[HN Gopher] Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer...
___________________________________________________________________
Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on
Wikipedia
Author : geox
Score : 193 points
Date : 2023-12-05 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (academic.oup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (academic.oup.com)
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Well there's a surprise!
| bawolff wrote:
| This seems a bit to be a - water is wet article.
|
| I think the more interesting question is what is the impact of
| these volunteers leaving. Are the toxic comments directed at
| people who tend to get in the middle of flamewars, or are they
| innocents? Do these people do good work? Or are they just
| annoying people until someone snaps at them in a fit of toxity?
| bdhcuidbebe wrote:
| > I think the more interesting question is what is the impact
| of these volunteers leaving.
|
| Then you might be interested in reading the publication you are
| commenting on, especially under the heading "Results".
| kemayo wrote:
| That just says "there's less activity", and doesn't address
| bawolff's question of quality in any way.
| chefandy wrote:
| Sure-- where you're driving is usually more interesting than
| the highway that will take you there, but this isn't an off-
| the-cuff editorial-- it's presenting a quantitative analysis.
| Trying to study the qualitative impact without data like this
| means merely assuming the fundamental size and shape of the
| problem, which at best reduces it's utility. At worse it points
| you in the completely wrong direction.
| intended wrote:
| There are very few water is wet articles in T&S research. It's
| pretty dang hard to get any good scientific information. It's
| only in the past few years that I have got an idea of churn and
| impact of toxicity behavior online on communities.
|
| I've been looking into this from before the term trust and
| safety existed.
|
| It's THAT bad. Most of our data is behind platform walls.
|
| That water is wet is state of the art.
| Semaphor wrote:
| edit: Misunderstood TFA. Leaving the original comment.
|
| ~~On the other hand, the only toxic comments I experienced on
| Wikipedia were from an editor.~~
| rewmie wrote:
| > On the other hand, the only toxic comments I experienced on
| Wikipedia were from an editor.
|
| Isn't everyone an editor on Wikipedia? By definition, you need
| to be an editor in order to leave comments. Who other than
| editors would leave toxic comments?
| itishappy wrote:
| Am I a marathon runner because I'm theoretically capable of
| it, or do I need to actually run one first?
| Thorrez wrote:
| Leaving a comment on Wikipedia involves editing the talk
| page. So commenting is performing an edit, thus making the
| commenter also an editor.
|
| Also, anyone who is knowledgeable enough to edit a talk
| page most likely has edited regular articles in the past as
| well.
| itishappy wrote:
| Sure, but do you really think that's the intent of the
| article, or are we arguing semantics?
|
| Your second point is a great one.
| rewmie wrote:
| > Sure, but do you really think that's the intent of the
| article, or are we arguing semantics?
|
| It's not semantics. Accusing Wikipedia editors of doing
| something in an attempt at portraying Wikipedia in a
| negative light has the same meaning as blaming wikipedia
| for accepting changes from everyone in the world who
| stumbles upon a page.
|
| By definition, an editor is anyone who edits anything at
| all on Wikipedia. In wikipedia, you don't even need to be
| logged in to edit articles or leave comments.
| Thorrez wrote:
| >Sure, but do you really think that's the intent of the
| article, or are we arguing semantics?
|
| I think the article is using "editor" in a broad way
| meaning all users with accounts. I think we are arguing
| semantics in a way the article isn't. From the article:
|
| >A user's talk page is a place where other editors can
| communicate with the user either on more personal topics
| or to extend their discussion from an article talk page.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I took this to mean those with special rights, so everything
| beyond automatically granted standard access:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_access_levels
| Thorrez wrote:
| Skimming the article, the article isn't using that
| definition. The article's definition seems to be "anyone
| with an account" or "anyone with an account who is active".
|
| > In this paper, we analyze all 57 million comments made on
| user talk pages of 8.5 million editors across the six most
| active language editions of Wikipedia
| rewmie wrote:
| > I took this to mean those with special rights (...)
|
| I know that wikipedia supports granting special rights to
| some editors. I have those. That's why I'm stating that an
| editor does not have special rights, because everyone is an
| editor.
|
| And by the way, in general Wikipedia's "special rights"
| granted to non-administrator user accounts aren't that
| special. They unlock some UI features like bulk editing to
| fight vandalism, move pages, mark edits as minor, etc. See
| for yourself, and compare the difference between the
| permissions granted to Administrator accounts, everyone in
| the world (all users, registered accounts), and other
| groups.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_access_levels#
| T...
|
| Claiming that an editor posted a toxic comment has the same
| weight as claiming that a random passerby shouted at you in
| the street.
| Semaphor wrote:
| The special rights include reverting edits, which is
| pretty powerful when the person in question can insult
| you, but revert whatever you reply.
|
| And I already edited the original comment, explaining
| that I misunderstood.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| FYI anyone can revert any edit just by manually undoing
| changes; what's gated is the one-click button to do so
| ("rollback").
| rewmie wrote:
| > The special rights include reverting edits (...)
|
| No, it really doesn't. Anyone can revert any edit, even
| if you haven't registered an account and/or you aren't
| logged in.
|
| The only thing that the reversion permission capability
| grants you is access to a button in the UI.
|
| Also, all you need to do to be granted access to that
| permission is a) have an account, b) ask for the
| permission, b) not have an abuse-riddled contribution
| history.
| sebstefan wrote:
| There's regular users and then there's "Extended confirmed
| users" who have more permissions and can do things such as
| edit protected pages
|
| >User is automatically added to the group when the account
| has existed for at least 30 days and has made at least 500
| edits. This user access right allows editors to edit and
| create pages that are under extended confirmed protection.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_access_levels
| Thorrez wrote:
| The original article doesn't seem to be making a
| distinction between regular users and extended confirmed
| users. It seems to call them all editors.
| sebstefan wrote:
| Yes, I gathered they meant extended confirmed users
| because I can read context clues
| 9question1 wrote:
| tfw you see a snarky comment on a discussion thread about
| toxic comments
| sebstefan wrote:
| Guilty... I made a wikipedia edit 2 hours ago, too, but
| there was no snark in it
| Thorrez wrote:
| >they
|
| Are you talking about Semaphor or about the original
| article's authors?
| sebstefan wrote:
| I was talking about Semaphor
| rewmie wrote:
| > There's regular users and then there's "Extended
| confirmed users" (...)
|
| The accusation isn't directed at users with specific role-
| oriented permissions. The accusation is directed at
| editors. Everyone in wikipedia is an editor. Even users who
| haven't logged in, or have an account at all. It's a
| nonsense claim, particularly when we take into account that
| the whole concept of a wiki is that everyone in the world
| is an editor.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| I think you're being a bit pedantic.
|
| There are people who rarely make edits on Wikipedia, and
| then there are people who do it all the time and
| participate in the wider culture/community/bureaucracy of
| Wikipedia.
|
| I believe the original comment was talking about people
| who regularly edit Wikipedia articles.
| rewmie wrote:
| > I think you're being a bit pedantic.
|
| I'm not. I'm pointing out the absurdity of complaining
| that in Wikipedia you have editors editing.
|
| > There are people who rarely make edits on Wikipedia
| (...)
|
| It really doesn't matter. Wikipedia allows them to edit
| anything as they please, even if they choose not to.
|
| Again, the whole point of a wiki is that everyone is an
| editor. The very definition of a wiki is that "a website
| or database developed collaboratively by a community of
| users, allowing any user to add and edit content."
|
| I stress "allowing any user to add and edit content."
|
| Any user.
|
| Do you see what I mean?
|
| > I believe the original comment was talking about people
| who regularly edit Wikipedia articles.
|
| Again, the original comment makes no sense because
| everyone is an editor. You cannot add a contribution
| without editing it. You cannot revert a change without
| editing it. Any operation on an article represents an
| edit. Anyone can edit articles on wikipedia. Everyone is
| an editor, even those without user accounts. Don't you
| understand that the original comment makes no sense,
| knowing what a wiki is?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
|
| Adding to this, the original comment tries to refer to
| "Editor" as if it's somekind of authority figure which is
| somehow victimizing him for editing content they added.
| Yet, isn't that the whole concept of a wiki, that anyone
| is free to edit anything they see fit? Do you understand
| the absurdity of that comment?
| jandrese wrote:
| This hasn't really been true for years. Most new editors have
| experienced like this:
|
| They see an article that needs correction or a small
| expansion so they create the account and do the work.
|
| Their work is immediately reverted by an editor.
|
| A few hours later the editor adds their work back, but under
| their own name.
| someone7x wrote:
| > They see an article that needs correction or a small
| expansion so they create the account and do the work.
|
| > Their work is immediately reverted by an editor.
|
| My 2 day wikipedia career in a nutshell, I guess I'm not
| alone.
| justinclift wrote:
| Ouch, that sounds lousy. Any obvious examples you can point
| out?
