Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

academic.oup.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 363 posts

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

#331

Post by Ensorceled »

VancouverMan wrote: post #139
Ensorceled wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good way to begin to understand about toxic comments is to look for the "dead" comments on HN. Dead comments fall into a few categories: trolling, advertisements, conspiracy/culture war and toxic. It's pretty easy to figure out which is which.

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…

> 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.

Be careful what you wish for.

The problem is that you are in a minority. People are leaving X in droves because of this approach of letting terrible people be terrible. I've left X because almost all the people I follow have departed.

HN would be the same.

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

#332

Post by tptacek »

gafage wrote: post #325
tptacek wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questions like these always make me think of Dwight Schrute speeding towards a sales call that Andy Bernard is closing out from under him, screaming into his phone "are you saying you INVENTED PAPER?". I'm not saying I invented paper. You can be upset with anything you like. I'm not the upset police. But if the thing you're upset about (20 years later!) is the premise of the what is probably the single most successfu…

No, that sales call is being made by Michael, not Andy.

Dammit! We regret the error.

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

#333

Post by projektfu »

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…

Is the definition begging the question? "A rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make people leave a discussion." I guess the question is whether they leave the discussion and continue editing or whether they take a break from Wikipedia altogether.

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

#335

Post by projektfu »

nomilk wrote: post #257
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 somet…

I think looking at the examples and their rating of toxicity, there's a difference between a Semmelweis who says, "I think you're killing people with established practice" and a theoretical one who says, "You [expletive] [ethnic slur] ... should be shot like a dog in the street."

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

#336

Post by [deleted] »

natpalmer1776 wrote: post #263
Razengan wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 ter…

[deleted]

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

#337

Post by zerkten »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #328
throwaway2037 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real question: Where do you go instead? Or, do you use Google to find blog posts with the answers that you need? I agree that the formerly-great Q&A site (that shall remain unnamed) has fallen from grace with terrible new leadership. The drama seems never to end. I vote to fork the whole thing and bring back Monica. :) For my areas of interest (plain old Java, Python, C, C++, and JavaScript), the search results are s…

Oh, it's still fairly prominent, in searches, but I'm finding the answers to be less and less useful. It's become pretty much worthless, to ask questions, anymore. I end up answering my own questions. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, someone will throw in an insult. If I'm not lucky; without actually helping. I got used to the insults, as they usually came with useful answers, but that hasn't been the case, in quite a while.…

Do you still tend to answer questions? It feels like there is a drop in quality contributors too because they got invested, but have peers engaging in the behavior you describe as a questioner. They want to take kinder approaches, but that's never going to win over that power user segment.

I have a high reputation that unlocks privileges, but I rarely go back these days to answer questions. If I can snipe someone that's trying to shut down a question prematurely then that's kind of fun.

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

#338

Post by hollerith »

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…

>It'd be easy to criticize Wikipedia for having that culture, except that the project is so spectacularly successful.

My recollection is that it started being spectacularly successful within a year or 2 of its founding (in 2001) but that the profusion of rules (and deletionism) started to ramp up slowly (over a period of many years) after it started being spectacularly successful.

(The Wikimedia Foundation was incorporated on June 20, 2003. The Foundation was granted section 501(c)(3) status by the U.S. Internal Revenue Code as a public charity in 2005.)

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

#339

Post by nerdponx »

dxbydt wrote: post #275
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…

There was a sketching algo on wikipedia that was not well described. So I added 2 lines of python to illuminate what was intended by the roundabout description. Within an hour my edit was reverted with the terse comment - "Wikipedia is not a github." ! So I clicked on the editor to find who this rude person was. It was the professor who had invented that sketching algo.

That's ridiculous on so many levels, but most of all because there are plenty of other computer science articles with code samples.
Post reply on HN