Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.