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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

#61

Post by southwesterly »

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.

This was my experience. So I stopped.

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

#62

Post by howenterprisey »

Semaphor wrote: post #26
rewmie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 vanda…

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.

FYI anyone can revert any edit just by manually undoing changes; what's gated is the one-click button to do so ("rollback").

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

#63

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

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?

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

#64

Post by medstrom »

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…

Another victim of deletionism. You might like https://gwern.net/inclusionism#no-club-that-would-have-me

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

#65

Post by lolc »

Ensorceled wrote: post #50
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…

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.

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.

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

#66

Post by grammers »

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...

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

#68

Post by whamlastxmas »

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

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

#69

Post by melenaboija »

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...

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

#70

Post by julianeon »

rqtwteye wrote: post #57
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 no…

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.
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