Hi all,
AriadnesThread and I are happy to help clarify some of the concerns and confusion that you noted in your response, working towards a happy resolution for all parties. We'll start by addressing specific aspects of your message:
When deciding whether someone is acting as a part of a larger group and therefore deemed malicious, is the user's branch origin taken into consideration or is it based solely on evidence such as user statement and comments that they were voting in coordination with others?
When we are evaluating a user, their home branch is not a factor in determining if they are part of a brigade or engaging in vote manipulation. In the past, we have had brigades exclusively from EN users, who have also received disciplinary bans. Branch membership will only be weighed when first attempting to understand if a brigade is taking place, and as one of many metrics we evaluate normal activity patterns.
I.. failed to comprehend how this pattern logically justifies the conclusion.. after all, user behavior within any branch - be it EN, CN or others - are similar. Shared branch participation does not automatically concludes coordination.
This is a fair point, allow me to clarify what we meant there. When we say 'coordinated', we mean that the voting activity was centered around a specific idea. In this case, that was seen as 'an attempt to prevent deletion on SCP-268-J'. It was never our goal to characterize international users as a larger group of coordination, that was a mistake in my phrasing; we used it as a notable indicator of potential brigading, which triggered our further investigation. In this case it is an unfortunate situation of all abusive users coming from a single location, which resulted in assumptions about the branch acting as a whole. We will work to avoid confusing language in the future.
We'd like to understand whether this standard has been applied equally to all low-activity users regardless of origin, and/or is activity comparison a standard procedure for international users.
In this situation, we evaluated every user that voted on the page, to look for a break in standard voting pattern that would indicate vote manipulation. This applied to both users who upvoted and downvoted, and evaluated their frequency of activity, voting patterns and further community interactions, for all users, regardless of home branch. During this review, we identified a user from KO who met our criteria, but have not given any further bans on this topic until we ensure that there is a full understanding of how we evaluated and made our decision based on evidence.
For CN users in good faith we would appreciate the clarity: Must a user maintain a certain level of engagement to safely carry out their voting rights? What's the best practice for a newly joined EN user to cast their first few votes?
When we are evaluating voting activity, the biggest indicator that a user is engaging in good faith is that they have left a comment that is more substantial that a single joke, or noting how they voted. As an example, if a user had left a comment expressing what they felt about the article, and did so each time they voted on a translated work, we would interpret that as engaging in good faith on the EN wiki.
As a specific example, the CN user 
Kanie Ja, was banned for vote manipulation based on a sporadic voting pattern, and having voted on works that were the target of previous brigades. Yesterday, the user appealed, and upon further investigation, they had left substantial comments for the EN pages that they voted on, and had a regular, consistent, cadence of voting. Seeing this, Disciplinary realized that they were caught in the initial wave of bans by mistake, and accepted the appeal, unbanning them from the wiki. Conversely, several other accounts were only active in previous suspected brigades with two or three votes per year on controversial or contest-entry pages, and later appealed with insulting language towards the English staff members. Good faith engagement is ultimately the primary indicator, just as it would be for any branch (presumably).
When we are trying to see if a user is participating in vote manipulation, if they provide a reasonable comment, we will most likely consider them engaging in good faith — in the event that they are banned, but were trying to engage in good faith, we highly recommend that they reach out to a member of Disciplinary to appeal their ban. We will always approach an appeal without bias, and investigate further based on the contents of their appeal.
We believe that if you can encourage your users to provide a comment that is more substantial than just saying 'I like this', expressing what or why they liked it, and that, in the event of a ban, they should appeal to the Disciplinary team, we feel that we will be able to avoid issues like this in the future.
There is a common held belief that if someone reads and understands the content of an article and holds the membership in the original site(be it CN or EN), they are entitled to cast a vote as an member. It is also not uncommon for users to be reminded that they may do so if they hold the membership. If this understanding or comment contradicts EN policy, we would greatly appreciate clarification so users may understand the boundaries as they vote.
Neither of these statements is incorrect. A user who is a member of EN is entitled to cast a vote, and users reminding each other to vote on the original is also allowed. In this case, the specific behaviors of issue with voting were, as detailed above, voting without commenting, and voting in a manner that breaks a pattern (for example, voting after a long gap, or only voting on a few pages). In terms of the reminders to vote, the specific issue in this case was the user who tracked the current vote total on EN; for the Disciplinary team, that was a clear indicator that it was not a simple reminder to vote, rather, a direct call to vote such that the rating would be reversed.
Concrete examples, guidelines, clarifications or best practices you could provide would still help users to avoid further missteps and incidents.
