways to deal with Wikipedians who have extensive (15 or even 20+ years) histories of editing.

I likely will not have time to engage with the questions until next week at the earliest but hopefully some of my colleagues will.

What are the key values of Wikipedians? What do they value in research on/about Wikipedia?

Is there a place where members of the community are able to share responses to the above question?

I will say a huge thank you for all of your hard work so far!

In T349415#9519689, @HouseBlaster wrote:

What are the key values of Wikipedians? What do they value in research on/about Wikipedia?

Is there a place where members of the community are able to share responses to the above question?

I will say a huge thank you for all of your hard work so far!

I would just write it here House, though my understanding is there will also be a formal community consultation down the line. But you're here, give your input.

Thanks for engaging so far.
@HouseBlaster I confirm that the plan for engaging the broader community is for the time that we have a good first draft ready. NForrester is working on that and we will share here more info about timelines and ways of engaging once we know more (no later than the 4th week of February).

Weekly updates:

• Eli and I met with ArbCom for a short period of time and did a quick status update, sought alignment on timelines, and agreed on a time/format for clearing the overall skeleton with the committee.
• Eli, Michael and I worked on the paper (primarily introduction), met and agreed on next steps (we will work on sections 4 and 2 in parallel, section 3 is explicitly moved to future work).

(This will serve as our weekly update for this task which usually comes out on Fridays.)

• Thank you to all the ArbCom folks who left comments, questions and suggestions for us in the skeleton document. We have read all of them and will start using them in shaping the document.

• We had an agreement with ArbCom that folks have until February 13th to let us know if we are not in the right track with the skeleton and/or if we are missing one or more important sections. None of the feedback we have received has flagged a missing section or the paper being on a wrong/mistaken track. We are going to consider this skeleton as "stable" and work on expanding it. I acknowledge that we have at least one comment that the skeleton may be too ambitious for the timelines and that some reduction of scope may be needed. We heard you and if we need help with that we will let you know. Thank you for continuing to give us the space to reduce scope as needed. : ) And thank you all for providing your feedback. We feel confident that we are working on a solid ground that we all agree on.

• Some details on progress over the past days (reporting on the work by Eli, Michael and myself):
  • We have written a good first draft of Section 1.
  • We have started to concurrently work on sections 2 and 4.
  • We moved Section 3 to Future Work (with the understanding that data collection about Wikipedians' perception of privacy is important and will require dedicated time post the first deadline if we decide to more work is needed as we had already suspected about that section.)

Section 4 contains a reference to the Terms of Use and the privacy laws mentioned in the Terms of Use but as yet contains no reference to the WMF Universal Code of Conduct, which speaks to the privacy issue as well—and is far more stringent than privacy laws.

Harmonising the document with the Universal Code of Conduct is key to my mind. This has been one of the prime areas of tension and uncertainty.

The Universal Code of Conduct applies to all Wikimedia sites.

Note that the Terms of User contain a specific reference to the Universal Code of Conduct:

"Terms of Use and Policies — You adhere to the below Terms of Use, to the Universal Code of Conduct, and to the applicable community policies when you visit our websites or Projects or participate in our communities."

Providing some updates on progress

• "Introduction" section appears relatively stable at this point
• Work continues on "related work" and "exploring key questions" sections
• Have generated and drafted a number of recommendations for researchers and Wikipedians for the "recommendations" section
• Coordinating with Nathan on the outreach and communication plan, and have begun generating targeted questions for feedback during this process

(I've avoided using section numbers here only because moving original section 3 to future work (now section 5) has affected numbering; however, none of the sections have changed content-wise from the skeleton that was shared some weeks back with ArbCom.)

Progress update 29 March: We're very close to having a stable draft ready for the feedback/input cycle planned. The "related work" and "exploring key questions" sections have come along nicely and are just missing a subsection or two. The recommendations subsections will provide a considerable starting point for conversation during the feedback cycle and we look forward to reviewers' input. We're still coordinating with Nathan for the outreach/feedback cycle to begin with a tentative target date of 8 April.

weekly update:

• We are ready to go live ;) on Monday and start gathering feedback on the current working draft from Wikipedians and Wikipedia researchers. Thanks to everyone who worked collaboratively to bring us to this point, and a special thanks to Eli for continuously improving the draft to bring us to this point.
• T&S worked with Movement Communications to finalize all the details of the community outreach plan.

Weekly update:

• We are receiving feedback. To the best of my knowledge, all of it has come so far to the relevant discussion page and we have not received feedback via email or the community hour we held on Tuesday. Overall the feedback has been very helpful, constructive and supportive.
• We are closing the feedback on April 30th and then will start (with more intensity) updating the draft based on the feedback and otherwise.
• We have said this in other places but worth repeating here: For the coming months, mostly Michael and I will write. We may still invite a couple of other folks to join us for writing depending on the specific areas we want to further expand.

Weekly update: no update.

Weekly update: no update. competing priorities have continued to delay my time on this project. I will be able to update here with more information in the coming couple of weeks.

Weekly update:

• no significant update on my part.
• Eli is back and we briefly discussed the state of the work left. We are meeting on Monday with Michael to plan the next steps to bring the work to the finish line.

