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 frequent contributor.
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 disrupt the existing power balance or pose an existential threat to the organization.
As time passes, more layers get added in response to various perceived attempts to subvert the organization until a critical mass is reached in which the organization suffers from a brain drain (via retirement, loss of interest, etc.) with the barriers too high and rewards too meager for new(er) qualified individuals to consider filling the void. The organization then continues forward in a zombie-like state until it either fails or becomes irrelevant.
> 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.
That’s what happens when you gamify “moderation” (pushing buttons at people) instead of providing answers. You get what you incentivize.
Honestly, another major deficiency of their approach is the lack of any meta-moderation. If you gamify moderation, it really behooves you to also have some mechanism for gamifying finding and punishing users who abuse that moderation. You’ve created a predator-prey cycle between content generation and content moderation, without some mechanism to drain the “economy” of moderation eventually the predators will exhaust all available prey and then starve. Even HN has the “vouch” button and that’s on top of a generally less toxic culture in the first place.
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 still good. However, I can understand that your areas may be in decline.
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.
I tend to get most of my actual help from blog posts and Substack articles (even clickbaity ones can be helpful). I'm seldom presented with "the answer," but they usually help to figure out how to get a start.
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.
I've asked about 2X questions to answers. I have contributed some fairly good answers, but I have mainly gone to get questions answered.
Early on, I probably asked them badly, but I learned to ask them better, and the answers came much less frequently. So ask a question badly, and get an insult, but also a useful answer. Ask a question well, and ... crickets. Lately, I usually end up answering my own question, just so there might be something for someone else to find.
I'm usually quite capable of finding the answers; just not quickly. It used to be, I would get good answers, within seconds of asking the question. Nowadays, I usually end up answering it myself, hours or days later.
I used to like getting answers that were "done right." Many of the folks there, have a lot of structural and cultural knowledge, and the answers were often quite valuable; giving me advice on why we should do it this way. I may well find out how to do it wrong, left to my own devices. I didn't mind being told I was doing it wrong. We become right, by being wrong.
Most folks with very high karma, have very few (usually single-digit) question counts (the digit is often "0"). I am not one to ascribe motives, but there must be a reason that invested folks don't want to ask questions on that forum.
Early on, I probably asked them badly, but I learned to ask them better, and the answers came much less frequently. So ask a question badly, and get an insult, but also a useful answer. Ask a question well, and ... crickets. Lately, I usually end up answering my own question, just so there might be something for someone else to find.
Incredible! This is exactly my experience. So many times, I ask a question, and either "crickets" (no replies), or some replies with zero up votes on my question. So... do they think my question isn't valuable, yet they take the time to answer it? Bizarre. In the last 2-3 years, my usage of the website has largely decayed to read-only.
I read it to mean Stack Overflow, whose drop in traffic has been widely discussed. But it could be Quora or other sites--effectively validating OP's original point.
StackExchange has been going downhill since late 2019. A significant number of power users (moderators) have left and the writing has been on the wall for a number of years.
Most StackExchange sites are niche and just get fewer users naturally because topics are covered by other forums.
I'm a power user on SO with some moderation capabilities. There's no mods per se I think just people who have different functions enabled to them (editing questions, closing, review etc). Admittedly I don't moderate it much (never did)
I still use it daily as a lazy reference. Haven't noticed any decline apart from it having covered all topics so there's mostly nothing new left to ask. Which is the best thing that can happen to Q&A site
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 ?
We have this at my work, need to totally gut the main product offering in order to maintain long term viability but nobody will do it because it's the cash cow even though it's slowly dying.
> 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.
I'm not sure you noticed it, but the people complaining about "editors" being toxic are actually those who are confronted with these "very clear rules and goals" already specified by the community , and they are calling foul once they see their edits being edited based on these established and time-tested processes.
And by the way, wikipedia supports conflict resolution processes which can culminate in articles being temporarily blocked to prevent endless revertions. You just need to flag the article and ask people their opinion.
It's strange how this whole debate centers around abuse, offers all kinds of solutions to perceived problems, but not only fails to acknowledge these processes are already in place in Wikipedia for over a decade but also they don't even wonder what content was added by the editors complaining their edits were reverted. I mean, think about it for a second. Do you think wikipedia achieved a notable level of quality because all edits, regardless of their content, remain untouched in place as-is?
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.
Probably not for existing organizations. Possibly for newly formed organizations, but it's unlikely to scale.
I've seen volunteer organizations founded on mild anarchistic principles thrive for a few decades while occasionally reinventing themselves. The key is a culture focusing on people working together for a common purpose. Keeping in mind that the purpose of the organization is more important than the organization itself.
There may be formal stakeholders and formal power hierarchies, but their role is kept to a minimum. Some people need to be in charge for legal and practical reasons, but leadership positions are not associated with high status. Ideally, the leaders are selected through a deliberative process, and they voluntarily step down after a while. Some people inevitably acquire high status within the community, but they are expected to recognize it and avoid being too vocal.
How about having a leader willing to make big bold bets? Whatever you may think about Zuck renaming Facebook to Meta, it certainly seems to demonstrate that his company hasn't fallen prey to stasis.
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.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. "Good faith" is hard to put a finger on, but you know it when you see it! I will never forget reading a bug report in Python where a senior developer replied to a junior developer: (roughly) "That's a good point. I didn't think of that. Your idea is better." I had never seen that level of humbleness in other open source projects that I follow.
I bet the top Wiki editors don't think there is an issue. That is the hard part. How do you get the people with the most vested interest accept change?
That is a good point you raise and there are no cookie cutter answers I think personally. Changing a culture is always far harder than to start. People’s behavior is already set (think of the backwards brain bicycle TED talk)
So you need a new synthesis in a dialectic system of two opposing wills. Like you say, how do you get people to accept less? Only if you can make them see what you are seeing, and if they can see different points of view. For some this is impossible I find, depending on character and circumstances. Also can you make them see that their behavior is detrimental in the long run? Or that they might have their heart in the right place (they care about the subject) but it is forced?
But yeah, the ability or willingness to see through other eyes is definitely “good faith” to me. You still don’t always have to agree, you don’t have to become a hivemind. But knowing that your ideas or critiques are heard, echoed makes you feel part of the whole, just being seen or heard makes a world of difference I think.
actively encouraging structures made up of almost-competing interests that sum towards a common goal helps guide our individual competitive natures towards accomplishing larger-than-one projects
picture a bunch of sticks leaning against each other; individually they'd fall, but their combined vector gives the total structure strength
> I agree. Is there any way to "inoculate" organisation to prevent this failure mode?
Maybe competent moderators, and a kind of rock-paper-scissors rule structure. Where you have rules, but excessive rules lawyering is a grave, bannable offense.
Why was this down voted? Guido van Rossum has the magic touch. He steered Python for 20+ years, including through the 2->3 upgrade. And, you never read negative stuff about him. Many other famous open source leaders are the subject various personal attacks. Linus Torvalds famously took off time to improve his interpersonal skills.
one way might be to demarcate civility as important as technical knowledge and allow people to get pitched by mod vote if they become snarky. Just a guess. I wish that was a rule on reddit for sure. Essentially disallowing fiefdoms
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 WWW, since the data is essentially sourced commercially (satellites and maps), whereas with the examples above the data was sourced communally.
And so I think it's inevitable Wikipedia will die within my lifetime. Probably within the decade. I suspect my children will never get to enjoy the miraculous shockingly glorious human affirming paradox of Wikipedia. Their (public school) teachers senselessly already tell them to avoid it. :-(
I don't think Wikipedia will die for any specific technical or political reason. I just think it will die because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before already has, so why not Wikipedia?
> 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.
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 Wikipedia's would probably help keep each other honest, and wouldn't functionally be too different than the non-english sections of Wikipedia that already exist.
If anything I'm a bit concerned that Wikipedia might be getting a bit too influential than an encyclopedia aught to be.
Right. The Wikimedia Foundation keeps trying other projects. They think they are supposed to grow. This leads to increasingly obnoxious demands for more contributions. "By 2022, it employed around 700 staff and contractors, with annual revenues of $155 million, annual expenses of $146 million, net assets of $240 million and a growing endowment, which surpassed $100 million in June 2021."
It's the disease of universities - too many administrators.
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.
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).
> Their (public school) teachers senselessly already tell them to avoid it. :-(
Weren't they doing that from the beginning? I get the feeling this feeling has gone down not up.
>I don't think Wikipedia will die for any specific technical or political reason. I just think it will die because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before already has, so why not Wikipedia?
It still seems to be surviving. Editor count may be down but a lot of the articles that have to be written already exist. It may stop improving much and only include new events but I don't think it will die until there's a replacement. Maybe people will just consult LLMs for general information and never visit Wikipedia?
I sadly agree with everything you said, except would add that Google Maps has already died for many users outside of urban areas. Satellite view has always been great for scouting outdoor areas but the app falls apart if you actually go anywhere with poor service and try to use it.