| rewmie wrote:
| > Ouch, that sounds lousy.
|
| That's the whole concept of a wiki: you edit an article
| like everyone else, you change everyone else's changes as
| you please, and it converges to a stable point by a
| consensus-based process. If you disagree with someone
| else's edit, you can open a debate to settle the dispute.
| southwesterly wrote:
| This was my experience. So I stopped.
| rewmie wrote:
| > Their work is immediately reverted by an editor.
|
| I'm not sure you got the point.
|
| The whole point is that in Wikipedia everyone is an editor.
|
| Even unregistered users are editors, which mean those who
| didn't even bothered to login.
|
| In Wikipedia everyone is an editor. I mean, that's the
| whole concept, isn't it? That's what it was designed to do:
| allow everyone to edit a doc. Everyone is an editor. Do you
| see what I mean?
| Hitton wrote:
| > _For instance, the level of conflict on discussion pages, as
| assessed by raters, has been shown to negatively correlate with
| the quality of the corresponding Wikipedia articles._
|
| An alternative explanation is that "toxic comments" protect
| wikipedia from low quality content, acting as defense mechanism
| against bad editors. So without better study which tries to
| analyze if the critique (regardless of toxicity) is justified,
| it's absolutely useless to make any conclusions from the article.
| shagie wrote:
| I wrote about this a couple of years ago as a post titled
| "Rudeness - the moderation tool of last resort"
|
| Part of that...
|
| > One of those things that comes up time and time again in
| virtual communites is that of "everyone here is mean." There is
| some truth to that.
|
| > Try as we might with "be nice" policies and censoring rude
| comments that have the possibility of driving newcomers away,
| rudeness still thrives. While one component of this is John
| Gabriel's theory ( https://www.penny-
| arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa... ) and that people
| are more likely to act out when protected by some veneer of
| anonymity, it doesn't handle that on usenet of old and many
| professional leaning forums where the link between online and
| real world identity is more tightly coupled for many users.
|
| > Clay Shirky touched on this in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
| where he talks about a community oriented BBS (it was the 70s
| with all the ideals that implies) that was overrun by kids and
| the community there lacked the tools to be able to moderate or
| censor them (these tools were never built because it ran
| counter to those ideals).
|
| > This brings us to Usenet in the 80s and 90s. Usenet was much
| larger than the BBSs of old and it had some moderation tools
| with it. There were moderated news groups that restricted
| posting to only approved posts - this didn't scale well. There
| were also cancel messages as part of the control protocls that
| were part of cancelbot wars against spam. At the personal
| level, there were was really only one tool available - kill
| files which caused specific posts, threads, or users to be
| ignored by you and only you. The reprocussion of this was that
| in order to have someone get disinvited from a news group, one
| had to drive them away with social tools. Rudeness.
|
| > Today's sites are much larger than those BBSs of the 70s and
| the largest of those contest the volume of data of a full
| usenet feed at its height. The community moderation tools have
| simillarly grown in capability as the moderated usnet groups
| would not scale to thousands of posts per day (Reddit has on
| the order of 200k posts per day, Quora and Stack
| Overflow/Exchange have on the order of 10k posts per day).
|
| > The problem of rudeness arises as people run out of the
| ability to moderate using the tools provided in software.
| Votes, the ability to push a post into the workflow of "make it
| dissapear for everyone" and the ability to completely hide a
| post or person from ever showing up on one's feed again - when
| those tools run out or aren't provided the "social" moderation
| tools are the ones that remain.
|
| > Thus rudeness and the attempt to drive an individual away
| because other moderation tools have run out or are ineffective.
| Rudeness is the moderation tool of last resort. When one sees
| the umteenth "how do I draw a pyramid with *" in the first week
| of classes on a programming site - how does one make it go away
| when the moderation tools have been fully exhausted? Be rude
| and hope that the next person seeing it won't post the
| umteenth+1 one.
| rez9x wrote:
| I think your comment is also reinforced by the subjectiveness
| of the question, "What is toxicity?" While I can see a trend of
| decreasing respect for others, both online and in-person, the
| pendulum certainly swings in the other direction. Some
| individuals seek out any opportunities to play the victim and
| feel attacked, whether they do so consciously or not, and this
| seems to lead to those of this mentality calling any critique
| 'toxic'.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I think there's a few layers to what makes said comments be
| seen as "toxic." There's definitely some very standoffish
| individuals in Wikipedia's inner-circle of editors. The
| decisions of editors also often seems very arbitrary. I've seen
| many cases where an editor doesn't allow a fact or citation
| because it's "original research" whilst on other pages the
| opposite is complained of, which is a big problem when articles
| are allowed for subjects that are not necessarily going to be
| written about on CNN/MSNBC/NYT.
|
| And then there are the many talk sections I've seen where a
| petty editor plays the nuh-uh/yeah-huh game.
|
| I'd contribute to Wikipedia, but I have no energy to bicker
| with people who are going to play with definitions or semantics
| just to make articles reflect their world view.
| sgift wrote:
| Ah, yes, the age old "I'm not an asshole! I just have _high_
| standards! "
|
| High standards can be communicated without being toxic. It's
| just more effort. If most people had the same high standards
| for their answers they have on the contributions of others
| (whether on Wikipedia or in general) things would be far
| better.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > High standards can be communicated without being toxic.
|
| Depends on the perception of toxicity. Just not being
| supportive or pointing out objective flaws is sometimes
| perceived as toxic by some people, while others take any sh*t
| and critique and consider it as valuable as long as it's
| true.
|
| This is especially problematic in an international project,
| where multiple cultures clash. Though, this is likely only a
| problem for English Wikipedia.
| hoseja wrote:
| Hey I have a better title:
|
| "Toxic" comments easy to track and quantify for researchers.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| "You're [not your idea] stupid."
|
| "Why can't you do what I asked, Stupid?!"
|
| "WHERE HAVE ALL OUR USERS GONE?!?"
|
| ----
|
| My main wikihandle is two decades old. It still shocks me when a
| fewyearsaccount un-edits my contributions (I know how this rodeo
| works, folks). Even more shocking is when ChatGPT cites one of my
| trivial contributions (e.g. transistor density updates when M2Pro
| chipset was released).
| vasco wrote:
| "Toxic" would not be the thing I'd start with. I'd start with
| "being told no for the first time", which might or not have an
| overlap with toxicity. But I think it's much more likely that
| someone will start making edits, only get uninterested comments
| or bot engagements, keep editing, then at some point someone
| reverts the edits - tells them no, and so they stop.
|
| Potentially this scenario even catches situations like:
|
| 1. User registers
|
| 2. User adds a bunch of promotional edits to multiple pages
|
| 3. At some point someone discovers this, reverts something, tells
| them to go away
|
| 4. User was "caught" so abandons the account and re-registers
|
| If #3 is classified as toxic, this paper would find the same
| results I think.
| snoopsnopp wrote:
| I find this happens with a lot of forums. The most critically
| minded users eventually get exasperated and become toxic after
| repeated bans to "kamikaze" accounts.
| notahacker wrote:
| I suspect the system for scoring "toxic" comments is less
| likely to flag the bureaucratic "I have reverted your edit for
| a second time because it does not meet WP:NPOV or WP:NOR.
| Please be aware of WP:3RR and be prepared to discuss any
| further changes on the talk page" comments about reversion and
| more likely to flag the sort of very angry and personal
| comments that come up when the page being edited is related to
| the culture war or actual longstanding war. Whether the
| _recipient_ of the angry messages was previously a constructive
| contributor to that topic is an open question, of course.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The system almost certainly doesn't address the primary
| problem, which is that a small group of people consider a
| page or topic to be their personal fiefdom and they're
| experts at snowballing people with the most obscure wikipedia
| policies.
|
| A shining example of this would be the page for Alcoholics
| Anonymous, which has a small legion of accounts 'defending'
| it. The accounts espouse, vocally, a victimhood complex -
| that AA is targeted by people "harassing" and "discrediting"
| the program.
|
| The page is _brutally_ censored of any negative information -
| such as their problems with predation ( 'thirteenth
| stepping') and sexual assault, the fact that the program has
| no basis in science and is repeatedly demonstrated to be
| amongst the worst options for addiction treatment. The result
| is a page which is wildly not NPOV - it contains only
| material positive about the founder, program and
| organization.
|
| Someone tried to add mention of a documentary and the prick
| editor claimed the film did not meet notability guidelines
| because it hadn't been screened in the right kind of film
| festivals and thus its _existence_ could not be mentioned.
| novaleaf wrote:
| my son created an account and tried to add a page for his
| middle-school, only to have the page deleted and told it's not
| notable enough to have a page.
|
| after that my son hasn't tried editing Wikipedia.