Weekly update:

• Eli organized a coordination session between Michael, Eli and myself to has out the next steps.
• We have plans for the coming few weeks to accelerate work on this front and bring it to completion.
• We set an updated deadline of August 20th for finishing the paper.
• We will send the paper and our plan for dissemination to ArbCom on August 20th or slightly after that. The three of us will be available to meet with ArbCom in October (1st?).

side-note: happy to meet with ArbCom folks who will be in Wikimania in a couple of weeks as well. Just let me know if you'd like to meet.

• We set an updated deadline of August 20th for finishing the paper.
• We will send the paper and our plan for dissemination to ArbCom on August 20th or slightly after that. The three of us will be available to meet with ArbCom in October (1st?).

side-note: happy to meet with ArbCom folks who will be in Wikimania in a couple of weeks as well. Just let me know if you'd like to meet.

Thanks for the update. I've let my colleagues know and will leave them to contact you if those who are attending wish to meet.

Weekly update:

• Progress on a number of sections. Thanks to the work by Eli, Michael and Legal (who is now helping with specific portions of the document which is more about privacy policy and also is providing feedback to improve other parts).
• Reviewing talk page comments from the time we collected feedback from the community to make sure all feedback that we could answer is answered in these final passes.
• Section 4 (recommendations) remains the roughest and needs more work from everyone.
• Given the state of Section 4, we need more time to finish the paper. I'm going to update the deadline for this task accordingly (I have not coordinated this change of date with the group but I can see that August 20th is not feasible so I'll change it and we may need to change it further if more time is needed.)

Weekly update:

• We've received feedback from WMF-legal and the human rights team, and turned this feedback into revisions to the white paper.
• We continue to work on revisions, especially focusing on the recommendations sections now.
• This week we had a workshopping session with a colleague from the human rights team to work on recommendations.
• We've completed a detailed review of the talk page feedback and comments, focusing on turning as much of this feedback as possible into direct edits and revisions to the white paper.

No updates this week.

Weekly update:

• Worked on restructuring sections 3 and 4 (key questions and recommendations). This work will continue in the coming week.

Weekly update:

• Eli did a major push over the past two weeks. Michael helped and I helped off and on. The document is super close to be done.
• We got a couple of good real world examples to start testing the document with (researchers who reached out and had questions about how to handle specific privacy related topics).

Looking ahead:

• We need a few more days for the document. We /may/ go past October 1st deadline by a couple of days but not more.
• We should definitely try to meet at least unofficially the ArbCom members who will be attending WikiCon NA 2024 next week. It's a pity to get there and not talk to each other. : )

Weekly update:

• Eli informally connected with some members of enwiki ArbCom during WikiCon NA and did a temperature check on our plans for next steps.
• Given that overall what we had in mind sounded good to folks who Eli talked with we spent the last two weeks finalizing the paper and devising a plan for next steps.
• The paper is now ready for enwiki ArbCom (original requester) to review and sign-off if they see fit. Copy of the paper in a google document along with our questions, discussion suggestions and draft next steps. We hope to discuss these in the upcoming ArbCom meeting in November (if possible for the group).

I'm going to move this task to the sign-off lane until we meet with ArbCom. They will then grant the sign-off or will let us know specific feedback that we can consider implementing before publishing the work. Given that I'm moving this task out of the quarterly lane, we won't provide weekly updates for the task anymore. Instead, we will update the task when substantial updates become available.

And I know this task (and its parent) will have a long-tail before fully being concluded. So I would like to take a moment to thank all of you who contributed to it: a special thanks to Eli who did a lot of work on the paper, to Michael Zimmer whose contributions were critical for us to better understand the broader ethics space. And our colleagues in the Legal department who jumped in a variety of places and ways to help. I will keep the specific thanks and acknowledgements for the closure time but I do think we should all take a moment and celebrate this milestone. cheers! :)

@Barkeep49 I have moved the task to our sign-off lane in preparation for the upcoming conversation with ArbCom. I have also assigned the task to you so it's clear on our end that we are requesting a sign-off from ArbCom. Please feel free to re-assign to someone else in the group. Also, if this doesn't sound right to you for some reason, please assign the task back to me and I'll be the bearer until we all connect. :) (context for sign-off at the start of the paper). Looking forward to the next steps. :)

So as fate would have it, I stepped off ArbCom a few months ago to focus on my U4C work. Were I still on ArbCom I would say that this is "safe to try" and satisfies the request ArbCom made, but will leave that formal process to ArbCom. I have emailed the committee to ask who I should re-assign to and named who I will do so by default if this doesn't get to resolution.

@Barkeep49 thank you for letting me know and your note. (And thank you for your work on U4C). I will remove you as an assignee and assign back to myself for now.

Thank you, @Sdrqaz.

Hi everyone. As a brief update, several Research staffers joined ArbCom for a call last week and we discussed the white paper. Several arbitrators left comments, and we will be looking forward to any revisions prior to eventual clearance and approval on our end. On the whole, arbitrators were very thankful for the work and impressed with its quality. Thank you!