One of the most basic features, saving a pin on a map, broke years ago and despite many complaints on their support forum it hasn't been fixed. Directions can be terrible in less traveled areas, and dangerous if followed blindly since they will happily lead you down roads that require 4x4 or are totally impassible. Not to mention saved offline maps are unreliable and the UI clutter has gotten drasticaly worse over the years.
Maps still works fine for the typical things a Google emplyee cares about like getting directions in a well traveled city or finding places to shop, but it's only a matter of time before those usecases get crushed under the ever-building pressures of short term monetization, enshittification, and Google's general apathy and lack of care for users.
Trying to use Google Maps inside Germany due to poor mobile is a nightmare.
Trying to use Google Maps in France usually ends up being send down a dirt road or up a mountain.
Trying to use Google Maps to check my train the other day and I showed the next train and then a train 2 hours later, I had to put the depart time to 1 minute after the train leaving to see the next one.
I've said for years now the product owners of Google Maps are some of the most incompetent on the planet for the size of app they have.
Nowadays, everybody wanna browse like they know the next big site,
But when they click, it's the same old hype,
Just a bunch of reposts, nothing quite like,
And web surfers act like they forgot about Digg.
Nowadays, everybody wanna share like they've found the freshest link,
But when they scroll, it's closer to the brink,
Just echoes of the past, faster than you blink,
And online crowds act like they forgot about Digg.
>I just think it will die because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before already has
Assuming this is true, what are the leading hypotheses? Regression to the mean? Eternal September? I know everyone likes to talk about "enshittification", but what is the actual mechanism?
Since this is HN, someone's going to say "capitalism", but "capitalism" doesn't explain why Google search results get worse or Facebook is too annoying.
Oh that's easy. Dotcom Boom and Bust ended one era of the web right around 9/11, and you get a weird era between 2001 and the release of the iPhone where there's a lot of content posted on Newgrounds or flash game portals like Miniclip. An era where people still got information from Magazines and got demo discs, and people were discouraged from sharing their real name or personal information online instead of being required to provide it in order to create an account. Steve Jobs refused to put Flash support in the iPhone justifying it through security reasons but the real reason being it undermined the walled garden and iPhone app marketplace, and Android didn't think it would be worth it either, leading to even Adobe dropping support in 2011 ending that chapter of the internet entirely.
When 100% of your users access a website through a desktop computer you are going to design it one way. When half your users are mobile and half are desktop it's going to be designed a different way.
not dismissing other points your making or questions you're asking, but what happens with search results is a phenomenon that's more or less related to monopoly power - so as they (Google) control more, the classical theories behind capitalism no longer hold. For example, they provide worse search, but there is no close second. Even if there is a close second, that "other guy" is unable to afford the 60+ billion Google is paying to other companies to make them the default.
Competition is a double edged sword. More competition means businesses are liable to go bankrupt if they don't optimize for profit above all else, ethics be damned. Less competition means lazy monopolies. If you're anti-monopoly, it's hard to think of a bigger "lazy monopoly" than the government.
What you think of as “the classical theories about capitalism” are after-the-fact rationalizations which reflect neither the motivation for the development of capitalism (class struggle between the mercantile class and the feudal aristocracy) nor its actual operation in the real world, and which were developed defensively in response to the original (and critical) theory about capitalism-as-an-existing-system, which absolutely does not cease to hold in the presence of monopoly, or view the emergence and maintenance of such a condition as aberrant.
Sure, we can create something very small, private and fringe and be happy with our little kingdom. The powerful wouldn't care about that because it doesn't threaten their power. Once it becomes relevant, that's when they take action and show up with money and hard, real-world power. This is not some deep state conspiracy theory, it's simply about the powerful having the means to get their way.
>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.
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 cited material directly contradicts the claim made on the page.
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.
I don't have any issues with the article as it stands today. But earlier revisions had uncritically claimed that she had written the first computer programs. Hence the massive Talk thread.
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.
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.
> 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 think that concept is a fairy tale. It's kind of like open source software: just because the code is out there doesn't mean anyone's looking for bugs in or or fixing them.
Wikipedia articles settle on the stalemate between its most obsessive or motivated users, the result of which is frequently is wrong or biased. The quantity of eyeballs is irrelevant.
Wikipedia was one of the crowning achievements of the internet before said culture took over, and significantly such culture formed as a sort of symbiote and parasite to it's success.
What made Wikipedia successful was that it was free in a time that people were more used to paying for that kind of information, and that it was open in the sense that anyone could contribute when many places were significantly gatekept.
It has now evolved it's own form of said gatekeeping, not because such is necessary for Wikipedia to be successful, but to harvest the residual success of that open system for the benefit of the parasites.
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.
I once pointed out on a music theory page that a long name for a scale could be shortened to "Dorian b2". The edit was rejected because the chief whatever wanted a source. If you knew what Dorian means and what the second degree of a scale means you'd know immediately that what I was saying was true. I've hardly suggested an edit since.
Idea of centralized and universal interpenetration of information soon or later bump into boundaries. By definition, it's impossible approach. Interpretation vary with knowledge, culture and is shaped by politics, religion, regime, etc.
You’re consciousness trapped in meat, everything you experience is an interpretation of your environment and entirely subject to that meat.
“The Republican Party exists” is an interpretation of each word, and is controversial on some axis. “2” is a concept, it literally does not exist outside of the mind.
This is to say: your desire for objectivity has failed, the best we can ever get are “well defined and explained rationalizations that many people agree with”.
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.
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.
I wanted to give you a proper response to this but ran out of time. In any case, thanks for the kind reply!
If you felt like the comment was breaking the site guidelines (for example against shallow dismissals), then yes, a flag would be appropriate; or perhaps a downvote as a slightly lesser expression.
In terms of "people like this": the trouble is that we can't tell much about each other from these tiny globs of internet text, and what ends up happening is that we connect the dots in ways that come from our own prior experiences (usually negative ones), and then we end up feeling surrounded by jerks.
The root issue is not that everyone is that big of a jerk (though some do behave that way)—it's that we don't have enough information. Shallow comments expressing negative opinions are the most likely to generate this feeling in the reader, because the combination of lack-of-information and negative-sentiment is sort of fatal.
From a moderation point of view: if you read enough of these threads, it turns out that every reader has a different set of triggers for what feels to them like "people like this" whose "purpose is to negate" and so on. People thus have completely different interpretations of which are the worst comments. This makes sense once you understand that we're all filling in the blanks, connecting the dots, etc. out of our own prior experience. We all have such different priors that we will in different blanks in different ways.
This is not a basis for strong vocal moderation because if I scold one user saying "you're being purposely negative, please don't", what happens is a great many readers for whom the comment didn't land that way will feel like the mods are being heavy-handed and forcefully protest. Moreover, the user being scolded will most often reply, quite sincerely, that they had no intention of being that way and had no idea that their comment could land that way.
When running into a comment like that which creates a feeling like that, the temptation is to reply forcefully—i.e. with as much frustration as the comment generated in you—but for the purposes of a good online discussion, this is the worst thing to do. It only creates even stronger negative feelings in others, who then feel entitled to strike back in turn—and we get a downward spiral which is equal parts tedious and nasty.
The only thing I know that works is to "metabolize" your negative reaction by letting it run its course in you, and eventually subside, before replying. At that point, you have two options available that you didn't have before: either to reply neutrally, or to simply move on to something else that's more interesting.
Of course this advice is not so easy to follow in practice, and what it requires of you (I don't mean you personally of course, but all of us) is much deeper than it appears. On the bright side, it does mean that internet forum communication is not quite as trivial as it appears!
Maybe I should have stopped after the first sentence, but there's always, every bloody time, someone there to drag you down with negativity. How wiki is shit, stackoverflow is shit, the web is shit, society is shit – they never offer evidence, it's just shit and they can't see good in anything. I'm tired of these people dragging me down. What is their fucking agenda other than to wallow in failure?
People having an opinion on something doesn't affect you. Just relax.
Swearing at them, calling them out, "people like you" etc, affects them.
I have to have this exact same discussion with my 60yo bipolar neighbour who terrorizes a whole ecovillage, because someone planted carrots and "don't they know the seasonal pattern!!" - just relax, focus on your lane
> IMHO, you have to be deeply weird to be a frequent contributor.
Weirdo here.
Actually, I don't contribute much to Wikipedia (aside from the occasional edit for clarity or grammar).
But I do upload a number of images to Wikimedia commons. And I occasionally nominate some of my photos for evaluation as Quality Images and Featured Images.
Some people definitely act as gatekeepers and can be harsh in their criticism. But in my experience, most people give courteous, constructive criticism--even when they're rejecting your nomination!
I pretty much ignore the impolite people--or I try to point out that they could have leveled their critique in a better way.
The whole place is infused with passive-aggression (by policy) and toxic double-standards.
There are some truly bizarre things that I've encountered on Wikipedia (editing for almost 20 years now). Admins handwave blatant mistakes away by their friends, citing [[WP:NOTBURO]] and other such shenanigans. It seems to be getting worse over time.