| Washuu wrote:
| Similar here. I corrected some statistics on a page for a
| vehicle. I had multiple different years of the owner and
| service manuals in had to verify these facts and able to
| source them. Nope, some overlord of the page just kept
| reverting it with no recourse. I never bother to try editing
| again. It is not worth my time to deal with that.
| Tomte wrote:
| Similar. I use Wikipedia a lot, but will under no
| circumstances whatsoever contribute anything, after a bad
| experience with my first edit.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The trick with any sort of halfway controversial edits is
| to discuss at length your planned contribution on the talk
| page, wait until nobody complains, _then_ make the actual
| edit. If you do get reverted, you can point out that you
| had announced the edit in the talk page and no objections
| had been raised. It helps to post on the message boards for
| relevant WikiProjects too.
|
| Yes, Wikipedia policy pages say to be "bold" with editing,
| but that only really works for things like fixing typos. If
| you _know_ that someone might object, you should focus on
| in-depth discussion and let concerns be addressed that way.
| vasco wrote:
| The trick with any sort of halfway controversial edits is
| to not do them, if you want to remain sane.
| Avamander wrote:
| You can also revert the revert a few times, that requires
| arbitration usually.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Seems like Wikipedia should change their policy to say
| "be bold for trivial edits only" then. In fact, if they
| would just say "you're only allowed to make serious
| changes if you're part of the elite cabal of senior
| editors who have devoted their lives to memorizing our
| volumes of policy" instead of continuing to call itself
| "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit", we wouldn't be
| having this discussion; people would at least know what
| the situation is.
| mongol wrote:
| I did that once. Got banned, with no recourse. It was a
| country-specific Wikipedia though, not the English one.
| shagie wrote:
| There are roughly 13,000 middle schools in the United States.
|
| Creating a page for each one _and curating it_ represents a
| significant amount of volunteer work.
|
| The "not notable enough" is in place in part to try to limit
| the amount of pages that need curating.
|
| Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable - but the
| allocation of volunteer curation resources are often
| stretched quite thin on sites that crowdsource their content.
| rurp wrote:
| But his son already did the work to add his school! I don't
| see why adding one random middle school requires that all
| 13,000 be added and kept up to date. Wikipedia has all
| sorts of inconsistencies in what is covered, because it is
| so driven by volunteers and what they want to invest time
| into. I don't see how people adding public institutions
| that they are interested in adding goes against the spirit
| or practical realities of Wikipedia.
| jl6 wrote:
| They have to draw a line somewhere or the project gets
| spammed with self-promotional articles. Requiring
| notability does a decent job of keeping the spam out.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| I'd believe this if it wasn't for the thousands upon
| thousands of pages about the most absurdly obscure Star
| Trek and Star Wars shit.
|
| If wikipedia policies result in pages for minor subplot
| characters in auxiliary pulp trash novels for a space
| western series but not for a real-life school, we have a
| problem.
| shagie wrote:
| It's not the work _now_ that 's at issue but the work of
| the future to fix "Mr. Smith is a poopy head" vandalism
| on content that gets few views.
|
| Things like names of teachers or sizes of current classes
| - those temporal things (which are correct now) become
| broken windows of "someone needs to update it" in the
| future.
|
| And if one says "Ok, this one is acceptable" - then how
| much more maintenance and curation of pages are the core
| group of volunteers expected to take up?
|
| If the answer to _that_ question is "none" - who is
| doing it? or is it going to become a repository of
| outdated information?
|
| Having content is an ongoing cost of time to the people
| who maintain it. If it isn't maintained, it isn't
| valuable (or notable) enough to be put in there in the
| first place.
|
| It might be better served as a part of a larger page that
| covers the school district. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /List_of_Dallas_Independent_Sch... which are a name and
| optionally a note. Other districts don't even have notes
| ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_Scho
| ol_Di... ).
|
| If it was just a paragraph of content that was timeless
| (when established, mascot, municipality, etc...) then
| consider reformatting the school district page (which may
| well exist) to include the information rather than
| creating a new one.
| vasco wrote:
| > It's not the work now that's at issue but the work of
| the future to fix "Mr. Smith is a poopy head" vandalism
| on content that gets few views.
|
| If it gets few views it's not important to fix, and if
| any of the few views cares they can fix it. Lets not
| pretend that each page needs the same level of attention.
| A random middle school wikipedia page having a slightly
| out of date content or even vandalism isn't a big deal at
| all and can be fixed, and if it's not fixed - it has few
| views anyway. Wikipedia already acknowledges this and
| certain pages are much harder to edit than others.
|
| It's like they think they run a paper version of a
| encyclopedia with these rules about what is notable or
| not.
| jowea wrote:
| > The "not notable enough" is in place in part to try to
| limit the amount of pages that need curating.
|
| As someone who leans inclusionist I wondered about that,
| but I think it also has to do with the existence of
| reliable sources. You need them to write an article, and
| the notability guidelines exclude articles that would be
| impossible or hard to write due to lack of sources.
| shagie wrote:
| The extreme inclusionist position (and I've got a straw
| man there) ends up with sites that are full of outdated
| information that few people want to maintain.
|
| Even if we say "ok, the cost of the page on some random
| middle school is 1 minute / year" then as it grows to
| that 13,000 schools - that's 220 hours. Five and a half
| weeks of checking each page once a year for 1 minute with
| a 40 hour week.
|
| And looking, I'm slightly off on the number of schools.
|
| > During the 2020-2021 school year, there were 13,187
| public school districts. These school districts enrolled
| 47,755,349 students across all 50 states and the District
| of Columbia. ( https://ballotpedia.org/Public_school_dist
| rict_(United_State... )
|
| Many school districts have multiple schools (e.g. https:/
| /en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_Sch...
| )
|
| How much time are you willing to spend maintaining
| individual pages as opposed to a page that lists all the
| schools and a little bit about each one. The list page
| takes a similar amount of time to maintain than each page
| as an individual one.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School
| _Di... as another example. Pages for high schools? They
| tend to have sufficient information about them (though
| the high school that I went to doesn't have a page).
| Multiply that number by two for the middle schools and by
| twice again for the elementary schools... and it gets to
| the difficult to maintain realm.
|
| Another example of a school district and note the lack of
| middle school distinct pages - https://en.wikipedia.org/w
| iki/Palo_Alto_Unified_School_Distr...
| Ensorceled wrote:
| They are using an established tool to measure toxicity ("A
| rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to
| make people leave a discussion.") and extreme toxicity ("A very
| hateful, aggressive, disrespectful comment or otherwise very
| likely to make a user leave a discussion or give up on sharing
| their perspective. This attribute is much less sensitive to
| more mild forms of toxicity, such as comments that include
| positive uses of curse words.") not what you are saying.
| paulnpace wrote:
| Gave up looking for a clear definition of what a "toxic comment"
| is. All I found is a statement that they use some score from some
| tool and link to the tool developer's site so I'm required to
| sift through the developer's site to understand what the core
| part of the paper is, or I've missed some other part of the paper
| because they include so many dense paragraphs of nothing useful
| informations (as well as a nice promotion for the tool
| developers).
| Ensorceled wrote:
| A good way to begin to understand about toxic comments is to
| look for the "dead" comments on HN.
|
| Dead comments fall into a few categories: trolling,
| advertisements, conspiracy/culture war and toxic.
|
| It's pretty easy to figure out which is which.
| lolc wrote:
| No the question is how the authors decided which comments
| were toxic for their evaluation. If they say "gut feeling"
| then replication will be greatly hampered.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| The article explains their methodology for identifying and
| tracking toxic comments.
| lolc wrote:
| The original comment said "All I found is a statement
| that they use some score from some tool and link to the
| tool developer's site". So if that's all there is
| regarding classification, their methodology is not nailed
| down very well in my view. But maybe there's more and we
| haven't found it?
| VancouverMan wrote:
| As somebody who wants to see as much discussion as possible,
| even if I might disagree with or dislike what's being
| expressed, I find the moderation here tends to be more
| "toxic" to my user experience than the dead or grayed-out
| comments are.
|
| I wish this site had a setting like "showdead", but that
| disabled all moderation-related impacts on the display of the
| discussion. There wouldn't be any grayed-out comments, for
| example, and the ordering would depend only on when a comment
| was posted.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Agreed, and I'd even be willing to opt out of the karma
| system entirely to get this.
|
| The self-defeating nature of "graying" comments out is just
| utterly mind-blowing. It calls more attention to the
| undesirable content rather than less... yet nobody in power
| seems to understand that. (For starters: if I turn on
| showdead, it means I don't want my view censored. So _stop
| doing it._ )
|
| Anyway, it's OT for this story.
| natch wrote:
| I'm not inside your head so I don't know if you would
| agree, but I would love to see this say content that is
| _deemed_ undesirable as opposed to just straight
| "undesirable."
|
| My problem with gray text is a bit different: Since the
| dumbness of crowds can happen even on HN, I'd like to be
| able read comments myself and decide for myself what to
| think about them.
