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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

#131

Post by ziddoap »

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #90
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…

> 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 format…

>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?

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

#132

Post by harimau777 »

tptacek wrote: post #125
tivert wrote: post #60

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…

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.

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.

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

#133

Post by yCombLinks »

exo-pla-net wrote: post #124

[flagged]

It's a fine social or political stance, but it's purely those. Clicking the first link, woman : A trans woman (short for transgender woman) is a woman -> Woman : A woman is an adult female human. -> Female : An organism's sex is female (symbol: ) if it produces the ovum (egg cell). As far as I know that's not the case.

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

#134

Post by tptacek »

alboaie wrote: post #93

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…

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.

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

#135

Post by tim333 »

alboaie wrote: post #93

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…

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.

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

#136

Post by tptacek »

josefritz wrote: post #52

I gave up contributing to Wikipedia when I looked back and found how much had been deleted. The deletionists have won the war.

That being the literal premise of the project, it's the outcome you'd have expected.

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

#137

Post by rewmie »

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.

> 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?

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

#138

Post by novaleaf »

vasco wrote: post #22

"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:…

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.

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

#139

Post by VancouverMan »

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.

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.

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

#140

Post by rewmie »

justinclift wrote: post #58
jandrese wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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.

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