Seems the nastier people are to contributors, the better the end product is for the 10000x more people reading it.
You know all those cruel piano teachers in Russia? But the audience actually wanted to hear the pianists later in life! It's like that... but collaborating on content, with NO CELEBRITIES :)
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.
> 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".
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."
The point is Semmelweis, whose information saved huge numbers of human lives, would be lumped in the same category (“toxic”) as your theoretical example, on account of Sammelweis being considered rude and disrespectful.
In simplest terms, ideas that threaten orthodoxy can be considered rude and disrespectful, and thus “toxic”.
So perhaps the definition of toxic needs more refinement, or toxicity isn't the right thing to be looking at,
despite it sounding about right in everyday conversation.
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 be expressed. On the other hand, to filter out the noise, there's a need for a trust propagation system among editors and viewers, so that each time, you get the most probable form of a page based on the trust given to direct contacts and indirectly to recursive contacts. Maybe AI could also help a bit. Who dare to start a new Wikipedia ;) ?
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 drawing from.
It's quite painful to directly edit Wikipedia articles on your own areas of expertise. You have context lay readers don't have, and you'll often leave things implicit or skip steps, because you know that laying those steps out and citing every detail of them isn't helpful for learning & understanding. But the encyclopedia doesn't work that way: the community there can't tell the difference between sensible elisions done in the spirit of efficient explanation, and original research that simply takes an opinion you hold idiosyncratically or fractiously and mints an encyclopedia article out of them.
It's also going to be deeply suspicious, for very good reasons that don't apply to you but do apply to like 70% of all other cases, any time you write something and cite yourself.
It is also just the case that not everyone should commit themselves to writing whole Wikipedia articles. I found the process pretty unhealthy; it sucked me in, to be sure, but it also filled my time with rules lawyering and squabbles. It'd be easy to criticize Wikipedia for having that culture, except that the project is so spectacularly successful.
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.
I always always always prefer code to mathematical notation or descriptions. Maybe it’s because I was never formally taught notation whereas I use code everyday, but I often find that mathematical notation lacks sufficient context and explanation.
Ultimately I’m going to need to turn your algorithm into code anyways so let’s just cut out the middleman. That may not be a popular opinion with peer reviewers, though.
>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.)
> It'd be easy to criticize Wikipedia for having that culture, except that the project is so spectacularly successful.
Much as I dislike some aspects of Wikipedia, I think this sentence should be printed in bold at the top of every discussion talking about how to change that culture.
Also true of a lot of other "why don't they just X" statements about other successful projects. Chesterton's fence in action.
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.
> the only conclusion is that the system is flawed. There's a need for a fundamental change in approach
There are attempts of creating more "professional" electronic encyclopedia like Citizendium [1] and Scholarpedia [2] but it seems that such tasks are rather hard since Wikipedia solidified its position already, despite flaws
Wikipedia policy specifically says to not reference primary sources (e.g. published, peer-reviewed journal articles). Only secondary sources such as news articles referencing the papers. This is probably why your contributions are being rejected.
I haven't read the specific justification for this policy, but a couple of reasons is that it allows two rounds of review of the information prior to incorporation into Wikipedia, and that journal articles are typically more technical and thus more difficult for general Wikipedia editors to understand when checking whether the sources back up the claims in the Wikipedia article.
The sourcing policy says: “If available, academic and peer-reviewed publications are usually the most reliable sources on topics such as history, medicine, and science.”
Peer-reviewed research papers have always been allowed in citations. The nuance that evolved over time is this "For example, a paper reviewing existing research, a review article, monograph, or textbook is often better than a primary research paper." Meaning, you can cite a research paper, but something more secondary that summarizes a body of scholarship would be better.
Individual research papers that haven't been reproduced often present conflicting results with one another, especially in fields with poor quality research like nutrition. Experts often run into this issue when they try to cite their own research or a narrow set of papers in a given field, especially when recent research conflicts with prior scientific consensus. It's why tptacek's comment above is apropos.
Censorship and biasmaking will always exist because the benefits it has for the elite are too high to not try and engage in it. There are many articles on current events in wikipedia where you can sift through the webarchive and see very different articles in terms of what details are highlighted or omitted entirely.
It depends a bit on the reason for the rejection. Wikipedia have various rules such as using secondary rather than primary sources that trip up people who are experts on some topic but unclear on how Wikipedia works.
"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:
1. User registers
2. User adds a bunch of promotional edits to multiple pages
3. At some point someone discovers this, reverts something, tells them to go away
4. User was "caught" so abandons the account and re-registers
If #3 is classified as toxic, this paper would find the same results I think.
I suspect the system for scoring "toxic" comments is less likely to flag the bureaucratic "I have reverted your edit for a second time because it does not meet WP:NPOV or WP:NOR. Please be aware of WP:3RR and be prepared to discuss any further changes on the talk page" comments about reversion and more likely to flag the sort of very angry and personal comments that come up when the page being edited is related to the culture war or actual longstanding war. Whether the recipient of the angry messages was previously a constructive contributor to that topic is an open question, of course.
The system almost certainly doesn't address the primary problem, which is that a small group of people consider a page or topic to be their personal fiefdom and they're experts at snowballing people with the most obscure wikipedia policies.
A shining example of this would be the page for Alcoholics Anonymous, which has a small legion of accounts 'defending' it. The accounts espouse, vocally, a victimhood complex - that AA is targeted by people "harassing" and "discrediting" the program.
The page is brutally censored of any negative information - such as their problems with predation ('thirteenth stepping') and sexual assault, the fact that the program has no basis in science and is repeatedly demonstrated to be amongst the worst options for addiction treatment. The result is a page which is wildly not NPOV - it contains only material positive about the founder, program and organization.
Someone tried to add mention of a documentary and the prick editor claimed the film did not meet notability guidelines because it hadn't been screened in the right kind of film festivals and thus its existence could not be mentioned.
Could you point me to any sources that discuss how the program "has no basis in science"? They have a section on effectiveness citing a few studies and the Cochrane review. I'm not well-equipped to determine if that's conclusive, of course. Is there overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
As someone else pointed out, there is a section on thirteenth stepping. Do you find it insufficient, or is it a recent addition..?
I am not invested either way, I am just curious. If what you're saying is accurate, it's a stark reminder that Wikipedia articles may _look_ well-researched and still ignore or hide enough evidence to fundamentally change the story.
This is something I have a hard time coping with: that no matter how many sources are cited, there is no way of knowing how many are missing... in some cases a few minutes of research can uncover obvious lies (and it's already a titanic effort to cursorily check most of your beliefs), but in others it takes actual expertise in the topic to know.
Edit: After a better look at the Criticism section, the article seems less-than-neutral in listing critical sources. "In the past, some critics have criticized 12-step programs as pseudoscientific". I would object to the use of "In the past" here: the sources cited are from 2015 and 2010 (although both of them are prior to the 2020 Cochrane review, which the Wikipedia page seems to consider conclusive. Still, unclear wording which spins the opinions as outdated). Similarly, two sources of criticism are listed under the "Popular press" section. Perhaps a better wording would be "Non peer-reviewed".
If you believe that AA _is_ ineffective, then this wording is certainly a misdirection. If you believe that the sources in its favor are conclusive, then it's adequate. Neutrality is tricky, and while it's extremely important in some topics, it should not be entertained in others (should the article on Earth be "neutral" and faithfully cite flat-earthers as a reasonable side?) Again, I don't know which way this should go, as I don't have any degree of certainty either way, because I know absolutely nothing about the subject.
> Could you point me to any sources that discuss how the program "has no basis in science"?
Do you know anything about it? The primary source I'd cite would be their own literature. It doesn't claim to be based in science. Sobriety is only possible by giving up your ego and embracing a higher power.
They are using an established tool to measure toxicity ("A rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make people leave a discussion.") and extreme toxicity ("A very hateful, aggressive, disrespectful comment or otherwise very likely to make a user leave a discussion or give up on sharing their perspective. This attribute is much less sensitive to more mild forms of toxicity, such as comments that include positive uses of curse words.") not what you are saying.
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.
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" with editing, but that only really works for things like fixing typos. If you know that someone might object, you should focus on in-depth discussion and let concerns be addressed that way.
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.
You are correct, I agree.
Lowering barrier affects contribution positively.
But I would argue, that it affects quantity and quality in significantly different ways. Meaning that quantity is increased vastly more of the two. Average quality most probably decreases. I.e. given high barrier only the most dedicated are donating, which affects quality positively.
Wikipedia wants to strike some balance between quality and quantity. (At this moment probably push towards quality)
Edit:
Where wikipedia clearly fails, is effectively communicating which contributions are desired, ahead of time.
People spending time with good intentions only to finally get rejected, is definitely suboptimal outcome for both sides. (Negative emotions, wasted time, decreased chance of further contributions, bad publicity)
Seems like Wikipedia should change their policy to say "be bold for trivial edits only" then. In fact, if they would just say "you're only allowed to make serious changes if you're part of the elite cabal of senior editors who have devoted their lives to memorizing our volumes of policy" instead of continuing to call itself "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit", we wouldn't be having this discussion; people would at least know what the situation is.