|
| With some topics the hater community is very strong, and
| comments get so light so fast they cannot even be read
| without some disruptive workflow, and they aren't always
| useless comments.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Yeah, we're basically in agreement there.
|
| In most cases, I'd say those comment threads that end up
| almost entirely grayed out were never good candidates for
| HN stories in the first place.
| natch wrote:
| True, and maybe I went a little far. The ones that
| quickly get unreadable are invariably pretty dismal.
| Sometimes it's just morbid curiosity about what they
| said.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| It's not easy. Definition of toxicity is fluid. Also,
| polotical topics are regularly flagged, even though source
| information is reliable and solid.
|
| I miss something like explanation/select of category if
| giving a flag. Without any explanation, why link is flagged,
| no one is learning.
| cbondurant wrote:
| I had to ctrl+f to navigate enough to find it but they mention
| that their method for identifying toxic comments is under the
| methods and materials section. Its just some kind of trained ML
| model. In that section they link to a page (Id share it
| directly but it clearly has some annoying "heres your temporary
| access key" query parameters that would probably cause the link
| to break super fast) that gives examples of how it ranks
| different kinds of comments, and I think that list of examples
| is enough to trust that it does at least well enough at
| classifying to draw at least light conclusions from.
| acadapter wrote:
| It's all just a matter of expectations. Today's Wikipedia has a
| quite difficult learning curve for making proper and lasting
| contributions.
|
| The "Visual Editor" should be confined to the Talk: pages, so
| that the difficulty of editing can be higher, to match the
| difficulty of dealing with Wikipedia's internal bureaucracy.
| squigz wrote:
| As an occasional Wikipedia editor... I would hate this so much.
| reddalo wrote:
| I agree. The Visual Editor has simplified editing Wikipedia
| pages from a technical standpoint, but at the same time
| lowering the bar to edit pages also lowered the quality of many
| of those edits, making moderation even more difficult.
|
| It's a vicious circle.
| tamarlikesdata wrote:
| Add community notes
| collyw wrote:
| The talk tab generally has more interesting stuff than the main
| article these days.
| bivvic wrote:
| I've left acerbic comments in replies to editors before, but only
| when they were being rude, obstructive, dismissive or sarcastic
| themselves. I do hope it changed their behavior, like the article
| suggests.
|
| Some of these people get so full of themselves and treat the
| pages they are interested in like their own little fiefdoms that
| no-one else is allowed to touch.
| kranke155 wrote:
| The Portuguese Wikipedia has been completely taken over by a
| toxic mega group that's bent the rules to get what they want.
|
| They constantly harass you, and they invent rules if needed to
| get articles down that they don't like.
| jowea wrote:
| People complain about that in the English Wikipedia but I guess
| it can be even worse in the smaller ones? Weren't a few of them
| basically captured by the local far-right propagandists?
|
| Is this group you're talking about political or just the "I/we
| own this and will do this my way" of English Wikipedia?
| whstl wrote:
| I remember it depending on the article. There are "turfs", and
| the rules aren't consistent between them. Some guy goes nuts on
| the movies and television articles and nobody can get anything
| through, it gets reverted with a "this is not necessary".
|
| On science and engineering pages I remember there being a lot
| of unsourced material that felt more like a school paper than
| an encyclopedia. The quality was really bad, but it was still
| hard to change.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Have they met...humans?
| boomlinde wrote:
| I'd rather have some uncouth editor berate me in a discussion
| than my personal editing experience of sometimes having simple
| and obvious, even clerical changes to non-contentious topics
| immediately reverted with no comment.
|
| It's not that I take it personally, because I realize that no one
| cared to review the edits before reversion. It's just that "be
| bold" in the sense that it's applied by me in combination with
| how it's applied by overprotective bots (maybe?) or at worst
| diligent but careless editors is a massive waste of time and
| energy. So I've stopped contributing altogether.
| donatj wrote:
| I have been making small contributions for fifteen or so years. I
| don't much feel like doing it anymore after a spurt of bad
| interactions.
|
| About a year ago I created a Wikipedia page for a TV personality
| and author I enjoy. Spent literal hours on it collecting
| citations and what have you. Within a couple hours the page was
| deleted for not being noteworthy. He had his own TV show, has
| multiple published books and a popular podcast. Seems noteworthy
| enough to me, but what do I know.
|
| A couple months ago I tried to create a page on a local tractor
| company that used to be really important to my hometowns economy.
| There was an existing section about the company on one of their
| specific tractors pages. I used that with its citations as the
| basis for the new page.
|
| I did scan the citations and they seemed fine. I even fixed one
| that was broken with a wayback machine link. What I didn't do was
| read them word for word. Well turns out multiple sections of the
| text I had moved from the tractors page were straight up lifted
| from their sources. Within 5 minutes of posting the page, someone
| else did read my citations word for word, and it was marked for
| "rapid deletion for copyright infringement". No chance to
| explain. No chance to reword. Just gone completely and I didn't
| have a local copy of the article.
|
| It was particularly frustrating because the moved text only
| accounted for about 20% of the page by the time I was done.
|
| Beyond that the history of my author page is now marked with a
| copyright infringement warning that if I do it again I'll be
| banned.
|
| I don't think I want to play in their sandbox anymore.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Reminds me of my experience with Stackoverflow. I tried to
| solve a very specific problem with Windows installers. I only
| got some responses from oldtimers that basically said "why
| would you do such a thing?"and similar. It felt extremely
| unwelcoming. It's ok to not answer but why be so dismissive? I
| guess the only questions they like are things like "how do I
| calculate 2+2 in python?". Anything more complicated is not
| acceptable.
| julianeon wrote:
| I think StackOverflow is a good example of a site where
| cultural norms have become a life-threatening issue. The site
| has experienced a sharp drop in search traffic and yet people
| still say it's unfriendly all the time. Fixing that
| perception should be a top priority.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Fixing the unfriendly perception is why stack overflow is
| dead. Signal to noise for professionals is now close to
| zero. Maybe it's friendlier, but it's also no longer worth
| visiting other than the historical record.
| wirrbel wrote:
| From my last 5 stack overflow questions, 3 were some mod
| closing the question with a rationale that's ridiculous.
|
| Most questions are now answered in the comments instead
| of being written as an answer below the question and I
| assume this is because people have had bad experiences
| with gate keeper mods when writing answers.
|
| I have reasonably high karma.
|
| I don't think quality deteriorated due to some attempts
| to make the site more friendly. It's the spirit of a
| county rabbit breeders association that drives people
| away
| jstarfish wrote:
| I (used to) answer questions in comments. It became too
| discouraging to post an answer that took 20 minutes to
| write and get _immediately_ downvoted because someone
| disagrees with any single part of it (or they 're trying
| to promote their own answer by suppressing everyone
| else's).
|
| Comments can't be downvoted. MetaFilter had the right of
| it.
| shagie wrote:
| Saying "mod on stack overflow" is much like saying
| "editor on Wikipedia".
|
| Where these other community members who had the close
| vote privilege? Or an elected moderator that had a
| diamond in their name to designate that?
| jstarfish wrote:
| In the rare occasion I'm desperate enough to ask a
| question, I dread seeing the red inbox notification. I
| think I've abandoned the last three questions I asked
| because I couldn't stomach facing the drama I expected.
|
| The cultural norms of internet forums should never have
| been allowed to take root on a Q&A site. There is nothing
| "professional" (or even _helpful_ ) about answering
| questions with out-of-scope proscriptions.
|
| Your plumber doesn't show up asking _why_ you want your
| toilet fixed, nor does he tell you your house is messy,
| give you dietary advice and passive-aggressively insinuate
| you need to fix your roof. SO responders are mini-spouse
| syndrome incarnate.
| tivert wrote:
| Yeah, whenever I ask a question on SO, I literally have to
| write paragraphs of text exhorting people to answer _my_
| question instead of a different question they find easier, or
| why my question is not the same as some vaguely similar one.
|
| Then I have to constantly remind people about the same stuff
| in the comments.
|
| That culture problem has been getting worse and worse at SO
| over time. I only go there as a last resort.
| falserum wrote:
| Sources?
|
| (Edit: Let's add /s just in case)
| ryandrake wrote:
| StackOverflow is a great resource if you want to know how
| you would have done some programming task in 2009. Their
| cultural aversion to new/updated content has frozen them in
| time.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Agreed. Certain categories should probably be purged
| every 5 years or so. In many areas there is no value in
| learning how things got done years ago. Obviously, there
| are other areas where the fundamentals haven't changed
| since the last decades.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I found SO very frustrating until one of the moderators
| explained it rather clearly: SO isn't about me (or you).
| They don't want to help me (or you). They want to help
| everyone else.
|
| In that light all the weirdness made sense. Of course, _I_
| am very interested in getting _my_ problems solved, so I
| simply stopped asking on SO to avoid the frustration.
