Live data from Hacker News

Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

academic.oup.com

151–160 of 363 posts

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

#151
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…

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 Wiki…

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.”

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

#152

[flagged]

What is it about this topic that drives people absolutely crazy? Far less than 1% of people ID as trans yet it's just the most important cultural shibboleth and just mentioned / argued about constantly... why do you care at all how Wikipedia phrases the opening paragraph on their page about Trans women?

There were women's spaces (bathrooms / changing rooms) for example that kept women safe from predatory men.

Who should be allowed in those? Is it defined by the clothes?

If a predatory man / bad actor decides to put on those clothes to abuse the system, then what? What if the predatory man / bad actor decides to hang just below the bar of illegality, and creep on women long term?

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

#154
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.

> 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.

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

#155
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Similar. I use Wikipedia a lot, but will under no circumstances whatsoever contribute anything, after a bad experience with my first edit.

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

#158

"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).

[deleted]

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

#159
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exist…

> 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.

Just to be clear, I wasn't toxic (although unclear what the definition exactly is), I just vigorously called him out on his bullshit.

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

#160
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…

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 month…

> and some more recent pharma-related topics

I'm kind of curious now, what are the topics?

Post reply on HN