Exactly, these people are doing the valuable work of screening the crackpots, for no pay - and the only cost is that they'll also build an impregnable fortress to prevent almost anyone from ever changing anything unless they feel very strong with it and can traverse challenge social and organizational obstacle courses. This keeps the rate of change at a nice, steady, manageable trickle.
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.
There are roughly 13,000 middle schools in the United States.
Creating a page for each one and curating it represents a significant amount of volunteer work.
The "not notable enough" is in place in part to try to limit the amount of pages that need curating.
Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable - but the allocation of volunteer curation resources are often stretched quite thin on sites that crowdsource their content.
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 realities of Wikipedia.
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 the core group of volunteers expected to take up?
If the answer to that question is "none" - who is doing it? or is it going to become a repository of outdated information?
Having content is an ongoing cost of time to the people who maintain it. If it isn't maintained, it isn't valuable (or notable) enough to be put in there in the first place.
If it was just a paragraph of content that was timeless (when established, mascot, municipality, etc...) then consider reformatting the school district page (which may well exist) to include the information rather than creating a new one.
> 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.
> 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.
This type of effort often creates a disproportionate amount of work for the volunteers maintaining Wikipedia.
If you feel that that would be a good thing to do, the school should stand up its own wiki about itself that students could update and maintain.
That also avoids possible conflict with the rules of Wikipedia.
I recall a school that attempted to do "ask a question on Stack Overflow" and all the students in the class asked the same question - nearly word for word - about their current assignment... that all then got closed as duplicates of each other.
If the goal is to introduce someone to the application platform, it is likely better to have them work in a private instance where the mentor to new user ratio is much higher and things like "you need to make sure that you are using proper and correct English with capitalization and punctuation," are not "revert and leave an impersonal comment on their talk page about the expected quality of their contributions."
But what if such low-view, and now outdated/vandalized articles start approaching 50% of wikipedia content? That might reflect badly on credibility of whole wiki.
It is nontrivial problem of striking balance between content quality level vs content quantity/contributor freedom.
(Open source software projects deal with same problem, just not on such scale)
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
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.
> 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 slightly off on the number of schools.
How much time are you willing to spend maintaining individual pages as opposed to a page that lists all the schools and a little bit about each one. The list page takes a similar amount of time to maintain than each page as an individual one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_Di... as another example. Pages for high schools? They tend to have sufficient information about them (though the high school that I went to doesn't have a page). Multiply that number by two for the middle schools and by twice again for the elementary schools... and it gets to the difficult to maintain realm.
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!
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!
I find this happens with a lot of forums. The most critically minded users eventually get exasperated and become toxic after repeated bans to “kamikaze” accounts.
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 successful project on the Internet, it's going to be hard to take the concern too seriously.
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’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).
I remember it depending on the article. There are "turfs", and the rules aren't consistent between them. Some guy goes nuts on the movies and television articles and nobody can get anything through, it gets reverted with a "this is not necessary".
On science and engineering pages I remember there being a lot of unsourced material that felt more like a school paper than an encyclopedia. The quality was really bad, but it was still hard to change.
I'd rather have some uncouth editor berate me in a discussion than my personal editing experience of sometimes having simple and obvious, even clerical changes to non-contentious topics immediately reverted with no comment.
It's not that I take it personally, because I realize that no one cared to review the edits before reversion. It's just that "be bold" in the sense that it's applied by me in combination with how it's applied by overprotective bots (maybe?) or at worst diligent but careless editors is a massive waste of time and energy. So I've stopped contributing altogether.
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 software project contributions).
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.
There is too much politically motivated agitation on Wikipedia. This is particularly a problem because Wikipedia's power apparatus is completely undemocratic and anonymous. Wikipedia's organizational structure corresponds to a medieval feudal system.
It's impossible to have centralized "democratic" interpretation of information. You need vote system and constant revision of text. Even though I think it's not possible to have universal interpretation of information. Point of view vary with many aspects including politics, religion, regime, actual available knowledge...
One take might be that it is indeed rambling and not targeted. I say that because the statements, while appearing political, display a profound ignorance on the topic. It is entirely possible this was a disturbed individual who wished to do harm and saw this as a 'acceptable to some' way of perpetrating those crimes.
It's like someone claiming to be vegan to help them veil their eating disorder. Just because they say they are vegan, and do things a vegan might, does not mean that they share the behavioral traits or values of a vegan.
When I see this war between petty editors and insolent demanding contributors, I can’t help but sorta cheer to both teams.
They are all so right and simultaneously so wrong, and you can see the exact same thing happening on all large online spaces where content is supposed to be curated, that I can’t help but wonder: how is it that the phenomenon hasn’t been researched with hundreds of non-shoddy papers and a dozen of books written? And how come we haven’t moved on from screaming at one another about what the cure should be — “more censorship” or “more empathy”? How far can you dial both before realizing it just plain doesn’t work?
It's all just a matter of expectations. Today's Wikipedia has a quite difficult learning curve for making proper and lasting contributions.
The "Visual Editor" should be confined to the Talk: pages, so that the difficulty of editing can be higher, to match the difficulty of dealing with Wikipedia's internal bureaucracy.
I agree. The Visual Editor has simplified editing Wikipedia pages from a technical standpoint, but at the same time lowering the bar to edit pages also lowered the quality of many of those edits, making moderation even more difficult.
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.
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.
I have to think there is a lot of crossover between Wikipedia edit review interactions and code review interactions in terms of what actually brings out better quality outcomes and what make for discouragement of efforts.
I tried to be an editor for a couple months. I found the experience to be extremely unpleasant because even the best intentioned feedback came across as callous and annoyed and unkind. Softness is not a strong skill amongst Wikipedia editors.
That and the shitty bias evident everywhere due to using corporate news as the primary source for anything not involving STEM. Corporate news is wildly biased and it bleeds heavily into Wikipedia. It’s unfortunate that billionaires who own news organizations are literally writing history
I have made numerous toxic comments (described by others as vitriolic at times) over my two decades of editing, almost entirely towards the admin corps and the other imps who are disruptive. I do appreciate their work as a whole. I am a top-5000 editor of all time on the English WP. Mostly politics but some tech. My toxic comments are few and far, but can be intense. And not to mistake them with passively-hostile, terse disagreement.
I have never seen the 0.99 level comments on WP. The 0.83 and below is common, not just on Wikipedia but walking around large cities. 0.99 is part of the wonderful experience in SF and DC. But all the reports of decline are overstated, these places aren't going to decline much more, it's steady state at this point.
Many years ago I got called an idiot for suggesting an extremely specific and extremely irrelevant article get deleted. I haven't bothered to contribute since. Clearly Wikipedia is full of very stable geniuses and don't need contributions from the common folk.
Gave up looking for a clear definition of what a "toxic comment" is. All I found is a statement that they use some score from some tool and link to the tool developer's site so I'm required to sift through the developer's site to understand what the core part of the paper is, or I've missed some other part of the paper because they include so many dense paragraphs of nothing useful informations (as well as a nice promotion for the tool developers).
I had to ctrl+f to navigate enough to find it but they mention that their method for identifying toxic comments is under the methods and materials section. Its just some kind of trained ML model. In that section they link to a page (Id share it directly but it clearly has some annoying "heres your temporary access key" query parameters that would probably cause the link to break super fast) that gives examples of how it ranks different kinds of comments, and I think that list of examples is enough to trust that it does at least well enough at classifying to draw at least light conclusions from.
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 example, and the ordering would depend only on when a comment was posted.
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.)
I’m not inside your head so I don’t know if you would agree, but I would love to see this say content that is deemed undesirable as opposed to just straight “undesirable.”
My problem with gray text is a bit different: Since the dumbness of crowds can happen even on HN, I’d like to be able read comments myself and decide for myself what to think about them.
With some topics the hater community is very strong, and comments get so light so fast they cannot even be read without some disruptive workflow, and they aren’t always useless comments.
True, and maybe I went a little far. The ones that quickly get unreadable are invariably pretty dismal. Sometimes it’s just morbid curiosity about what they said.
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.
> 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.
No the question is how the authors decided which comments were toxic for their evaluation. If they say "gut feeling" then replication will be greatly hampered.
The original comment said "All I found is a statement that they use some score from some tool and link to the tool developer's site". So if that's all there is regarding classification, their methodology is not nailed down very well in my view. But maybe there's more and we haven't found it?
There is an entire section dedicated this at the end of the article. They are using at established tool for this domain and there are links explaining how it works and definitions.
I hear a lot of comments here about the decline of Wikipedia. That's nonsense. One can be very productive on Wikipedia if they have viewer rights. Sites like Stack Overflow are much worse.
An obvious alternative explanation would be that pages on controversial topics both attract toxic comments and are more difficult to edit. I am not sure whether this paper controlled for this.
