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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

#251

Post by tptacek »

Manuel_D wrote: post #235
xboxnolifes wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My teacher never told us to avoid Wikipedia. They just told us not to cite Wikipedia directly. Multiple high school and college professors told us to read Wikipedia got general context building, and to read the citations to find relevant sources.

That of course being the point of an encyclopedia; you're generally not supposed to cite it, right? It's a guide to other sources.

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

#252

Post by tptacek »

xor25519 wrote: post #215
tptacek wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It doesn't have much to do with your public identity, but rather with how experts in a field tend to write about that field; they make assumptions that are universally accepted among practitioners, but aren't obvious to lay readers, and Wikipedia tends to challenge those assumptions.

I guess hiding your identity is a way to cite your own stuff there.

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

#253

Post by kranke155 »

jowea wrote: post #209
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?

It is far worse being a smaller Wikipedia.

It’s both. There are political accounts that remove corruption scandals from local politicians and others who just harass you in general.

I made a page about a major scandal in Portugal and they used the Brazilian admins by telling them the scandal was too small to be in Wikipedia. It was in a major TV show in Portugal but the Brazilian admins almost deleted the page (which then blocks you from remaking it).

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

#254

Post by _a_a_a_ »

dang wrote: post #231
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. So let's be consistent "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something". How did the comment I responded to say anything useful, constructive or usefully critical? Negative but vacuous dismissals like theirs seem ok. I hate that aspect of HN; the nihilism allowed to flower.

Two answers: (1) it's not possible to be consistent because there are far too many posts for us to read; we can only moderate what we see. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com; and (2) shallow as the GP's criticism may have been, your comment was far worse. Responding to…

1) fair enough. Should the negative empty comment I was referring to have been flagged for your attention? I appreciate the answer may very well be "no, you're wasting our time with the little stuff", and I'd agree.

2) I honestly don't know how to respond to people like this. Their purpose is to negate, even purposefully destroy. I've sat down with people I've worked with who are apathetic and hopeless and slowly taught them that they can make a difference but I can't do that over the Internet. And it fills me with despair watching them trash what good things we do have.

(BTW thank you for replying, I appreciate it)

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

#255

Post by rockskon »

harimau777 wrote: post #132
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.

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.

Wikipedia is also very poor when it comes to contentious political topics that the bulk of contributors are extremely passionate about.

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

#256

Post by Razengan »

natpalmer1776 wrote: post #248
Gare wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"We have tried nothing and we give up."

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

#257

Post by nomilk »

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…

> Toxicity: A rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make people leave a discussion

Rude and disrespectful are subjective. As a layperson learning biology for fun (e.g. Bob Sapolsky lectures) I often chuckle at how rude or shocking nature can be! I grimace at how nature videos (e.g. a pride of lions hunting a baby elephant) will garner comments like "you're sick for filming this!" or "do something to help!".

Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that microscopic particles (what we now know as bacteria) on the hands and body were causing women and babies to become infected during birth. He was considered a misinformation-spreading pariah for a quarter century until links were made between germs and diseases.

But for the 25 years it took the ideas to mature and reach mainstream, he was "toxic".

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

#258

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

Too much money by what metric?

Either way, it functions but I feel it's simply a tool for 99.9% of people. They don't read the in depth heated arguments, they looks something up, get brief context, and dip. What they do with that information is honestly no better or worse than any news organization.

Ideally we teach to identify and take bias into account, but we've been at a trend for a while now to try and regulate tech instead of society.

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

#259

Post by at_a_remove »

rewmie wrote: post #137
jandrese wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hasn’t really been true for years. Most new editors have experienced like this: They see an article that needs correction or a small expansion so they create the account and do the work. Their work is immediately reverted by an editor. A few hours later the editor adds their work back, but under their own name.

> Their work is immediately reverted by an editor. I'm not sure you got the point. The whole point is that in Wikipedia everyone is an editor. Even unregistered users are editors, which mean those who didn't even bothered to login. In Wikipedia everyone is an editor. I mean, that's the whole concept, isn't it? That's what it was designed to do: allow everyone to edit a doc. Everyone is an editor. Do you see what I me…

I mean, that's true, but in a not-especially-deep way that doesn't really help or address the issue at hand.

Why do we have this thing where different people can edit it? Oh, well, we're trying to build some inter-related foundation of knowledge via categories and references, text and images. So, while yes, anyone can edit, some of that gets in the way of the actual purpose, in that "five whys" sense.

It's a bit like saying, when someone brings up spam, "Well, it's email! It's designed so anyone can send anyone else with an email address a message, that's the point."

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

#260

Post by EnigmaFlare »

With all these horror stories, I have the opposite. I made an article for my tiny company to help promote it. Sounds bad but I followed the Wikipedia rules to the letter. I ensured that every single piece of information was cited to independent reputable sources only, even though some of it was actually false. I declared my conflict of interest on the first edit and my user talk page. I was prepared for it to get instantly deleted but instead some bots fixed a bit of formatting and now it's the 2nd result on Google after my own website when searching for the company name.
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