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Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

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Re: Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

#51

Post by kemayo »

bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #12
bawolff wrote: post #4

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?

> 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”.

That just says "there's less activity", and doesn't address bawolff's question of quality in any way.

Re: Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

#53

Post by cbondurant »

paulnpace wrote: post #27

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 pro…

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.

Re: Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

#55

Post by sgift »

Hitton wrote: post #10

> 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 justi…

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.

Re: Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

#56

Post by networkchad »

donatj wrote: post #48

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 po…

[dead]

Re: Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

#57

Post by rqtwteye »

donatj wrote: post #48

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 po…

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.

Re: Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

#58

Post by justinclift »

jandrese wrote: post #44
rewmie wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

Ouch, that sounds lousy. Any obvious examples you can point out?

Re: Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

#59

Post by epgui »

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.

Re: Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

#60

Post by tivert »

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.

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