| donatj wrote:
| Generally I've had pretty good luck with Stack Overflow.
| Recently however I had a ten year old popular question about
| how to read terminal responses in a shell script removed b/c
| some mod decided questions about shell scripts belonged on
| "another Stack Exchange site".
| borbulon wrote:
| I had a similar experience in SO, I used the term "the most
| bulletproof-y way I can think of" or something like that in
| my answer, definitely used "bulletproof-y." Someone responded
| with something like "You shouldn't say that. Nothing's
| _really_ bulletproof, you know. "
| medstrom wrote:
| Another victim of deletionism. You might like
| https://gwern.net/inclusionism#no-club-that-would-have-me
| technothrasher wrote:
| I recently read a page on a 19th century clock maker and found
| it poorly sourced and very factually incorrect in many places.
| I thought briefly about putting in the work to correct the page
| and provide good sources and such, but I read posts like yours
| and any energy I might have for it just evaporated.
| some_random wrote:
| Well duh, that's just what you get for trying to contribute
| without at least a Bachelors in Wikipedia Law with a minor in
| Editor Politicking
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I had a similar experience a few years ago. I started a new
| topic and immediately I had some guy marking it for deletion.
| In the talk page he made various claims, almost all of them
| nonsensical, apparently with goal of getting me to go away.
| Eventually, after some fairly harsh replies, he went away, and
| the pages stand to this day.
|
| But it worked, I gave up soon after and haven't contributed
| since.
|
| It's like the existing editors want to keep WP all to
| themselves and don't appreciate "outsiders" interfering. The
| irony is I'd been contributing since 2002 off an on, but that
| made no difference.
| JackFr wrote:
| > Eventually, after some fairly harsh replies, he went away,
| and the pages stand to this day.
|
| Which brings up the point I was going to make about TFA. If
| 'toxic' comments are an effective way to reduce the impact of
| bad editors, then it's not clear that 'toxic' comments have a
| negative effect on the quality of Wikipedia. They might be
| improving it.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Just to be clear, I wasn't toxic (although unclear what the
| definition exactly is), I just vigorously called him out on
| his bullshit.
| lelanthran wrote:
| I hate to dogpile and I almost never do, but the parent's and
| GP's experiences are almost the same as mine.
|
| It doesn't take too much blatantly dishonest interaction
| before I decide "life is too short", regardless of whether it
| is on Wikipedia or elsewhere.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| I expect Wikipedia to collapse under its own weight and hard
| fork within the next 10 years. I think it would be a shattering
| like Twitter if the content wasn't under a permissive license.
| Instead I think it's going to be like WoWWiki being acquired
| and forking to Wowpedia, and then Wowpedia being acquired and
| forking to Warcraft Wiki.
|
| The community around it is extremely unwelcoming and has
| calcified - only the most cynical and bitter editors remain. I
| know of a couple of the principles of the site, "be bold" and
| "assume good faith", I don't think those are followed or
| respected anymore.
|
| And the finances of the foundation, good lord.
| borbulon wrote:
| > And the finances of the foundation, good lord.
|
| Please expound? Or a link is fine, too.
| martin_a wrote:
| Maybe start here: https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/20/ca
| sh_rich_wikipedia_c...
|
| While 10 years old, things haven't gotten better but worse.
| Seems like lots of projects besides the "core product"
| Wikipedia are being founded. Obviously people don't like
| that because they want the money to be used for
| preserving/building/extending Wikipedia.
| vasco wrote:
| Any cursory googling of their finances would show you that
| they balooned and instead of using said finances to run the
| website they ask for more millions of dollars to sponsor a
| bunch of unrelated charities and hire a bunch of executives
| to manage such use of the funds.
|
| I wish someone would hard-fork it already and stick to a
| promise of strictly sticking to the core job of operating
| wikipedia the website, with a small dedicated team.
|
| Plus they don't need any more money, they have enough money
| to run it for a long long time already and if they keep
| doing a good job people will keep donating. I don't
| understand this model of "we need to ensure we survive
| forever as fast as possible by accumulating a billion
| dollar endowment". Nonprofits should have ~5-10 years
| runway max and keep getting donations if they keep doing a
| good job. I don't trust any organization forever. What
| incentive do they have to be useful and welcoming if they
| have a forever endowment?
| 6510 wrote:
| You could make a fantastic fork if you simply stop
| pretending that credentials can not be validated. It then
| follows that 5 angry narcissist anons do not equal in
| value a professor.
|
| Then you can further simplify if you employ expert
| moderators who have the final say in everything. The
| infinite size discussions back stage serve no purpose.
|
| I bet people had tons of ideas for other improvements.
| (think: A distributed system with fancy api's for the
| robot overlords.)
| adastra22 wrote:
| Volumes have been written on the ballooning budgets of
| Wikimedia foundation, of which only a trivially small
| amount goes towards hosting costs. In mobile rn, but Google
| should get you plenty of results.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| I've read stuff from insiders that the foundation spending
| grows exponentially year-after-year and they use those
| scare banners that "wikipedia is under threat" to collect
| more money and grow even more, the money is completely
| unrelated to hosting the site. This is a recent article
| from a year ago:
|
| https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-
| fou...
| Viv_moira wrote:
| Wikipedia has an ongoing project on improving articles on the
| subject of western esotericism (quite interesting one even for
| "scientifially-minded" if you look at the origins of the Royal
| Society and the surrounding protosciences). I've been using
| Wikipedia since its early beginnings, on my primary account
| loosely contributing for well over a decade and many of my
| edits from years ago were left unchanged.
|
| A few months ago I've tried creating a small page about a
| modern-day occultist who seems to have near Indiana Jones
| status in that community for digging out one well-known magical
| ritual from medieval archives all over Europe with academic
| scrutiny (the Abramelin ritual, A Dark Song is a recent
| interesting movie about it). His name already was mentioned on
| some related pages.
|
| Went through some lengths searching for more secondary material
| after they asked for it. Had hours of conversations via
| Wikipedia IRC to make sure I deliver exactly what is needed
| (and they claimed my sources are sufficient there). But even
| several academic papers discussing his work were not enough for
| the admin in charge, apparently his whole bio needs to be in a
| secondary source for him to be considered "noteworthy" - which
| seems to be an impossible demand in this small community.
|
| I get the danger of self-promotion, Wikipedia has a few obvious
| pages of company CEOs self-promoting, who probably asked some
| poor employee bloke to write it. But meanwhile Wikipedia is
| scattered with obvious industry propaganda / damage control
| (see the suspiciously detailed Monsanto damage-controlling
| articles on glyphosate or the Seralini affair; and some more
| recent pharma-related topics) and literal advertisements from
| several industries. Just check out that page about Justin
| Bieber portraying that kid as some modern-day musical genius.
| Industry marketing departments - of course - do have the
| resources to literally fight for their articles full-time. On
| top of it this all severely and widely influences public
| opinion - these articles are much more widely read than one
| about a well-known author in a hidden subculture -, and nobody
| seems to be interested in doing something about it.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| I'm sure your already aware of it, but if anyone is
| interested in digging into western esotericism now, the
| podcast is great:
|
| https://shwep.net/
|
| But it should really be accompanied by the History of
| Philosophy without any gaps podcast for more historical
| context. It's very interesting to hear the contrast between
| the "mainstream" and the "underground" takes on the exact
| same philosophers throughout history.
| Viv_moira wrote:
| Thank you, this looks great (and quite academic, which
| seems difficult to come by). You likely know about him, but
| Wouter Hanegraaff, who holds an academic chair about
| western esotericism could be interesting to you.
| matrix87 wrote:
| > and some more recent pharma-related topics
|
| I'm kind of curious now, what are the topics?
| EnigmaFlare wrote:
| > He had his own TV show, has multiple published books and a
| popular podcast.
|
| That alone doesn't meet Wikipedia's requirements for
| noteworthiness. Some of the sources you used have to be
| _independent_. Eg. published biographies written by someone
| else, an independent TV show about him (not starring him), etc.
| Otherwise any random social media influencer could be included
| if they publish their content in various formats.
| martin_a wrote:
| > Otherwise any random social media influencer could be
| included if they publish their content in various formats.
|
| Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but... Why not?
|
| I know that's an age old question in Wikipedia, but if people
| are happy to write and edit articles about their niche of
| interest... Let them do it, maybe they'll contribute even
| more to other topics.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I tend to be an advocate for including more rather than
| less, but one argument for requiring a baseline level of
| notability is that sufficiently obscure topics are
| difficult to verify information about _as well as_ making
| it unlikely that people will notice, and Wikipedia gives
| additional credibility to whatever 's currently written
| there (whether it should or not, it _does_ ).
|
| Less obscure topics are both easier to verify and more
| likely to have someone looking at them and going "wait,
| what, that's not right...".