I think since the paper is littered with the term "toxic", it clearly has its own point of view — that is, not as objective as one would like in this kind of study.
Who leaves the toxic comments? Rando readers some of the time I'm sure, but most probably come from other editors. Other editors are the ones who are well accustomed and most inclined to track down other editors associated with some article and give them a piece of their mind.
Most of the public seems to be range-banned when not using an account anyway.
Wikipedia has grown to be a PR outlet. It's overwhelmed by different interest groups pushing their own agenda or doing PR. Especially smaller Wikipedias, like for example German, are known for defamation campaigns against “unpopular” authors and topics.
Though the source, although worth reading and providing a valid criticism, may not be good enough, since Wikipedia, the main source of truth on Internets, marks it as a misinformation website.
You're being sprayed with weed killer (metaphorically). The problem is, you have step into a conflict area without realizing it.
The moderators spray the whole area with weed killer because there really are weeds. It's too much work to pull the weeds individually, so it all gets hosed down.
I regularly edit things on Wikipedia. My principle is: If someone is toxic, reverts my edits with mean words, fuck it, leave the lemma. Usually after a while these people get banned and then I come back and happily improve.
Personally I have no problem working with toxic people. Toxic people talking nonsense I cant deal with. You do have to have a f**g point if you are going to be toxic and you need to demonstrate by example how you think things should be done.
I've left acerbic comments in replies to editors before, but only when they were being rude, obstructive, dismissive or sarcastic themselves. I do hope it changed their behavior, like the article suggests.
Some of these people get so full of themselves and treat the pages they are interested in like their own little fiefdoms that no-one else is allowed to touch.
I have been making small contributions for fifteen or so years. I don’t much feel like doing it anymore after a spurt of bad interactions.
About a year ago I created a Wikipedia page for a TV personality and author I enjoy. Spent literal hours on it collecting citations and what have you. Within a couple hours the page was deleted for not being noteworthy. He had his own TV show, has multiple published books and a popular podcast. Seems noteworthy enough to me, but what do I know.
A couple months ago I tried to create a page on a local tractor company that used to be really important to my hometowns economy. There was an existing section about the company on one of their specific tractors pages. I used that with its citations as the basis for the new page.
I did scan the citations and they seemed fine. I even fixed one that was broken with a wayback machine link. What I didn’t do was read them word for word. Well turns out multiple sections of the text I had moved from the tractors page were straight up lifted from their sources. Within 5 minutes of posting the page, someone else did read my citations word for word, and it was marked for “rapid deletion for copyright infringement”. No chance to explain. No chance to reword. Just gone completely and I didn’t have a local copy of the article.
It was particularly frustrating because the moved text only accounted for about 20% of the page by the time I was done.
Beyond that the history of my author page is now marked with a copyright infringement warning that if I do it again I’ll be banned.
I don’t think I want to play in their sandbox anymore.
I had a similar experience a few years ago. I started a new topic and immediately I had some guy marking it for deletion. In the talk page he made various claims, almost all of them nonsensical, apparently with goal of getting me to go away. Eventually, after some fairly harsh replies, he went away, and the pages stand to this day.
But it worked, I gave up soon after and haven't contributed since.
It's like the existing editors want to keep WP all to themselves and don't appreciate "outsiders" interfering. The irony is I'd been contributing since 2002 off an on, but that made no difference.
> Eventually, after some fairly harsh replies, he went away, and the pages stand to this day.
Which brings up the point I was going to make about TFA. If 'toxic' comments are an effective way to reduce the impact of bad editors, then it's not clear that 'toxic' comments have a negative effect on the quality of Wikipedia. They might be improving it.
Reminds me of my experience with Stackoverflow. I tried to solve a very specific problem with Windows installers. I only got some responses from oldtimers that basically said “why would you do such a thing?”and similar. It felt extremely unwelcoming. It’s ok to not answer but why be so dismissive? I guess the only questions they like are things like “how do I calculate 2+2 in python?”. Anything more complicated is not acceptable.
Yeah, whenever I ask a question on SO, I literally have to write paragraphs of text exhorting people to answer my question instead of a different question they find easier, or why my question is not the same as some vaguely similar one.
Then I have to constantly remind people about the same stuff in the comments.
That culture problem has been getting worse and worse at SO over time. I only go there as a last resort.
StackOverflow is a great resource if you want to know how you would have done some programming task in 2009. Their cultural aversion to new/updated content has frozen them in time.
Agreed. Certain categories should probably be purged every 5 years or so. In many areas there is no value in learning how things got done years ago. Obviously, there are other areas where the fundamentals haven't changed since the last decades.
I found SO very frustrating until one of the moderators explained it rather clearly: SO isn't about me (or you). They don't want to help me (or you). They want to help everyone else.
In that light all the weirdness made sense. Of course, I am very interested in getting my problems solved, so I simply stopped asking on SO to avoid the frustration.
> I found SO very frustrating until one of the moderators explained it rather clearly: SO isn't about me (or you). They don't want to help me (or you). They want to help everyone else.
I know that's what they say. The thing they have trouble understanding is that "helping everyone else" does not mean bending every question into some 101 level software design advice thing.
"Helping everyone else" very much can mean being a repository of answers to hard questions or solutions when non-typical constraints are at play. Every software engineer worth his salt must have had an experience where the answer he was looking for was in some old, weird forum post that was the single hit to his search query, but a lot of SO doesn't seem to get that.
I think StackOverflow is a good example of a site where cultural norms have become a life-threatening issue. The site has experienced a sharp drop in search traffic and yet people still say it's unfriendly all the time. Fixing that perception should be a top priority.
In the rare occasion I'm desperate enough to ask a question, I dread seeing the red inbox notification. I think I've abandoned the last three questions I asked because I couldn't stomach facing the drama I expected.
The cultural norms of internet forums should never have been allowed to take root on a Q&A site. There is nothing "professional" (or even helpful) about answering questions with out-of-scope proscriptions.
Your plumber doesn't show up asking why you want your toilet fixed, nor does he tell you your house is messy, give you dietary advice and passive-aggressively insinuate you need to fix your roof. SO responders are mini-spouse syndrome incarnate.
Fixing the unfriendly perception is why stack overflow is dead. Signal to noise for professionals is now close to zero. Maybe it's friendlier, but it's also no longer worth visiting other than the historical record.
From my last 5 stack overflow questions, 3 were some mod closing the question with a rationale that’s ridiculous.
Most questions are now answered in the comments instead of being written as an answer below the question and I assume this is because people have had bad experiences with gate keeper mods when writing answers.
I have reasonably high karma.
I don’t think quality deteriorated due to some attempts to make the site more friendly. It’s the spirit of a county rabbit breeders association that drives people away
I (used to) answer questions in comments. It became too discouraging to post an answer that took 20 minutes to write and get immediately downvoted because someone disagrees with any single part of it (or they're trying to promote their own answer by suppressing everyone else's).
Comments can't be downvoted. MetaFilter had the right of it.
I had a similar experience in SO, I used the term "the most bulletproof-y way I can think of" or something like that in my answer, definitely used "bulletproof-y." Someone responded with something like "You shouldn't say that. Nothing's really bulletproof, you know."
Generally I've had pretty good luck with Stack Overflow. Recently however I had a ten year old popular question about how to read terminal responses in a shell script removed b/c some mod decided questions about shell scripts belonged on "another Stack Exchange site".
I expect Wikipedia to collapse under its own weight and hard fork within the next 10 years. I think it would be a shattering like Twitter if the content wasn't under a permissive license. Instead I think it's going to be like WoWWiki being acquired and forking to Wowpedia, and then Wowpedia being acquired and forking to Warcraft Wiki.
The community around it is extremely unwelcoming and has calcified - only the most cynical and bitter editors remain. I know of a couple of the principles of the site, "be bold" and "assume good faith", I don't think those are followed or respected anymore.
Any cursory googling of their finances would show you that they balooned and instead of using said finances to run the website they ask for more millions of dollars to sponsor a bunch of unrelated charities and hire a bunch of executives to manage such use of the funds.
I wish someone would hard-fork it already and stick to a promise of strictly sticking to the core job of operating wikipedia the website, with a small dedicated team.
Plus they don't need any more money, they have enough money to run it for a long long time already and if they keep doing a good job people will keep donating. I don't understand this model of "we need to ensure we survive forever as fast as possible by accumulating a billion dollar endowment". Nonprofits should have ~5-10 years runway max and keep getting donations if they keep doing a good job. I don't trust any organization forever. What incentive do they have to be useful and welcoming if they have a forever endowment?
You could make a fantastic fork if you simply stop pretending that credentials can not be validated. It then follows that 5 angry narcissist anons do not equal in value a professor.
Then you can further simplify if you employ expert moderators who have the final say in everything. The infinite size discussions back stage serve no purpose.
I bet people had tons of ideas for other improvements. (think: A distributed system with fancy api's for the robot overlords.)
