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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

#261

Post by johnnyanmac »

zlg_codes wrote: post #222
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…

[flagged]

>Why, oh why, does nothing ever help the common man?

I believe we call that tragedy of the commons. Prisoner's dilemma fits a bit of that as well.

And just plain ol' greed at the end of the day. The people who want to help are rarely in the positions of power to do so. Or are fighting other greed in the process bogged by beauracracy.

Lastly it's also Apathy in many situations. There can be quite a bit of power when the common man gathers together, but many can't, don't, or are unaware of such a ability. So the power is mitigated unless a good wave gets going.

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

#262

Post by Manuel_D »

makeitdouble wrote: post #237
Manuel_D wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia's flaws are more subtle. Pages sometimes present controversial, or even wrong claims as unambiguously true. Note, this is not actually that bad on pages that are clearly covering controversial topics (namely historical & political topics). The issue is more prevalent on niche topics where the average reader wouldn't recognize the controversy being claimed. I've sometimes encountered citations where the cite…

To parent's point, I think this is still better than what we had before. I mean, encyclopedias didn't have sources at all, and people were overly confident in books being correct. On the niche topic part, I wonder if we'll ever be able to do something about it. I don't believe in AI check being a good fit for specialized or rare contexts, and as there's fewer eyes it's by definition more complicated to cross referenc…

To be fair, I don't think there's much more Wikipedia could do better. Wikipedia is largely self-correcting in that the more eyeballs an article has, the more likely that wrong or biased claims will be challenged. I actually think the idea of creating a separate class of "proven experts" would make the situation worse: it'd just entrench whatever the expert opinion is which may even be more biased than the normal contributor base.

The main thing is to check out the talk pages. That's where the controversies crop up and at least you know the opposing view.

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

#263

Post by natpalmer1776 »

Razengan wrote: post #256
natpalmer1776 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I mean, I did say it was nuanced.

You could with the right people across the entire organization succeed without and actively combat the manifestation of this effect for as long as those, or like minded, people remain… but given the fact that organizations have a bidirectional relationship with people and culture, over a long enough period of time the organization will inevitably revert to the mean.

In more broad terms, I described the path of least resistance for a complex system (the default mode), while “you” are asking for a system that deviates from that path, which requires the introduction of entropy. As can be observed in many other fields, the total entropy of a system over a long enough period of time will always trend towards zero.

Given the specifics of this particular model are bound by social behaviors you could in theory create a culture that has a default mode that does not have the issue described, but to do so you would have to start at a much higher level than a single organization and thus for the purposes of the point I was making it is moot.

Even having said all of this, there is still a great deal more left unsaid that lead me to believe this to be true.

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

#264

Post by Vicinity9635 »

Fun fact: if you check the Talk page of controversial pages you can frequently see all the public interest information the extremely biased editors are trying to suppress. Recent example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:2023_Nashville_school_sho...

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

#265

Post by johnnyanmac »

zlg_codes wrote: post #226
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"…

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.

>they don't get to complain that people stop being interested in contributing when their Truth By Committee design blows up in their face.

Enough people remain that I doubt they are really hurting for more contributors. But yeah, that's a good part of why more technical or niche topics can be spurious.

But at the same time, less people visit those pages so it hurts the site less.

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

#266

Post by switchbak »

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…

The surprising rebirth of podcasts is the only standout in that list.

It's as if blogs became popular again. Though the days of simple RSS feeds with a high signal to noise ratio are probably long behind us. (I know some are still around, but I mean popular in the way podcasts are now).

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

#267

Post by johnnyanmac »

Kevin09210 wrote: post #87
dom96 wrote: post #79

Wow, this is a great study and I bet it extends to other volunteer-based activities. In particular: open source software projects. It seems obvious that toxicity needs to be rooted out of open source communities, and any projects that don't do so or ignore the issue will fail to keep their contributors. But it's nice to have some real studies on this with some objective results (even if not strictly for open source s…

You need to get rid of codebase ownership and find something else to replace the trust it brings. - Fine granularity forkability. Fork functions, not just projects - Curators/Reviewers who endorse the validity/security aspects of those forks.

>Fork functions, not just projects

I'm not dismissing your idea, but I'm not finding the value in this compared to copy-pasting that function.It'd also be beholden to all kinds of dependency checking to be practical unless it was a tiny function.

But i can see the benefits of granular ownership. You don't necessarily want to fork off a whole new repo just to have a contributor be responsible for a module but not the entire project.

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

#268

Post by gopher_space »

novaleaf wrote: post #138
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:…

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.

I think this is the central issue with both Wikipedia and stack overflow, and a bit of a problem for HN. I don't need people less interested in a subject than I am deciding what I read about.

I've worked on two separate projects where having every middle-school in the state on wikipedia would've helped, so tell your son I appreciate his work!

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

#269

Post by johnnyanmac »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #164
VancouverMan wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who wants to see as much discussion as possible, even if I might disagree with or dislike what's being expressed, I find the moderation here tends to be more "toxic" to my user experience than the dead or grayed-out comments are. I wish this site had a setting like "showdead", but that disabled all moderation-related impacts on the display of the discussion. There wouldn't be any grayed-out comments, for…

Agreed, and I'd even be willing to opt out of the karma system entirely to get this. The self-defeating nature of "graying" comments out is just utterly mind-blowing. It calls more attention to the undesirable content rather than less... yet nobody in power seems to understand that. (For starters: if I turn on showdead, it means I don't want my view censored. So stop doing it. ) Anyway, it's OT for this story.

The idea is that it's harder to read and much easier to skim over. It does elicit curiosity, but if everytime you take that effort and you end up reading nonsense, you're gonna assossiate that fade with nonsense.

I'd say it's the most interesting interpretation of "ignore the troll" that I've seen, if nothing else.

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

#270

Post by resolutebat »

Manuel_D wrote: post #194
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.

Wikipedia's flaws are more subtle. Pages sometimes present controversial, or even wrong claims as unambiguously true. Note, this is not actually that bad on pages that are clearly covering controversial topics (namely historical & political topics). The issue is more prevalent on niche topics where the average reader wouldn't recognize the controversy being claimed. I've sometimes encountered citations where the cite…

Genuine Q: what do you find "wrong" about Ada Lovelace's article as it stands today? To me it looks scrupulously fair about her contributions and the amount of disagreement on what exactly she did "first", which seems to account for 99% of the talk page wrangling.

Lovelace's notes are important in the early history of computers, especially since the seventh one contained what many consider to be the first computer program—that is, an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine. Other historians reject this perspective and point out that Babbage's personal notes from the years 1836/1837 contain the first programs for the engine.[6][better source needed] She also developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching, while many others, including Babbage himself, focused only on those capabilities.

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