| wirrbel wrote:
| I think there is a certain danger associated. I was a
| watcher of a few Wikipedia lemmas on esoteric topics and it
| was quite hard to keep these articles grounded in reality,
| I believe some actors on there were Astro turfing to sell
| more scams energy devices, and part of their strategy was
| to have a fitting, non-critical Wikipedia article to the
| esoterica they sell.
|
| I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore for the obvious
| reasons. Now there is one person less making sure that the
| article on Orgon Energy something states that it's not a
| concept accepted by science.
|
| My point is the more articles the less likely is it that a
| community can maintain the information and reach a certain
| consensus on what would be a neutral view when phrasing the
| article.
| adastra22 wrote:
| And what's wrong with that? Are you worried that you'll run
| out of bits?
| EnigmaFlare wrote:
| Not personally, but it's Wikipedia's rules.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Otherwise any random social media influencer could be
| included if they publish their content in various formats._
|
| I have yet to hear a compelling reason why this would be a
| bad thing. Are you able to expand on why?
| EnigmaFlare wrote:
| I'm guessing because of self-promotion as well as the fact
| that if nobody's written about them, they probably aren't
| that significant. Wikipedia says it's not meant to be a
| collection of _all_ human knowledge.
| Zuiii wrote:
| Same thing happened to me but in my case, I added a simple
| "citation needed" on a statement that was objectively false
| (can be proven by simply going to the vendor's landing page).
| The citation needed tag got reverted almost instantly and I was
| told that adding this tag was inappropriate and constituted
| sabotage. I never clicked that edit tab again.
|
| The thing is, I don't blame the editor. He's high on the smell
| of his own farts. I blame wikipedia for enabling him. At least
| with stack overflow, they try to make fighting against this
| kind of corruption easier by making it's voting-based
| moderation system visible. Not wikipedia. It's opaque. It
| reminds me a lot of governments.
|
| Anyway, I still notice false statements on wikipedia from time
| to time, but I always smirk to myself and carry on :)
| 6510 wrote:
| I've observed this phenomenon for a while. The people deleting
| these pretty much do nothing else. They are some how considered
| valuable contributors. Something I've mocked loudly. The effect
| is that some topics/categories have wild outgrowth of articles
| even the best of us would doubt necessary but certainly
| wouldn't care enough to attempt to delete it. Every popstar,
| every album, every song on the album, covers of it, each their
| own article. It would be wild if STEM editors got the memo.
|
| Who the hell would not want an article about a tractor company?
| Tractor are more important than discography. It gets even more
| stupid if we assume your articles really needed work. Who is to
| do the work if it is not allowed?
|
| They should just ban the deletionists starting with the ones
| who didn't contribute a single sentence for years. Filling talk
| pages with nothing that creates articles.
|
| The worse case I've seen was a guy creating articles about
| (mostly old) books for many years followed by this giant
| caravan of deletionists who sometimes deleted the article
| immediately, sometimes after a week, sometimes a month,
| sometimes they exchanged troll messages among their own for a
| whole year. Eventually they deleted the articles faster than he
| created them with ever cheaper excuses until eventually the
| person creating them was the excuse for deletion. Thousands of
| articles gone, all good articles. I know all of the guidelines,
| I know when it should be good enough.
| rdedev wrote:
| Only slightly tangential to parents post but I hate that
| Wikipedia moderators need articles to be import enough. A lot
| of deep dive articles into niche shows are all relegated to
| fandom wikis. Those sites provide no way to get a dump or even
| has any sort of knowledge graph
|
| I had been working with the zeshel dataset and wanted to build
| a knowledge graph on top of the dataset for the model that I
| was planning to build. If those articles were a part of
| Wikipedia, there would have atleast been some effort integrate
| them to the larger Wikipedia knowledge graph
| grpt wrote:
| > Spent literal hours on it collecting citations and what have
| you. Within a couple hours the page was deleted
|
| > No chance to explain. No chance to reword. Just gone
| completely
|
| I've had the same experience. It requires too little effort to
| dump other people's contributions. I don't understand the super
| users' motivations in cases like this.
| Viv_moira wrote:
| I don't understand the lack of respect towards other people's
| obvious efforts. Probably has a psychological side to it.
| bawolff wrote:
| > About a year ago I created a Wikipedia page for a TV
| personality and author I enjoy. Spent literal hours on it
| collecting citations and what have you. Within a couple hours
| the page was deleted for not being noteworthy. He had his own
| TV show, has multiple published books and a popular podcast.
| Seems noteworthy enough to me, but what do I know.
|
| Would this be Andrew Heaton? Here is the discussion:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
| it doesn't look particularly contested.
|
| Like there is always going to be disagreements about what
| should or shouldn't be an article, but this case seems pretty
| reasonable and hardly a close call.
|
| The wikipedians claimed there was no independent coverage of
| this person, and nobody disagreed. Seems reasonable to delete
| in such circumstances.
|
| ----
|
| > Within 5 minutes of posting the page, someone else did read
| my citations word for word, and it was marked for "rapid
| deletion for copyright infringement". No chance to explain. No
| chance to reword. Just gone completely and I didn't have a
| local copy of the article.
|
| Well yes, copyvios put wikipedia in disrepute so they are
| handled quickly. That doesn't mean it is the end of everything
| - you can still discuss after it was deleted. Even if it
| remains deleted an admin would likely be willing to give you
| the non copyvio part if you asked.
| josefritz wrote:
| I gave up contributing to Wikipedia when I looked back and found
| how much had been deleted. The deletionists have won the war.
| tptacek wrote:
| That being the literal premise of the project, it's the outcome
| you'd have expected.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| There are a LOT of people putting quotes around "toxic" in this
| thread and a lot of people claiming to not know what a toxic
| comment is at all.
|
| Really hard not to assume bad faith here.
| Levitz wrote:
| Hard disagree. Toxic itself is a term used precisely because
| it's nebulous enough.
|
| Note it's not "obscene", or "insulting" or "offensive". "Toxic"
| here serves as a synonym to "bad", which meaning is entirely
| subjective.
|
| This comment of mine might be considered toxic, your comment
| might too, there is no way to argue otherwise since it entirely
| depends on the beholder.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Toxic in this context means rude, disrespectful and
| unreasonable. Insulting and offensive are just as subjective
| as rude or disrespectful.
|
| We just have a culture of "sticks and stones" and people who
| leave toxic conversations are called "snowflakes" and told to
| "grow thicker skin".
| epgui wrote:
| I can say assuredly that toxicity and politicization (IRL, not
| just on wiki) also makes the vast majority (>99%) of science
| experts refrain from trying to engage with the public. The
| experts that do engage tend to be outliers, which sometimes
| exacerbates the public's distorted impressions of science
| questions.
| tivert wrote:
| Here's how they define toxicity (only clearly described in their
| "Supplementary material"): https://oup.silverchair-
| cdn.com/oup/backfile/Content_public/...
|
| Honestly, that's probably the most "measurable" kind of toxicity,
| but Wikipedia has a much bigger problem with toxicity than that.
| The whole place is infused with passive-aggression (by policy)
| and toxic double-standards. IMHO, you have to be deeply weird to
| be a frequent contributor.
| tptacek wrote:
| And yet it's one of the crowning achievements of the entire
| Internet, and a contender for one of the most important written
| works of the last century. This is always the challenge trying
| to dismiss Wikipedia: something they're doing is working, not
| just well, but well on a level that is virtually unprecedented.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Give it time. As Wikipedia has become more and more obsessed
| with being "encyclopedic", I've noticed that they are
| increasingly ending up with articles that are stripped of any
| useful information.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Idea of centralized and universal interpenetration of
| information soon or later bump into boundaries. By
| definition, it's impossible approach. Interpretation vary
| with knowledge, culture and is shaped by politics,
| religion, regime, etc.
| juliusdavies wrote:
| I consider Wikipedia to be the last standing wonder of the
| WWW (world wide web).
|
| - Google search results get worse every year.
|
| - Stackoverflow lies in ruins (albeit the ruins are still
| useful).
|
| - ICQ/Gtalk/AIM completely dead and all in silos now (Slack).
|
| - Twitter is dead.
|
| - Facebook is too annoying now.
|
| Google Maps is still amazing, but I consider that more a
| miracle of the internet as opposed to a miracle of the WWW,
| since the data is essentially sourced commercially
| (satellites and maps), whereas with the examples above the
| data was sourced communally.
|
| And so I think it's inevitable Wikipedia will die within my
| lifetime. Probably within the decade. I suspect my children
| will never get to enjoy the miraculous shockingly glorious
| human affirming paradox of Wikipedia. Their (public school)
| teachers senselessly already tell them to avoid it. :-(
|
| I don't think Wikipedia will die for any specific technical
| or political reason. I just think it will die because
| everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before
| already has, so why not Wikipedia?
| yesco wrote:
| > So why not Wikipedia?