I've read stuff from insiders that the foundation spending grows exponentially year-after-year and they use those scare banners that "wikipedia is under threat" to collect more money and grow even more, the money is completely unrelated to hosting the site. This is a recent article from a year ago:
While 10 years old, things haven't gotten better but worse. Seems like lots of projects besides the "core product" Wikipedia are being founded. Obviously people don't like that because they want the money to be used for preserving/building/extending Wikipedia.
Volumes have been written on the ballooning budgets of Wikimedia foundation, of which only a trivially small amount goes towards hosting costs. In mobile rn, but Google should get you plenty of results.
I've observed this phenomenon for a while. The people deleting these pretty much do nothing else. They are some how considered valuable contributors. Something I've mocked loudly. The effect is that some topics/categories have wild outgrowth of articles even the best of us would doubt necessary but certainly wouldn't care enough to attempt to delete it. Every popstar, every album, every song on the album, covers of it, each their own article. It would be wild if STEM editors got the memo.
Who the hell would not want an article about a tractor company? Tractor are more important than discography. It gets even more stupid if we assume your articles really needed work. Who is to do the work if it is not allowed?
They should just ban the deletionists starting with the ones who didn't contribute a single sentence for years. Filling talk pages with nothing that creates articles.
The worse case I've seen was a guy creating articles about (mostly old) books for many years followed by this giant caravan of deletionists who sometimes deleted the article immediately, sometimes after a week, sometimes a month, sometimes they exchanged troll messages among their own for a whole year. Eventually they deleted the articles faster than he created them with ever cheaper excuses until eventually the person creating them was the excuse for deletion. Thousands of articles gone, all good articles. I know all of the guidelines, I know when it should be good enough.
Same thing happened to me but in my case, I added a simple "citation needed" on a statement that was objectively false (can be proven by simply going to the vendor's landing page). The citation needed tag got reverted almost instantly and I was told that adding this tag was inappropriate and constituted sabotage. I never clicked that edit tab again.
The thing is, I don't blame the editor. He's high on the smell of his own farts. I blame wikipedia for enabling him. At least with stack overflow, they try to make fighting against this kind of corruption easier by making it's voting-based moderation system visible. Not wikipedia. It's opaque. It reminds me a lot of governments.
Anyway, I still notice false statements on wikipedia from time to time, but I always smirk to myself and carry on :)
Wikipedia has an ongoing project on improving articles on the subject of western esotericism (quite interesting one even for "scientifially-minded" if you look at the origins of the Royal Society and the surrounding protosciences). I've been using Wikipedia since its early beginnings, on my primary account loosely contributing for well over a decade and many of my edits from years ago were left unchanged.
A few months ago I've tried creating a small page about a modern-day occultist who seems to have near Indiana Jones status in that community for digging out one well-known magical ritual from medieval archives all over Europe with academic scrutiny (the Abramelin ritual, A Dark Song is a recent interesting movie about it). His name already was mentioned on some related pages.
Went through some lengths searching for more secondary material after they asked for it. Had hours of conversations via Wikipedia IRC to make sure I deliver exactly what is needed (and they claimed my sources are sufficient there). But even several academic papers discussing his work were not enough for the admin in charge, apparently his whole bio needs to be in a secondary source for him to be considered "noteworthy" - which seems to be an impossible demand in this small community.
I get the danger of self-promotion, Wikipedia has a few obvious pages of company CEOs self-promoting, who probably asked some poor employee bloke to write it. But meanwhile Wikipedia is scattered with obvious industry propaganda / damage control (see the suspiciously detailed Monsanto damage-controlling articles on glyphosate or the Séralini affair; and some more recent pharma-related topics) and literal advertisements from several industries. Just check out that page about Justin Bieber portraying that kid as some modern-day musical genius. Industry marketing departments – of course – do have the resources to literally fight for their articles full-time. On top of it this all severely and widely influences public opinion - these articles are much more widely read than one about a well-known author in a hidden subculture -, and nobody seems to be interested in doing something about it.
But it should really be accompanied by the History of Philosophy without any gaps podcast for more historical context. It's very interesting to hear the contrast between the "mainstream" and the "underground" takes on the exact same philosophers throughout history.
Thank you, this looks great (and quite academic, which seems difficult to come by). You likely know about him, but Wouter Hanegraaff, who holds an academic chair about western esotericism could be interesting to you.
> He had his own TV show, has multiple published books and a popular podcast.
That alone doesn't meet Wikipedia's requirements for noteworthiness. Some of the sources you used have to be independent. Eg. published biographies written by someone else, an independent TV show about him (not starring him), etc. Otherwise any random social media influencer could be included if they publish their content in various formats.
I'm guessing because of self-promotion as well as the fact that if nobody's written about them, they probably aren't that significant. Wikipedia says it's not meant to be a collection of all human knowledge.
> Otherwise any random social media influencer could be included if they publish their content in various formats.
Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but... Why not?
I know that's an age old question in Wikipedia, but if people are happy to write and edit articles about their niche of interest... Let them do it, maybe they'll contribute even more to other topics.
I tend to be an advocate for including more rather than less, but one argument for requiring a baseline level of notability is that sufficiently obscure topics are difficult to verify information about as well as making it unlikely that people will notice, and Wikipedia gives additional credibility to whatever's currently written there (whether it should or not, it does).
Less obscure topics are both easier to verify and more likely to have someone looking at them and going "wait, what, that's not right...".
I think there is a certain danger associated. I was a watcher of a few Wikipedia lemmas on esoteric topics and it was quite hard to keep these articles grounded in reality, I believe some actors on there were Astro turfing to sell more scams energy devices, and part of their strategy was to have a fitting, non-critical Wikipedia article to the esoterica they sell.
I don’t contribute to Wikipedia anymore for the obvious reasons. Now there is one person less making sure that the article on Orgon Energy something states that it’s not a concept accepted by science.
My point is the more articles the less likely is it that a community can maintain the information and reach a certain consensus on what would be a neutral view when phrasing the article.
> Spent literal hours on it collecting citations and what have you. Within a couple hours the page was deleted
> No chance to explain. No chance to reword. Just gone completely
I've had the same experience. It requires too little effort to dump other people's contributions. I don't understand the super users' motivations in cases like this.
Only slightly tangential to parents post but I hate that Wikipedia moderators need articles to be import enough. A lot of deep dive articles into niche shows are all relegated to fandom wikis. Those sites provide no way to get a dump or even has any sort of knowledge graph
I had been working with the zeshel dataset and wanted to build a knowledge graph on top of the dataset for the model that I was planning to build. If those articles were a part of Wikipedia, there would have atleast been some effort integrate them to the larger Wikipedia knowledge graph
I recently read a page on a 19th century clock maker and found it poorly sourced and very factually incorrect in many places. I thought briefly about putting in the work to correct the page and provide good sources and such, but I read posts like yours and any energy I might have for it just evaporated.
> About a year ago I created a Wikipedia page for a TV personality and author I enjoy. Spent literal hours on it collecting citations and what have you. Within a couple hours the page was deleted for not being noteworthy. He had his own TV show, has multiple published books and a popular podcast. Seems noteworthy enough to me, but what do I know.
Like there is always going to be disagreements about what should or shouldn't be an article, but this case seems pretty reasonable and hardly a close call.
The wikipedians claimed there was no independent coverage of this person, and nobody disagreed. Seems reasonable to delete in such circumstances.
----
> Within 5 minutes of posting the page, someone else did read my citations word for word, and it was marked for “rapid deletion for copyright infringement”. No chance to explain. No chance to reword. Just gone completely and I didn’t have a local copy of the article.
Well yes, copyvios put wikipedia in disrepute so they are handled quickly. That doesn't mean it is the end of everything - you can still discuss after it was deleted. Even if it remains deleted an admin would likely be willing to give you the non copyvio part if you asked.
Wikipedia is definitely used in politicized way by the editors. A clear example of my knowledge is how the referendum celebrated in Catalunya (Spain) in 2017 is described in the Catalan and Spanish versions, for some topics they seem to be talking about different events.
Anyone can use an english translator and check it out. Just in the first three lines the Spanish version uses the word "ilegal" and the Catalan does not, it might seem subtle but this subtlety has had huge implications in Spnish politics:
I would agree with the premise that there's reduced number of editors. I would agree wikipedia should try to figure out why.
It's not immediately obvious to me, from OP, who are leaving but I have a pretty strong understanding who.
It's also quite impossible to survey the people who left. When you survey those who remain, you're getting the complete incorrect cohort.
>automated toxicity detection
They never really define what is a toxic comment. Their sources seem to suggest the gender gap, task related disagreements, harassment survey from 2015, and something about arabic wikipedia.
All the while there are clear rules against things like personal attacks. So you have to kind of find rather subjective examples and you somehow automated it? That seems frought with inaccuracy. Yet they seem to find some correlation? Oh wait they don't provide those numbers. I bet it's pretty bad for them to hide them. Perhaps it's my mistake and I failed to find them.