I can speak to part of this, as the rest is handled by the Contests team, who I can forward specific questions to if that would be helpful. For what I can say, the indicators we look for during contests include the above detail regarding comments and activity; in addition, we also look if the user has voted on any other contest entries, leaving their thoughts.
When we are evaluating vote manipulation during a contest, one of the biggest indicators is voting exclusively on a single contest entry: when we see this, it is much more difficult to interpret the behavior in good faith. If users from INT branches want to vote during a contest, voting on multiple entries and providing comments will assist in our determinations.
Since translation is a major activity of international sites, we'd also appreciate clarification on, under the current framework and standards, are translations, and the attention they draw from international users thereof, considered a form or organic exposure or potential brigading and manipulation.
Translations are considered a form of organic exposure. EN has no policies that would disallow translations, and we fully believe it to be an important aspect of the collective SCP culture. However, behavior around translations, such as calling for reversing a rating, or calling for giving votes so a content entry might win by only voting on that one is considered potential brigading. As another example, frequently positively discussing and commenting on the translated pages, but only voting on one of the original EN pages would also be considered potential brigading or vote manipulation.
We hope that the above clarifies any confusion and concerns that you and your users may still have, please let us know if there is anything that we can communicate further.
I think, based on this conversation, I would like to work with CN, INT ambassadors, and the other EN Admins to create a guide, defining best practices for engaging in good faith between international wikis. Having a resource, that applies to all users, regardless of home branch, and explains how to respectfully and properly participate in these discussions, voting and more would be useful for all branches, helping to avoid situations like this in the future.
Thanks again,
Queerious - EN Admin, Disciplinary Captain
AriadnesThread - EN Admin, Disciplinary Captain
Hi Queerious and AriadnesThread,
First of all I apologize for the delayed response. It took us some time to carefully consider how to respond. We are deeply grateful for your patience in addressing our questions and answer one by one, with clear and actionable suggestions and standards provided, which we'll pass on to the CN community accordingly.
Thank you as well for clarifying that the presumption of bad faith is not based on user's branch origin and your willingness to re-evaluate each case individually based on the careful investigation of past activities and made them visible in each staff post. We've read through the post and noticed that, the fact that a user has significantly lower activity and little comments in EN compared to that of CN is a major factor of being considered malicious. While we would rather believe this may be due to user's preference for using their native language and therefore being diverted, we understand that if your team would use this as an continuing standard in the future it is not our place to assess that decision. We only hope that this level of transparency and clarity can help resolve the current concerns from the community.
We also appreciate your openness to carefully review appeals and reconsider certain bans. We are also actively informing users of the related rules and instructions of the EN appeal process and encouraging them to explain their situation truthfully.
At the moment we don't have any further questions, and thank you again for your detailed response to them. Our Master Admin Areyoucrazytom mentioned that he is willing to continue the communication in private to resolve some of the remaining disputes, and may reach out to you shortly.
We are especially grateful for the clear and actionable voting guidelines and risk indicators you provided - particularly those regarding contests which might have historically been a high-risk period of potential incidents (as in the future). Regarding your suggestion that user provide substantial comments, and that this is considered an important factor for presumption of good faith, we also found it a very constructive suggestion. Considering that, I am personally planning to write a guide about English terminologies and comment tips for readers who are interested in giving feedback on the original page.
That being said, I believe the motivation and underlying logic of such initiative is to enhance user communication, mutual understands and positive interactions by aiding them more conveniently expressing thoughts and their aesthetic judgments in a second language - rather than because specific users need to carry more responsibility in proving their innocence and spending more time and energy to reach certain level of engagement. Ultimately we hope this effort leads to a more inclusive and integrated community so that specific users will not have to face more risk of being flagged, self-restraint and unnecessary misunderstood in the future.
Please forgive us for some sharp questions in those earlier messages. Those were indeed several common situations that need considering and concerns raised by users, so we do believe that openly facing those concerns and potential institutional risks would help resolving them properly, and may prevent larger misunderstandings in the future. Thank you again for addressing and respond.
If you are willing, we would also welcome more example cases or risk indicators to share with the CN community for their reference and answer confusions, and help them participating in the EN community without missteps. However since the policy enforcement and interpretation lies with EN, user may expect and trust to receive the info directly from the EN wiki. As such, I would personally suggest the resources be posted on the EN wiki too to best increase transparency and credibility.
Once again, thank you again for your willingness to communicate and clarify.
Sincerely,
W Asriel, Administrator
Holy_Darklight, Administrator
MScarlet, Administrator
SCP-CN Staff Team
