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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

#231

Post by dang »

_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.

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 a bad comment (or one you feel is bad) by breaking the site guidelines yourself, let alone with a nasty personal attack, is exactly the opposite of what you should be doing here—it's driving the wrong way down a one-way street.

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

#232

Post by prox »

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?

I feel it’s basically an exponent of selfishness/greed. So for some it might be status or other incentives that make them favour a moat or developing an entrenched behavior.

Countering it means to cultivate an open and egalitarian platform, where vulnerability is part of the equation as well as the associated trust that is needed. Good faith over bad faith. Selfless behavior vs “I am gonna get mine.”

My sources are my experience in organisations as well as a good friend who manages such an organization.

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

#233

Post by zlg_codes »

I think everyone has the capacity to be toxic, but few things elevate my willingness to be toxic than having my well-reasoned contributions insulted or rejected.

I've contributed a total of once, ever, on Wikipedia. It was a typo correction that was reverted, then remade under the mod's account so he got credit for it.

If that's what I can expect by interacting with Wikipedia, I'll pass.

You have to actually reward participation if you want it.

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

#234

Post by karencarits »

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…

I would also like to mention Wikidata that for many articles feeds data to Wikipedia. It would make sense to have all instances of the schools listed there as it can be batch updated

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

#235

Post by Manuel_D »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #211
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…

> 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.

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

#236

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

natpalmer1776 wrote: post #144
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…

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 describes a once-marvelous Q&A site, where I almost never go, anymore, and which is rapidly declining, in search results.

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

#237

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

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 reference and have many active contributors on the same topics.

Even with more appeal to authority (let's say you get more power to edit if you're proven to be an expert in the field) I assume that would get abused to insert personal gripes in some place or another.

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

#238

Post by falserum »

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.

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)

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

#239

Post by karencarits »

shagie wrote: post #217
jowea wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "not notable enough" is in place in part to try to limit the amount of pages that need curating. As someone who leans inclusionist I wondered about that, but I think it also has to do with the existence of reliable sources. You need them to write an article, and the notability guidelines exclude articles that would be impossible or hard to write due to lack of sources.

The extreme inclusionist position (and I've got a straw man there) ends up with sites that are full of outdated information that few people want to maintain. Even if we say "ok, the cost of the page on some random middle school is 1 minute / year" then as it grows to that 13,000 schools - that's 220 hours. Five and a half weeks of checking each page once a year for 1 minute with a 40 hour week. And looking, I'm sligh…

But as long you can get hold of the data, it can be updated in batch. See https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wikidata_in_Wikimedia_pro...

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

#240

Post by glimshe »

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]

The problem is thinking that we can create a space where the powerful outside the space won't be powerful inside the space. Same thing with crypto.
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