>voluntary opt-in survey of the 3,845 Wikipedians conducted in 2015
All data prior to the actual problem occuring will be a red herring at best. Again, wrong cohort. This is like surveying non-cancer patients and making conclusions about cancer patients.
>The automatic detection of offensive language in online communities has been an active area of research since at least 2010
Offensiveness is subjective and clearly 2010 is too early of data.
What I see from this study, is cherry picked data from at least ~7 years ago. Why are they even doing this? Are they trying their best to find an explanation while being intentionally blind to the problem?
I'll just throw down. How about the better explanation? Wikipedia became biased and can't really be trusted anymore? Why contribute to something because has become a political tool?
I could point at John Stossel's work on showing wikipedia's bias. I could offer wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger's blog on wikipedia's bias. There has even been countless live examples where influencers modify wikipedia for greater truth. Provable on live video that the facts were incorrect. They then edit wikipedia and then it's near instantly reversed.
How about wikipedia's own curated 'reliable sources' which reads like a they only accept sources with only 1 type source; a particular establishment left wing viewpoint.
Whether or not fox news is reliable, it's not, it was practically the only source from a differing viewpoint. They purged all the rest.
Why is the reduced numbers of editors? People left wikipedia because it's not reliable and trustworthy anymore. People aren't leaving because someone on the internet hurt their feelings.
Wikipedia is absolutely free to continue in this path, but they will be in decline for doing so.
I can say assuredly that toxicity and politicization (IRL, not just on wiki) also makes the vast majority (>99%) of science experts refrain from trying to engage with the public. The experts that do engage tend to be outliers, which sometimes exacerbates the public’s distorted impressions of science questions.
> On the other hand, the only toxic comments I experienced on Wikipedia were from an editor.
Isn't everyone an editor on Wikipedia? By definition, you need to be an editor in order to leave comments. Who other than editors would leave toxic comments?
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.
> 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 mean?
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."
> I mean, that's true, but in a not-especially-deep way that doesn't really help or address the issue at hand.
I'm not sure you go the point. If someone's complain is that others can also edit wikipedia articles, they are complaining about the fundamental nature and purpose of a wiki. Don't you understand how fundamentally flawed is the concept of conplaining that others just like you can also edit wikipedia? Those damned editors.
> Why do we have this thing where different people can edit it?
Yes, others can edit it, including your own changes. That is the whole concept of a wiki. Whining that others also edited a wiki shows a fundamental failure to understand what a wiki is and how it's designed and expected to work.
> So, while yes, anyone can edit, some of that gets in the way of the actual purpose, in that "five whys" sense.
No. Anyone can edit it as they see fit. The whole concept of a wiki is a consensus-based process that concurrent changes converge to a stable point accepted by the community. Expecting that your edit should be set in stone while you reserve your right to edit other people's work is simply absurd.
That's why it's important to clarify what an editor really is (not a figure of authority, but a guy just like you) and why it's absurd to be offended and feel entitled to edit over everyone's work but not have your own contributions edited. That's not what a wiki is, nor is it why the concept is a huge success.
> It's a bit like saying, when someone brings up spam (...)
That's an amusing remark, because to me you're actually arguing in favor and in defense of spammers, as they are the ones complaining that their abusive misuse of a system should not be prevented, criticised or fought by the community.
I'm not so sure you get the point. The point of a wiki is not that anyone can edit it. That's merely a property, a method to accomplish something.
The wiki is for something. That something is to build an interrelated foundation of references and facts. That anyone can edit is merely a means to get there. The misuse of editing at least-worst, impedes creating that hyperlinked mass of information.
And no, you have the spammer thing backward, entirely. That anyone can send something to someone else is a merely a property of email. The point of email is communication that people want. And so the misuse of "sending a message to anybody" is that it can get in the way of communication people do want.
Nobody said any of it should be "set in stone," good grief. We're a month past November 5th, let's put the strawman away. Engage with some of the examples provided by people of bad actors for some good faith discussion.
No, that's fundamentally wrong. Every single Wikipedia user is an editor. In Wikipedia ou don't even need to have registered an account or be logged in to be an editor.
> 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.
This is how I know you have no idea about what you're talking about. Most users don't bother registering an account because they do not need one to be able to edit articles. I am well aware of this fact because I've been active in Wikipedia's anti-vandalism groups, and one thing I did was spend time looking at the stream of most recent changes. New edits are mainly done by IP users, which means editors who either have no account or haven't bothered logging in,
and red accounts (accounts whose owned didn't bothered to create a personal page). Red accounts were only behind a fraction of new edits.
Again, no one needs to have an account to edit wikipedia, with the rare exception of articles temporarily locked due to being subjected t attacks and edit wars.
> Their work is immediately reverted by an editor.
In my experience this is a somewhat rare event, and it is mainly due to sheer vandalism (shit posting, users creating articles about themselves, inserting unfounded and unsourced claims, etc). There are also astroturfers who abuse wikipedia to advertise their products or services. There are also constructive contributions but they are either edited to fit the style guide or are marked for stuff like sources or demonstrate notoriety.
I repeat, the main source of reverts is vandalism and posting stuff that has no place in Wikipedia, such as unsourced claims and allegations, post ads for stuff and businesses and things, push political agendas, and even abuse wikipedia as if it's your personal blog.
There's regular users and then there's "Extended confirmed users" who have more permissions and can do things such as edit protected pages
>User is automatically added to the group when the account has existed for at least 30 days and has made at least 500 edits. This user access right allows editors to edit and create pages that are under extended confirmed protection.
> There's regular users and then there's "Extended confirmed users" (...)
The accusation isn't directed at users with specific role-oriented permissions. The accusation is directed at editors. Everyone in wikipedia is an editor. Even users who haven't logged in, or have an account at all. It's a nonsense claim, particularly when we take into account that the whole concept of a wiki is that everyone in the world is an editor.
There are people who rarely make edits on Wikipedia, and then there are people who do it all the time and participate in the wider culture/community/bureaucracy of Wikipedia.
I believe the original comment was talking about people who regularly edit Wikipedia articles.
I'm not. I'm pointing out the absurdity of complaining that in Wikipedia you have editors editing.
> There are people who rarely make edits on Wikipedia (...)
It really doesn't matter. Wikipedia allows them to edit anything as they please, even if they choose not to.
Again, the whole point of a wiki is that everyone is an editor. The very definition of a wiki is that "a website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content."
I stress "allowing any user to add and edit content."
Any user.
Do you see what I mean?
> I believe the original comment was talking about people who regularly edit Wikipedia articles.
Again, the original comment makes no sense because everyone is an editor. You cannot add a contribution without editing it. You cannot revert a change without editing it. Any operation on an article represents an edit. Anyone can edit articles on wikipedia. Everyone is an editor, even those without user accounts. Don't you understand that the original comment makes no sense, knowing what a wiki is?
Adding to this, the original comment tries to refer to "Editor" as if it's somekind of authority figure which is somehow victimizing him for editing content they added. Yet, isn't that the whole concept of a wiki, that anyone is free to edit anything they see fit? Do you understand the absurdity of that comment?
Skimming the article, the article isn't using that definition. The article's definition seems to be "anyone with an account" or "anyone with an account who is active".
> In this paper, we analyze all 57 million comments made on user talk pages of 8.5 million editors across the six most active language editions of Wikipedia
> I took this to mean those with special rights (...)
I know that wikipedia supports granting special rights to some editors. I have those. That's why I'm stating that an editor does not have special rights, because everyone is an editor.
And by the way, in general Wikipedia's "special rights" granted to non-administrator user accounts aren't that special. They unlock some UI features like bulk editing to fight vandalism, move pages, mark edits as minor, etc. See for yourself, and compare the difference between the permissions granted to Administrator accounts, everyone in the world (all users, registered accounts), and other groups.
> The special rights include reverting edits (...)
No, it really doesn't. Anyone can revert any edit, even if you haven't registered an account and/or you aren't logged in.
The only thing that the reversion permission capability grants you is access to a button in the UI.
Also, all you need to do to be granted access to that permission is a) have an account, b) ask for the permission, b) not have an abuse-riddled contribution history.
>Sure, but do you really think that's the intent of the article, or are we arguing semantics?
I think the article is using "editor" in a broad way meaning all users with accounts. I think we are arguing semantics in a way the article isn't. From the article:
>A user’s talk page is a place where other editors can communicate with the user either on more personal topics or to extend their discussion from an article talk page.
> Sure, but do you really think that's the intent of the article, or are we arguing semantics?
It's not semantics. Accusing Wikipedia editors of doing something in an attempt at portraying Wikipedia in a negative light has the same meaning as blaming wikipedia for accepting changes from everyone in the world who stumbles upon a page.
By definition, an editor is anyone who edits anything at all on Wikipedia. In wikipedia, you don't even need to be logged in to edit articles or leave comments.
The real shocker is that there are two dozen sexual harassment scandals against women on Wikipedia, involving editors, admins and even high-up stewards and sysops.