|
| - Cheap to host, just text and images
|
| - Funded by non-profit with _too_ much funding
|
| - All images are permissively licensed
|
| - Easily archived
|
| - Easily forked
|
| The only potential "death" I can ever see happening to
| Wikipedia is the kind that happens from some kind of
| fracturing, similar to what we often see with fan wikis.
| But this kind of outcome could be a good thing really,
| multiple competing Wikipedia's would probably help keep
| each other honest, and wouldn't functionally be too
| different than the non-english sections of Wikipedia that
| already exist.
|
| If anything I'm a bit concerned that Wikipedia might be
| getting a bit _too_ influential than an encyclopedia aught
| to be.
| rurp wrote:
| I sadly agree with everything you said, except would add
| that Google Maps has already died for many users outside of
| urban areas. Satellite view has always been great for
| scouting outdoor areas but the app falls apart if you
| actually go anywhere with poor service and try to use it.
|
| One of the most basic features, saving a pin on a map,
| broke years ago and despite many complaints on their
| support forum it hasn't been fixed. Directions can be
| terrible in less traveled areas, and dangerous if followed
| blindly since they will happily lead you down roads that
| require 4x4 or are totally impassible. Not to mention saved
| offline maps are unreliable and the UI clutter has gotten
| drasticaly worse over the years.
|
| Maps still works fine for the typical things a Google
| emplyee cares about like getting directions in a well
| traveled city or finding places to shop, but it's only a
| matter of time before those usecases get crushed under the
| ever-building pressures of short term monetization,
| enshittification, and Google's general apathy and lack of
| care for users.
| jowea wrote:
| > Their (public school) teachers senselessly already tell
| them to avoid it. :-(
|
| Weren't they doing that from the beginning? I get the
| feeling this feeling has gone down not up.
|
| >I don't think Wikipedia will die for any specific
| technical or political reason. I just think it will die
| because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or
| before already has, so why not Wikipedia?
|
| It still seems to be surviving. Editor count may be down
| but a lot of the articles that have to be written already
| exist. It may stop improving much and only include new
| events but I don't think it will die until there's a
| replacement. Maybe people will just consult LLMs for
| general information and never visit Wikipedia?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > Their (public school) teachers senselessly already tell
| them to avoid it. :-(
|
| Teachers have been telling students to avoid it since the
| beginning, this is not a new development. If anything, I
| think teachers may be _more_ accepting of it than in the
| past, particularly for finding citable sources.
| port515 wrote:
| You forgot Digg
| zlg_codes wrote:
| We don't deserve the Internet, frankly. For every boon it
| gives us, there's another dark edge that serves power
| brokers, corporations, or governments.
|
| Why, oh why, does nothing ever help the common man?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Wikipedia's flaws are more subtle. Pages sometimes present
| controversial, or even wrong claims as unambiguously true.
| Note, this is not actually that bad on pages that are clearly
| covering controversial topics (namely historical & political
| topics). The issue is more prevalent on niche topics where
| the average reader wouldn't recognize the controversy being
| claimed. I've sometimes encountered citations where the cited
| material directly contradicts the claim made on the page.
|
| I highly suggest reading the talk page of wikipedia articles.
| Not just the talk page, but read through the history of the
| talk page too. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?titl
| e=Talk:Ada_Lovelace...
| lmm wrote:
| I don't think anything they're doing today is working. They
| had something great in, like, 2008, and have been at best
| coasting since then.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| [delayed]
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| To some degree you see this pattern repeated over and over
| anytime you have an organization gain any sort of longevity.
|
| A culture develops to create a power structure that favors
| those who have devoted a large portion of their personal
| identity to the success of the organization. This culture
| serves as a moat against anyone who would integrate themselves
| within the organization and attempt drastic changes that would
| disrupt the existing power balance or pose an existential
| threat to the organization.
|
| As time passes, more layers get added in response to various
| perceived attempts to subvert the organization until a critical
| mass is reached in which the organization suffers from a brain
| drain (via retirement, loss of interest, etc.) with the
| barriers too high and rewards too meager for new(er) qualified
| individuals to consider filling the void. The organization then
| continues forward in a zombie-like state until it either fails
| or becomes irrelevant.
| Gare wrote:
| I agree. Is there any way to "inoculate" organisation to
| prevent this failure mode?
| EGreg wrote:
| So basically, worse than StackOverflow? :-P
|
| Seems the nastier people are to contributors, the better the
| end product is for the 10000x more people reading it.
|
| You know all those cruel piano teachers in Russia? But the
| audience actually wanted to hear the pianists later in life!
| It's like that... but collaborating on content, with NO
| CELEBRITIES :)
| busyant wrote:
| > IMHO, you have to be deeply weird to be a frequent
| contributor.
|
| Weirdo here.
|
| Actually, I don't contribute much to Wikipedia (aside from the
| occasional edit for clarity or grammar).
|
| But I do upload a number of images to Wikimedia commons. And I
| occasionally nominate some of my photos for evaluation as
| Quality Images and Featured Images.
|
| Some people definitely act as gatekeepers and can be harsh in
| their criticism. But in my experience, most people give
| courteous, constructive criticism--even when they're rejecting
| your nomination!
|
| I pretty much ignore the impolite people--or I try to point out
| that they could have leveled their critique in a better way.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > infused with passive-aggression (by policy)
|
| And the worst abuses come from moderators who are _encouraged_
| to be abusive.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| When I see this war between petty editors and insolent demanding
| contributors, I can't help but sorta cheer to both teams.
|
| They are all so right and simultaneously so wrong, and you can
| see the exact same thing happening on all large online spaces
| where content is supposed to be curated, that I can't help but
| wonder: how is it that the phenomenon hasn't been researched with
| hundreds of non-shoddy papers and a dozen of books written? And
| how come we haven't moved on from screaming at one another about
| what the cure should be -- "more censorship" or "more empathy"?
| How far can you dial both before realizing it just plain doesn't
| work?
| grammers wrote:
| This is the new cancel culture: Comment away with hate speech
| (bots) to stop a true and honest discussion. It's too bad the
| internet is not yet ready for this form of misinformation and
| destroying real conversations. Now with AI (bots) coming up, it
| will get even more difficult...
| dv_dt wrote:
| I have to think there is a lot of crossover between Wikipedia
| edit review interactions and code review interactions in terms of
| what actually brings out better quality outcomes and what make
| for discouragement of efforts.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I tried to be an editor for a couple months. I found the
| experience to be extremely unpleasant because even the best
| intentioned feedback came across as callous and annoyed and
| unkind. Softness is not a strong skill amongst Wikipedia editors.
|
| That and the shitty bias evident everywhere due to using
| corporate news as the primary source for anything not involving
| STEM. Corporate news is wildly biased and it bleeds heavily into
| Wikipedia. It's unfortunate that billionaires who own news
| organizations are literally writing history
| melenaboija wrote:
| Wikipedia is definitely used in politicized way by the editors. A
| clear example of my knowledge is how the referendum celebrated in
| Catalunya (Spain) in 2017 is described in the Catalan and Spanish
| versions, for some topics they seem to be talking about different
| events.
|
| Anyone can use an english translator and check it out. Just in
| the first three lines the Spanish version uses the word "ilegal"
| and the Catalan does not, it might seem subtle but this subtlety
| has had huge implications in Spnish politics:
|
| https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refer%C3%A8ndum_sobre_la_indep...
|
| https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refer%C3%A9ndum_de_independenc...
| dom96 wrote:
| Wow, this is a great study and I bet it extends to other
| volunteer-based activities. In particular: open source software
| projects.
|
| It seems obvious that toxicity needs to be rooted out of open
| source communities, and any projects that don't do so or ignore
| the issue will fail to keep their contributors. But it's nice to
| have some real studies on this with some objective results (even
| if not strictly for open source software project contributions).
| Kevin09210 wrote:
| You need to get rid of codebase ownership and find something
| else to replace the trust it brings.
|
| - Fine granularity forkability. Fork functions, not just
| projects
|
| - Curators/Reviewers who endorse the validity/security aspects
| of those forks.
| ceving wrote:
| There is too much politically motivated agitation on Wikipedia.
| This is particularly a problem because Wikipedia's power
| apparatus is completely undemocratic and anonymous. Wikipedia's
| organizational structure corresponds to a medieval feudal system.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| It's impossible to have centralized "democratic" interpretation
| of information. You need vote system and constant revision of
| text. Even though I think it's not possible to have universal
| interpretation of information. Point of view vary with many
| aspects including politics, religion, regime, actual available
| knowledge...
| iamthirsty wrote:
| I think since the paper is littered with the term "toxic", it
| clearly has its own point of view -- that is, not as objective as
| one would like in this kind of study.
| csours wrote:
| You're being sprayed with weed killer (metaphorically). The
| problem is, you have step into a conflict area without realizing
| it.
