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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

#241

Post by ReptileMan »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #236
natpalmer1776 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 disrupt the existing power balance or pose an existential threat to the organization. That pretty much directly descri…

But it provided the training data for ChatGPT

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

#242

Post by shagie »

vasco wrote: post #223
shagie wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. If it gets few views it's not important to fix, and if any of the few views cares they can fix it. Lets not pretend that each page needs the same level of attention. A random middle school wikipedia page having a slightly out of date content or even vandalism isn't a big deal…

> You could even have a computer class where kids from the school would update their school's wiki page as a way to learn how to contribute to wikipedia. Might actually be the easiest type of page in the whole wiki to keep fresh now that I think about it, while creating a whole generation of interested editors.

This type of effort often creates a disproportionate amount of work for the volunteers maintaining Wikipedia.

If you feel that that would be a good thing to do, the school should stand up its own wiki about itself that students could update and maintain.

That also avoids possible conflict with the rules of Wikipedia.

I recall a school that attempted to do "ask a question on Stack Overflow" and all the students in the class asked the same question - nearly word for word - about their current assignment... that all then got closed as duplicates of each other.

If the goal is to introduce someone to the application platform, it is likely better to have them work in a private instance where the mentor to new user ratio is much higher and things like "you need to make sure that you are using proper and correct English with capitalization and punctuation," are not "revert and leave an impersonal comment on their talk page about the expected quality of their contributions."

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

#243

Post by JohnMakin »

Analemma_ wrote: post #212
zozbot234 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

but if "free encyclopedia anyone could edit" was literally true, wikipedia would make itself almost worthless in very little time.

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

#244

Post by nverno »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #214
notahacker wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - th…

They have a section on "thirteenth stepping" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholics_Anonymous#Criticism

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

#245

Post by Ensorceled »

lolc wrote: post #201
Ensorceled wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is an entire section dedicated this at the end of the article. They are using at established tool for this domain and there are links explaining how it works and definitions.

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

#246

Post by whatshisface »

t0bia_s wrote: post #174
harimau777 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Idea of centralized and universal interpenetration of information soon or later bump into boundaries. By definition, it's impossible approach. Interpretation vary with knowledge, culture and is shaped by politics, religion, regime, etc.

That's why you don't interpret it, just list it: encyclopedically.

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

#247

Post by zlg_codes »

falserum wrote: post #238
zlg_codes wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should someone sacrifice MORE of their valuable time and effort to get their contribution accepted, and follow a script or process? This is volunteer work. They can take it or leave it, but they don't get to complain that people stop being interested in contributing when their Truth By Committee design blows up in their face.

All contributions in the world follow some kind of process, even if informal. (E.g. you politely wait in line to drop off your generous donation)

And you think that validates it? Not all processes are created equally, and if the process is too much trouble, you won't get contributions.

If Goodwill didn't have a dock where I could drop things off and an employee to put it where it needs to be, I wouldn't donate.

You incentivize contribution by lowering the barriers to it.

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

#248

Post by natpalmer1776 »

Gare wrote: post #220
natpalmer1776 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, and while the nuances are pretty deep, it basically boils down to the fact that this behavior is necessary for the survival of any complex system.

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

#249

Post by falserum »

vasco wrote: post #223
shagie wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. If it gets few views it's not important to fix, and if any of the few views cares they can fix it. Lets not pretend that each page needs the same level of attention. A random middle school wikipedia page having a slightly out of date content or even vandalism isn't a big deal…

devilish advocate here.

One such article - small problem.

But what if such low-view, and now outdated/vandalized articles start approaching 50% of wikipedia content? That might reflect badly on credibility of whole wiki.

It is nontrivial problem of striking balance between content quality level vs content quantity/contributor freedom.

(Open source software projects deal with same problem, just not on such scale)

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

#250

Post by Animats »

yesco wrote: post #192
juliusdavies wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So why not Wikipedia? - Cheap to host, just text and images - Funded by non-profit with too much funding - All images are permissively licensed - Easily archived - Easily forked The only potential "death" I can ever see happening to Wikipedia is the kind that happens from some kind of fracturing, similar to what we often see with fan wikis. But this kind of outcome could be a good thing really, multiple competing W…

> Funded by non-profit with too much funding.

Right. The Wikimedia Foundation keeps trying other projects. They think they are supposed to grow. This leads to increasingly obnoxious demands for more contributions. "By 2022, it employed around 700 staff and contractors, with annual revenues of $155 million, annual expenses of $146 million, net assets of $240 million and a growing endowment, which surpassed $100 million in June 2021."

It's the disease of universities - too many administrators.

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