My main wikihandle is two decades old. It still shocks me when a fewyearsaccount un-edits my contributions (I know how this rodeo works, folks). Even more shocking is when ChatGPT cites one of my trivial contributions (e.g. transistor density updates when M2Pro chipset was released).
It's a fine social or political stance, but it's purely those.
Clicking the first link, woman :
A trans woman (short for transgender woman) is a woman ->
Woman : A woman is an adult female human. ->
Female : An organism's sex is female (symbol: ) if it produces the ovum (egg cell).
As far as I know that's not the case.
Maybe, but about 40% of people who lean Democrat believe that "woman" refers only to biological sex. [1] This is not a MAGA thing. (I myself lean strongly Democratic.)
Among all Americans, 60% (and growing) believe that a transwoman is not a woman.
So, my core point stands: the transwoman Wikipedia article parrots an ideological minority.
This ideological group happens to be extremely online and fervent, as my downvote status reflects. But they are nevertheless a shrinking minority, per Pew Research, and their views have no place being espoused in a Wikipedia article. It's a shameful contravention of Wikipedia neutrality. [2]
If toxicity makes certain "volunteers" stop squatting on Wikipedia pages, then weaponized toxicity against them might actually be the prosocial choice, as Wikipedia is an important public resource. Drive them out. That's my takeaway from the parent article.
What is it about this topic that drives people absolutely crazy? Far less than 1% of people ID as trans yet it's just the most important cultural shibboleth and just mentioned / argued about constantly... why do you care at all how Wikipedia phrases the opening paragraph on their page about Trans women?
I think the major things that drive anti-trans people crazy are laws, regulations, and policies compelling speech [1], and creating mandatory mixed-sex spaces [2] and competitions (we're still in an era where women have to fight for rights such as sports equality [3] and lactation rooms).
While Pew doesn't get into the question you're asking, it's research results show how widely people think on the issue [4]. A breadth of ideology facilitates polarization and craziness.
For pro-trans people you probably have a silent majority, but the crazy minority [5] will range the gamut in motivation.
It's because this is a fundamental redefinition of the difference between women and men, one which seriously disadvantages women. When this ideological stance of "trans women are women" is enacted into law and imposed as policy, it has the effect of eradicating female-only spaces, forcing women to accept any man who purports to be a woman in these spaces. This is good enough reason to oppose it.
There were women's spaces (bathrooms / changing rooms) for example that kept women safe from predatory men.
Who should be allowed in those? Is it defined by the clothes?
If a predatory man / bad actor decides to put on those clothes to abuse the system, then what? What if the predatory man / bad actor decides to hang just below the bar of illegality, and creep on women long term?
Is this something that you spent a lot of time worrying about prior to this bizarre trans panic? All of the existing laws that prevent predatory men from creeping on women in those spaces also apply to trans people..
Totally disagree, it’s now entirely legal in many places for a predatory man to say he identifies as a woman, and change in spaces previously created to keep women safe.
And yes, thanks, I do like thinking about issues of justice, morality, and politics.
Excellent example. Is it possible for a convicted criminal to game compassion to be moved from a men’s to women’s prison. Would anyone lie in that situation? There is probably a whole lot more people to take advantage of if your a convicted predator in a woman’s prison.
This is the new cancel culture: Comment away with hate speech (bots) to stop a true and honest discussion. It's too bad the internet is not yet ready for this form of misinformation and destroying real conversations. Now with AI (bots) coming up, it will get even more difficult...
I think the more interesting question is what is the impact of these volunteers leaving. Are the toxic comments directed at people who tend to get in the middle of flamewars, or are they innocents? Do these people do good work? Or are they just annoying people until someone snaps at them in a fit of toxity?
Sure-- where you're driving is usually more interesting than the highway that will take you there, but this isn't an off-the-cuff editorial-- it's presenting a quantitative analysis. Trying to study the qualitative impact without data like this means merely assuming the fundamental size and shape of the problem, which at best reduces it's utility. At worse it points you in the completely wrong direction.
There are very few water is wet articles in T&S research. It’s pretty dang hard to get any good scientific information. It’s only in the past few years that I have got an idea of churn and impact of toxicity behavior online on communities.
I’ve been looking into this from before the term trust and safety existed.
It’s THAT bad. Most of our data is behind platform walls.
>For instance, the level of conflict on discussion pages, as assessed by raters, has been shown to negatively correlate with the quality of the corresponding Wikipedia articles.
An alternative explanation is that "toxic comments" protect wikipedia from low quality content, acting as defense mechanism against bad editors. So without better study which tries to analyze if the critique (regardless of toxicity) is justified, it's absolutely useless to make any conclusions from the article.
I wrote about this a couple of years ago as a post titled "Rudeness – the moderation tool of last resort"
Part of that...
> One of those things that comes up time and time again in virtual communites is that of “everyone here is mean.” There is some truth to that.
> Try as we might with “be nice” policies and censoring rude comments that have the possibility of driving newcomers away, rudeness still thrives. While one component of this is John Gabriel’s theory ( https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa... ) and that people are more likely to act out when protected by some veneer of anonymity, it doesn’t handle that on usenet of old and many professional leaning forums where the link between online and real world identity is more tightly coupled for many users.
> Clay Shirky touched on this in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy where he talks about a community oriented BBS (it was the 70s with all the ideals that implies) that was overrun by kids and the community there lacked the tools to be able to moderate or censor them (these tools were never built because it ran counter to those ideals).
> This brings us to Usenet in the 80s and 90s. Usenet was much larger than the BBSs of old and it had some moderation tools with it. There were moderated news groups that restricted posting to only approved posts – this didn’t scale well. There were also cancel messages as part of the control protocls that were part of cancelbot wars against spam. At the personal level, there were was really only one tool available – kill files which caused specific posts, threads, or users to be ignored by you and only you. The reprocussion of this was that in order to have someone get disinvited from a news group, one had to drive them away with social tools. Rudeness.
> Today’s sites are much larger than those BBSs of the 70s and the largest of those contest the volume of data of a full usenet feed at its height. The community moderation tools have simillarly grown in capability as the moderated usnet groups would not scale to thousands of posts per day (Reddit has on the order of 200k posts per day, Quora and Stack Overflow/Exchange have on the order of 10k posts per day).
> The problem of rudeness arises as people run out of the ability to moderate using the tools provided in software. Votes, the ability to push a post into the workflow of “make it dissapear for everyone” and the ability to completely hide a post or person from ever showing up on one’s feed again – when those tools run out or aren’t provided the “social” moderation tools are the ones that remain.
> Thus rudeness and the attempt to drive an individual away because other moderation tools have run out or are ineffective. Rudeness is the moderation tool of last resort. When one sees the umteenth “how do I draw a pyramid with *” in the first week of classes on a programming site – how does one make it go away when the moderation tools have been fully exhausted? Be rude and hope that the next person seeing it won’t post the umteenth+1 one.
I think your comment is also reinforced by the subjectiveness of the question, "What is toxicity?" While I can see a trend of decreasing respect for others, both online and in-person, the pendulum certainly swings in the other direction. Some individuals seek out any opportunities to play the victim and feel attacked, whether they do so consciously or not, and this seems to lead to those of this mentality calling any critique 'toxic'.
Ah, yes, the age old "I'm not an asshole! I just have high standards!"
High standards can be communicated without being toxic. It's just more effort. If most people had the same high standards for their answers they have on the contributions of others (whether on Wikipedia or in general) things would be far better.
> High standards can be communicated without being toxic.
Depends on the perception of toxicity. Just not being supportive or pointing out objective flaws is sometimes perceived as toxic by some people, while others take any sh*t and critique and consider it as valuable as long as it's true.
This is especially problematic in an international project, where multiple cultures clash. Though, this is likely only a problem for English Wikipedia.
I think there's a few layers to what makes said comments be seen as "toxic." There's definitely some very standoffish individuals in Wikipedia's inner-circle of editors. The decisions of editors also often seems very arbitrary. I've seen many cases where an editor doesn't allow a fact or citation because it's "original research" whilst on other pages the opposite is complained of, which is a big problem when articles are allowed for subjects that are not necessarily going to be written about on CNN/MSNBC/NYT.
And then there are the many talk sections I've seen where a petty editor plays the nuh-uh/yeah-huh game.
I'd contribute to Wikipedia, but I have no energy to bicker with people who are going to play with definitions or semantics just to make articles reflect their world view.
Yea, during the dark ages of toxic Wikipedia editors, I had ample of citations to split apart "Deaf" (ethnocentric label) from "Deafness" (culture) and "Hearing-Loss" (medical) not to mention the toxic ableism of "Hearing Impaired" (former medical), it was nothing but a browbeating, deletion of my Wiki drafts, and reversion of my hard and diligent efforts.
About 20 years later, some 240 Deaf wikipedia editors finally led a revolt: first to fall is "hearing impaired" (ablist slang), of which many governments/civic/businesses are now moving away from.
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 frequent contributor.