|
| The moderators spray the whole area with weed killer because
| there really are weeds. It's too much work to pull the weeds
| individually, so it all gets hosed down.
| alboaie wrote:
| After an editor, who has edited millions of pages and seems to be
| a jack-of-all-trades, unjustifiably rejects your contribution on
| a topic where you have dozens of scientific articles published,
| the only conclusion is that the system is flawed. There's a need
| for a fundamental change in approach, probably to a system where
| censorship exists only in cases of clearly illegal content, and
| various opinions are allowed to be expressed. On the other hand,
| to filter out the noise, there's a need for a trust propagation
| system among editors and viewers, so that each time, you get the
| most probable form of a page based on the trust given to direct
| contacts and indirectly to recursive contacts. Maybe AI could
| also help a bit. Who dare to start a new Wikipedia ;) ?
| tptacek wrote:
| From bitter experience: if you have well established subject
| matter expertise on a topic, you should almost certainly not be
| writing Wikipedia articles about it. In Wikipedia's framing,
| you are a generator of primary and secondary sources. Wikipedia
| is a tertiary source: it is exclusively a roadmap to other,
| more authoritative sources. Instead of writing Wikipedia
| articles, write the articles Wikipedia will end up drawing
| from.
|
| It's quite painful to directly edit Wikipedia articles on your
| own areas of expertise. You have context lay readers don't
| have, and you'll often leave things implicit or skip steps,
| because you know that laying those steps out and citing every
| detail of them isn't helpful for learning & understanding. But
| the encyclopedia doesn't work that way: the community there
| can't tell the difference between sensible elisions done in the
| spirit of efficient explanation, and original research that
| simply takes an opinion you hold idiosyncratically or
| fractiously and mints an encyclopedia article out of them.
|
| It's also going to be deeply suspicious, for very good reasons
| that don't apply to you but do apply to like 70% of all other
| cases, any time you write something and cite yourself.
|
| It is also just the case that not everyone should commit
| themselves to writing whole Wikipedia articles. I found the
| process pretty unhealthy; it sucked me in, to be sure, but it
| also filled my time with rules lawyering and squabbles. It'd be
| easy to criticize Wikipedia for having that culture, except
| that the project is so spectacularly successful.
| xor25519 wrote:
| You can be pseudonomous on Wikipedia. Also, some experts are
| so deep in their field of expertise that they assume others
| to be knowing something they take for granted. (I am not a
| Wikipedia editor.)
| tim333 wrote:
| It depends a bit on the reason for the rejection. Wikipedia
| have various rules such as using secondary rather than primary
| sources that trip up people who are experts on some topic but
| unclear on how Wikipedia works.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Wikipedia policy specifically says to not reference primary
| sources (e.g. published, peer-reviewed journal articles). Only
| secondary sources such as news articles referencing the papers.
| This is probably why your contributions are being rejected.
|
| I haven't read the specific justification for this policy, but
| a couple of reasons is that it allows two rounds of review of
| the information prior to incorporation into Wikipedia, and that
| journal articles are typically more technical and thus more
| difficult for general Wikipedia editors to understand when
| checking whether the sources back up the claims in the
| Wikipedia article.
| swalling wrote:
| This is not correct at all.
|
| The sourcing policy says: "If available, academic and peer-
| reviewed publications are usually the most reliable sources
| on topics such as history, medicine, and science."
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| When did they change that policy?
| swalling wrote:
| Peer-reviewed research papers have always been allowed in
| citations. The nuance that evolved over time is this "For
| example, a paper reviewing existing research, a review
| article, monograph, or textbook is often better than a
| primary research paper." Meaning, you _can_ cite a
| research paper, but something more secondary that
| summarizes a body of scholarship would be better.
|
| Individual research papers that haven't been reproduced
| often present conflicting results with one another,
| especially in fields with poor quality research like
| nutrition. Experts often run into this issue when they
| try to cite their own research or a narrow set of papers
| in a given field, especially when recent research
| conflicts with prior scientific consensus. It's why
| tptacek's comment above is apropos.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| They never did. You can't use _YOUR OWN_ work as a
| source, but you can use primary sources.
| asdff wrote:
| Censorship and biasmaking will always exist because the
| benefits it has for the elite are too high to not try and
| engage in it. There are many articles on current events in
| wikipedia where you can sift through the webarchive and see
| very different articles in terms of what details are
| highlighted or omitted entirely.
| eterevsky wrote:
| An obvious alternative explanation would be that pages on
| controversial topics both attract toxic comments and are more
| difficult to edit. I am not sure whether this paper controlled
| for this.
| intended wrote:
| Since the discussions seems to be focusing entirely on the
| headline "Toxicyity" They are using Perspective, you can find
| more here: https://github.com/conversationai/perspectiveapi
| hanniabu wrote:
| This is the same reason i've stopped answering and asking
| questions on stack overview, except the toxic culture is coming
| from the moderators.
| miroljub wrote:
| Wikipedia has grown to be a PR outlet. It's overwhelmed by
| different interest groups pushing their own agenda or doing PR.
| Especially smaller Wikipedias, like for example German, are known
| for defamation campaigns against "unpopular" authors and topics.
|
| And before someone cries "citation needed" I'll add just one link
| to satisfy the requirements: https://swprs.org/wikipedia-and-
| propaganda/
|
| Though the source, although worth reading and providing a valid
| criticism, may not be good enough, since Wikipedia, the main
| source of truth on Internets, marks it as a misinformation
| website.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Semi-tangent: With Wikipedia being one of the last great
| resources (imo), it's interesting to see the amount of hate and
| negativity sent their way.
| incomingpain wrote:
| I would agree with the premise that there's reduced number of
| editors. I would agree wikipedia should try to figure out why.
|
| It's not immediately obvious to me, from OP, who are leaving but
| I have a pretty strong understanding who.
|
| It's also quite impossible to survey the people who left. When
| you survey those who remain, you're getting the complete
| incorrect cohort.
|
| >automated toxicity detection
|
| They never really define what is a toxic comment. Their sources
| seem to suggest the gender gap, task related disagreements,
| harassment survey from 2015, and something about arabic
| wikipedia.
|
| All the while there are clear rules against things like personal
| attacks. So you have to kind of find rather subjective examples
| and you somehow automated it? That seems frought with inaccuracy.
| Yet they seem to find some correlation? Oh wait they don't
| provide those numbers. I bet it's pretty bad for them to hide
| them. Perhaps it's my mistake and I failed to find them.
|
| >voluntary opt-in survey of the 3,845 Wikipedians conducted in
| 2015
|
| All data prior to the actual problem occuring will be a red
| herring at best. Again, wrong cohort. This is like surveying non-
| cancer patients and making conclusions about cancer patients.
|
| >The automatic detection of offensive language in online
| communities has been an active area of research since at least
| 2010
|
| Offensiveness is subjective and clearly 2010 is too early of
| data.
|
| What I see from this study, is cherry picked data from at least
| ~7 years ago. Why are they even doing this? Are they trying their
| best to find an explanation while being intentionally blind to
| the problem?
|
| I'll just throw down. How about the better explanation? Wikipedia
| became biased and can't really be trusted anymore? Why contribute
| to something because has become a political tool?
|
| I could point at John Stossel's work on showing wikipedia's bias.
| I could offer wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger's blog on
| wikipedia's bias. There has even been countless live examples
| where influencers modify wikipedia for greater truth. Provable on
| live video that the facts were incorrect. They then edit
| wikipedia and then it's near instantly reversed.
|
| How about wikipedia's own curated 'reliable sources' which reads
| like a they only accept sources with only 1 type source; a
| particular establishment left wing viewpoint.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop-ca...
|
| Whether or not fox news is reliable, it's not, it was practically
| the only source from a differing viewpoint. They purged all the
| rest.
|
| Why is the reduced numbers of editors? People left wikipedia
| because it's not reliable and trustworthy anymore. People aren't
| leaving because someone on the internet hurt their feelings.
|
| Wikipedia is absolutely free to continue in this path, but they
| will be in decline for doing so.
| 6510 wrote:
| Personally I have no problem working with toxic people. Toxic
| people talking nonsense I cant deal with. You do have to have a
| f**g point if you are going to be toxic and you need to
| demonstrate by example how you think things should be done.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Yea, during the dark ages of toxic Wikipedia editors, I had ample
| of citations to split apart "Deaf" (ethnocentric label) from
| "Deafness" (culture) and "Hearing-Loss" (medical) not to mention
| the toxic ableism of "Hearing Impaired" (former medical), it was
| nothing but a browbeating, deletion of my Wiki drafts, and
| reversion of my hard and diligent efforts.
|
| About 20 years later, some 240 Deaf wikipedia editors finally led
| a revolt: first to fall is "hearing impaired" (ablist slang), of
| which many governments/civic/businesses are now moving away from.
|
| We are almost there.
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