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

221–230 of 363 posts

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

#221

Post by mongol »

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"…

I did that once. Got banned, with no recourse. It was a country-specific Wikipedia though, not the English one. But I did not even edit the page, just made the case for it on the Talk page, someone else edited it and I got banned with a bunch of others. Never again.

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

#222

Post by zlg_codes »

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…

[flagged]

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

#223

Post by vasco »

shagie wrote: post #204
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…

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 at all and can be fixed, and if it's not fixed - it has few views anyway. Wikipedia already acknowledges this and certain pages are much harder to edit than others.

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.

It's like they think they run a paper version of a encyclopedia with these rules about what is notable or not.

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

#224

Post by zlg_codes »

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.

yeah, that sort of stuff is ridiculous. When fictional characters and movies and other bullshit are getting Wikipedia pages, they can document a community school or some shit. At least it's real!

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

#225

Post by lp0_on_fire »

rewmie wrote: post #140
justinclift wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch, that sounds lousy. Any obvious examples you can point out?

> Ouch, that sounds lousy. That's the whole concept of a wiki: you edit an article like everyone else, you change everyone else's changes as you please, and it converges to a stable point by a consensus-based process. If you disagree with someone else's edit, you can open a debate to settle the dispute.

> If you disagree with someone else's edit, you can open a debate to settle the dispute.

That's supposed to the be process, yes, but the editors who've deemed themselves the chosen ones generally just skip right to the reverting.

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

#226

Post by zlg_codes »

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"…

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.

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

#227

Post by _a_a_a_ »

dang wrote: post #197
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Please don't cross into personal attack when posting to HN. You can make your substantive points without that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

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

#228

Post by makeitdouble »

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?

Giving the organization very clear rules and goals from the start and making wide range correcting changes towards them even when they hurt the whole organization.

For companies this usually means pushing product cannibalisation and accepting to forgo additional profit in exchange for better long term viability.

I think Apple was good at this during most of Steve Jobs's second term. Didn't last long though. Perhaps too much success is the biggest issue ?

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

#229

Post by jl6 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #216
jl6 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of those articles should probably be merged or deleted, but a lot of them probably do pass the notability standard, because despite being absurdly fancrufty, the subjects still get covered in independent sources, in a way that schools don’t.

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

#230

Post by the_only_law »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #227
dang wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't cross into personal attack when posting to HN. You can make your substantive points without that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

HN rules are fickle at best. Only way to get a good idea of how they’re enforced is to observe for some time.
Post reply on HN