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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

#211

Post by xboxnolifes »

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. :-(

Teachers have been telling students to avoid it since the beginning, this is not a new development. If anything, I think teachers may be more accepting of it than in the past, particularly for finding citable sources.

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

#212

Post by Analemma_ »

zozbot234 wrote: post #168
Washuu wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The trick with any sort of halfway controversial edits is to discuss at length your planned contribution on the talk page, wait until nobody complains, then make the actual edit. If you do get reverted, you can point out that you had announced the edit in the talk page and no objections had been raised. It helps to post on the message boards for relevant WikiProjects too. Yes, Wikipedia policy pages say to be "bold"…

Seems like Wikipedia should change their policy to say "be bold for trivial edits only" then. In fact, if they would just say "you're only allowed to make serious changes if you're part of the elite cabal of senior editors who have devoted their lives to memorizing our volumes of policy" instead of continuing to call itself "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit", we wouldn't be having this discussion; people would at least know what the situation is.

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

#213

Post by port515 »

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…

You forgot Digg

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

#214

Post by KennyBlanken »

notahacker wrote: post #33
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:…

I suspect the system for scoring "toxic" comments is less likely to flag the bureaucratic "I have reverted your edit for a second time because it does not meet WP:NPOV or WP:NOR. Please be aware of WP:3RR and be prepared to discuss any further changes on the talk page" comments about reversion and more likely to flag the sort of very angry and personal comments that come up when the page being edited is related to th…

The system almost certainly doesn't address the primary problem, which is that a small group of people consider a page or topic to be their personal fiefdom and they're experts at snowballing people with the most obscure wikipedia policies.

A shining example of this would be the page for Alcoholics Anonymous, which has a small legion of accounts 'defending' it. The accounts espouse, vocally, a victimhood complex - that AA is targeted by people "harassing" and "discrediting" the program.

The page is brutally censored of any negative information - such as their problems with predation ('thirteenth stepping') and sexual assault, the fact that the program has no basis in science and is repeatedly demonstrated to be amongst the worst options for addiction treatment. The result is a page which is wildly not NPOV - it contains only material positive about the founder, program and organization.

Someone tried to add mention of a documentary and the prick editor claimed the film did not meet notability guidelines because it hadn't been screened in the right kind of film festivals and thus its existence could not be mentioned.

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

#215

Post by xor25519 »

tptacek wrote: post #134
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 dr…

You can be pseudonomous on Wikipedia. Also, some experts are so deep in their field of expertise that they assume others to be knowing something they take for granted. (I am not a Wikipedia editor.)

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

#216

Post by KennyBlanken »

jl6 wrote: post #200
rurp wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They have to draw a line somewhere or the project gets spammed with self-promotional articles. Requiring notability does a decent job of keeping the spam out.

I'd believe this if it wasn't for the thousands upon thousands of pages about the most absurdly obscure Star Trek and Star Wars shit.

If wikipedia policies result in pages for minor subplot characters in auxiliary pulp trash novels for a space western series but not for a real-life school, we have a problem.

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

#217

Post by shagie »

jowea wrote: post #208
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…

> 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.

The extreme inclusionist position (and I've got a straw man there) ends up with sites that are full of outdated information that few people want to maintain.

Even if we say "ok, the cost of the page on some random middle school is 1 minute / year" then as it grows to that 13,000 schools - that's 220 hours. Five and a half weeks of checking each page once a year for 1 minute with a 40 hour week.

And looking, I'm slightly off on the number of schools.

> During the 2020-2021 school year, there were 13,187 public school districts. These school districts enrolled 47,755,349 students across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. ( https://ballotpedia.org/Public_school_district_(United_State... )

Many school districts have multiple schools (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_Sch... )

How much time are you willing to spend maintaining individual pages as opposed to a page that lists all the schools and a little bit about each one. The list page takes a similar amount of time to maintain than each page as an individual one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_Di... as another example. Pages for high schools? They tend to have sufficient information about them (though the high school that I went to doesn't have a page). Multiply that number by two for the middle schools and by twice again for the elementary schools... and it gets to the difficult to maintain realm.

Another example of a school district and note the lack of middle school distinct pages - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto_Unified_School_Distr...

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

#218

Post by GauntletWizard »

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.

Wikipedia was one of the crowning achievements of the internet before said culture took over, and significantly such culture formed as a sort of symbiote and parasite to it's success.

What made Wikipedia successful was that it was free in a time that people were more used to paying for that kind of information, and that it was open in the sense that anyone could contribute when many places were significantly gatekept.

It has now evolved it's own form of said gatekeeping, not because such is necessary for Wikipedia to be successful, but to harvest the residual success of that open system for the benefit of the parasites.

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

#219

Post by whstl »

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.

I remember it depending on the article. There are "turfs", and the rules aren't consistent between them. Some guy goes nuts on the movies and television articles and nobody can get anything through, it gets reverted with a "this is not necessary".

On science and engineering pages I remember there being a lot of unsourced material that felt more like a school paper than an encyclopedia. The quality was really bad, but it was still hard to change.

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

#220

Post by Gare »

natpalmer1776 wrote: post #144
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…

To some degree you see this pattern repeated over and over anytime you have an organization gain any sort of longevity. A culture develops to create a power structure that favors those who have devoted a large portion of their personal identity to the success of the organization. This culture serves as a moat against anyone who would integrate themselves within the organization and attempt drastic changes that would…

I agree. Is there any way to "inoculate" organisation to prevent this failure mode?
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