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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

#201

Post by lolc »

Ensorceled wrote: post #72
lolc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The article explains their methodology for identifying and tracking toxic comments.

The original comment said "All I found is a statement that they use some score from some tool and link to the tool developer's site". So if that's all there is regarding classification, their methodology is not nailed down very well in my view. But maybe there's more and we haven't found it?

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

#202

Post by asdff »

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…

Censorship and biasmaking will always exist because the benefits it has for the elite are too high to not try and engage in it. There are many articles on current events in wikipedia where you can sift through the webarchive and see very different articles in terms of what details are highlighted or omitted entirely.

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

#203

Post by busyant »

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…

> IMHO, you have to be deeply weird to be a frequent contributor.

Weirdo here.

Actually, I don't contribute much to Wikipedia (aside from the occasional edit for clarity or grammar).

But I do upload a number of images to Wikimedia commons. And I occasionally nominate some of my photos for evaluation as Quality Images and Featured Images.

Some people definitely act as gatekeepers and can be harsh in their criticism. But in my experience, most people give courteous, constructive criticism--even when they're rejecting your nomination!

I pretty much ignore the impolite people--or I try to point out that they could have leveled their critique in a better way.

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

#204

Post by shagie »

rurp wrote: post #196
shagie wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are roughly 13,000 middle schools in the United States. Creating a page for each one and curating it represents a significant amount of volunteer work. The "not notable enough" is in place in part to try to limit the amount of pages that need curating. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable - but the allocation of volunteer curation resources are often stretched quite thin on sites that crowdsource the…

But his son already did the work to add his school! I don't see why adding one random middle school requires that all 13,000 be added and kept up to date. Wikipedia has all sorts of inconsistencies in what is covered, because it is so driven by volunteers and what they want to invest time into. I don't see how people adding public institutions that they are interested in adding goes against the spirit or practical re…

It's not the work now that's at issue but the work of the future to fix "Mr. Smith is a poopy head" vandalism on content that gets few views.

Things like names of teachers or sizes of current classes - those temporal things (which are correct now) become broken windows of "someone needs to update it" in the future.

And if one says "Ok, this one is acceptable" - then how much more maintenance and curation of pages are the core group of volunteers expected to take up?

If the answer to that question is "none" - who is doing it? or is it going to become a repository of outdated information?

Having content is an ongoing cost of time to the people who maintain it. If it isn't maintained, it isn't valuable (or notable) enough to be put in there in the first place.

It might be better served as a part of a larger page that covers the school district. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_Sch... which are a name and optionally a note. Other districts don't even have notes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_Di... ).

If it was just a paragraph of content that was timeless (when established, mascot, municipality, etc...) then consider reformatting the school district page (which may well exist) to include the information rather than creating a new one.

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

#205

Post by lmm »

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.

I don't think anything they're doing today is working. They had something great in, like, 2008, and have been at best coasting since then.

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

#206

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

> infused with passive-aggression (by policy)

And the worst abuses come from moderators who are _encouraged_ to be abusive.

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

#207

Post by jowea »

juliusdavies wrote: post #180
tptacek wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I consider Wikipedia to be the last standing wonder of the WWW (world wide web). - Google search results get worse every year. - Stackoverflow lies in ruins (albeit the ruins are still useful). - ICQ/Gtalk/AIM completely dead and all in silos now (Slack). - Twitter is dead. - Facebook is too annoying now. Google Maps is still amazing, but I consider that more a miracle of the internet as opposed to a miracle of the W…

> Their (public school) teachers senselessly already tell them to avoid it. :-(

Weren't they doing that from the beginning? I get the feeling this feeling has gone down not up.

>I don't think Wikipedia will die for any specific technical or political reason. I just think it will die because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before already has, so why not Wikipedia?

It still seems to be surviving. Editor count may be down but a lot of the articles that have to be written already exist. It may stop improving much and only include new events but I don't think it will die until there's a replacement. Maybe people will just consult LLMs for general information and never visit Wikipedia?

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

#208

Post by jowea »

shagie wrote: post #176
novaleaf wrote: post #138

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.

There are roughly 13,000 middle schools in the United States. Creating a page for each one and curating it represents a significant amount of volunteer work. The "not notable enough" is in place in part to try to limit the amount of pages that need curating. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable - but the allocation of volunteer curation resources are often stretched quite thin on sites that crowdsource the…

> The "not notable enough" is in place in part to try to limit the amount of pages that need curating.

As someone who leans inclusionist I wondered about that, but I think it also has to do with the existence of reliable sources. You need them to write an article, and the notability guidelines exclude articles that would be impossible or hard to write due to lack of sources.

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

#209

Post by jowea »

kranke155 wrote: post #43

The Portuguese Wikipedia has been completely taken over by a toxic mega group that’s bent the rules to get what they want. They constantly harass you, and they invent rules if needed to get articles down that they don’t like.

People complain about that in the English Wikipedia but I guess it can be even worse in the smaller ones? Weren't a few of them basically captured by the local far-right propagandists?

Is this group you're talking about political or just the "I/we own this and will do this my way" of English Wikipedia?

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

#210

Post by magicalhippo »

tivert wrote: post #74
rqtwteye wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, whenever I ask a question on SO, I literally have to write paragraphs of text exhorting people to answer my question instead of a different question they find easier, or why my question is not the same as some vaguely similar one. Then I have to constantly remind people about the same stuff in the comments. That culture problem has been getting worse and worse at SO over time. I only go there as a last resort.

I found SO very frustrating until one of the moderators explained it rather clearly: SO isn't about me (or you). They don't want to help me (or you). They want to help everyone else.

In that light all the weirdness made sense. Of course, I am very interested in getting my problems solved, so I simply stopped asking on SO to avoid the frustration.

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