Wikipedia Editor Says Site’s Toxic Community Has Him Contemplating Suicide | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia Editor Says Site’s Toxic Community Has Him Contemplating Suicide

motherboard.vice.com

32 pointsTomte44 comments

This is hopefully a wake up call, and the editor can take a step back and remember that while he's passionate about it, wikipedia is a website. sometimes taking a huge step back is what you need to do. i've had friends say the same thing about Facebook. The environment became so overwhelmingly toxic and negative that it was affecting them personally. Even I've had that happen. Took a lot of un-liking pages and unfollowing constantly angry people and bailing out of Facebook groups that were constantly argument ponds.

I'm glad the editor is doing better now.

At least Facebook is something you can actively avoid. Wikipedia, for better or worse, has become the de-facto source of knowledge on the internet.

Is there a way to solve the Wikipedia problem of toxic politics and it being a battleground for opposing groups?

Don't use Wikipedia for contentious topics. I know I'm going into a minefield when visiting the abortion or Donald Trump pages. Don't bother.

The articles on Donald Trump and abortion both seem very factual to me. They might have inaccuracies, but I doubt there exists any more objective source of information about Donald Trump or abortion on the Web.

They do helpfully flag those when they're being assaulted by heavy edits which is usually a sign to run screaming from the page.

I'm more concerned about the persistent efforts to subvert certain pages.

I decided deleting mine was the best thing to do. it became so toxic

The author of the email wrote Motherboard to say that he'd been reached by police and is feeling better

Note this part of the article. If you publicly say you're suicidal, you have policemen at your doorstep. And sometimes other consequences like being forced to go to checkups and therapy. It may also have concequences like not being eligible for gun ownership anymore, etc. So think twice before you discuss your mental health in public. There's a place to discuss it, but that place is not the internet under your real name. The last thing someone who is suffering from a breakdown needs is police waltzing into their home and taking away their rights.

You say "Note this part of the article", then ignore it yourself in order to talk about something else.

It says: "he'd been reached by police and is feeling better"

It does not say: "police waltzed into his home and took away his rights".

If the police is inquiring about your wellbeing you "feel better" real quick ;)

Look, I made my point, what you do with it is up to you.

Police are notorious for handling suicidal people poorly, to the point many call for never calling the police about anyone in a mental health crisis. It's not worth the risk of them being shot or arrested.

What gets people into trouble on Wikipedia is that they think it's a forum system where they can write anything they want. It's more like submitting pull requests to a major project on Github. You're changing something used by tens of millions of people.

Wikipedia is one of those systems, like Twitter, that almost seems like it was intentionally designed to incentivize toxic behavior. It rewards clique building and gives victory in any fight to whoever is the most stubborn and has influential friends, regardless of the truth. We are going to regret subcontracting so much of the job of compiling and sharing human knowledge to it, guaranteed.

I don't know. It's not ideal, but it has made approximately accurate knowledge that is very up to date incredibly accessible.

I think that's a pretty major win. But I may be biased by the fact that I have used wikipedia a lot.

Reading a Wikipedia article on a subject you're actually very knowledgeable about can be extremely painful.

OTOH, there are some very good parts of Wikipedia. The bits that nobody actually cares about, mostly.

If you want a general article, especially a political one, good luck. But if you're looking for some kind of hardware/software information, or details about a problem or algorithm, it's very good.

That's what the edit button is for. Use it.

I'm not an expert on many things, but I've corrected factual errors where I've seen them. Most of my edits are to link together two pages that were, for whatever reason, not properly associated.

Not as painful as trying to correct it.

There is a major issue here where objectively false facts are presented and defended with a truly awful source and yet its uncorrectable due to the deeply unhinged individuals that present their opinions as fact on Wikipedia and have been promoted to the lofty heights that allow them to constantly undo any change you might try to make.

I long ago stopped contributing to wikipedia, its written by an ever reducing group of people who are not only uncivil but also quite often delusional. The system its designed has excluded normal people.

Some examples? Other than obviously subjective topics like biographies, what are some kinds of subjects that you think are largely in error on WP?

I hear this criticism a lot, and it's usually about something subjective like politics or biographies.

There was one about 6 months ago where there is a article about a books character and there were some facts about this character presented that came from no where with no source. The original author of the book came on to correct the page (being the definitive source on the character) and they could not get the article changed because there wasn't a written source and even when the author did create one it was rejected and the false facts remained.

Was frustrating to read about but it follows issues I have had trying to fix problems in some technology articles as well. Its not just an issue with biographies and politics there is basically a troll behind every false fact on wikipedia with power.

Are you referring to the incident involving author Philip Roth's book "The Human Stain"? The problem there appeared to be that Mr Roth took exception to the Wikipedia article which mentioned published reviews of his book where the review authors felt that a character may have been inspired by a real life person. Mr Roth disagreed with this, but he sought to have mention of the reviews themselves removed from the article purely because he disagreed with their conclusions.

There is little question that an author should easily be able to correct a factual inaccuracies in a Wikipedia article which is related to them or their work, however the rights of an author to suppress mentions of reviews of their work purely because they disagree with them, are a different matter entirely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain#Anatole_Broyar...

My experience is that Wikipedia articles have been very accurate about every subject I consider myself knowledgeable about.

"seems like it was intentionally designed to incentivize toxic behavior. It rewards clique building and gives victory in any fight to whoever is the most stubborn and has influential friends, regardless of the truth."

Wikipedia, Twitter, Real Life, ... It's a long list.

If you really want to commit suicide for volunteering as an editor, you need some time off.

I'm guessing that he cares a lot for knowledge, truth and encyclopedias, but Wikipedia's infrastructure rewards loud-mouthed people with lots of time on their hands.

Indeed. It's remarkable how accurate it is (IME, fairly, provided you avoid anything political).

This kind of role can be felt as a struggle, something that can't be ignored or put down.

It's too easy to dismiss this as something you can take time off from.

"Feeling depressed? Have you tried thinking happy thoughts?"

That's just as absurd and dismissive.

You're doing a bit of hyperbole there. Depression is, according to the current theories, due to a imbalance in neurotransmitters in the brain. Now, a physiological constraint is much more binding than a behavioural constraint, as nobody can be talked or conditioned out of it. It might be dismissive, but saying that it is as dismissive is too much.

I think you do have a point, meaning that this still might be a serious issue for these people. But if they're really compulsively checking a website which often does nothing but make them feel bad and just can't ignore the damned thing, they need help. From an actual therapist.

The poster you replied to didn't say anything even remotely like the editor should just "think happy thoughts", he said essentially what the (current) top comment says:

    This is hopefully a wake up call, and the editor 
    can take a step back and remember that while he's
    passionate about it, wikipedia is a website.

How difficult it may or may not be (unknown) for someone to take time off from something that's bad for them doesn't change the fact that it's the right thing for them to do.

"This civility problem is nothing new, but it’s a persistent problem that Wikipedia—and online communities in general—have yet to solve"

That is some naive technological solutionism right there, at least it's a common one.

Real life communities have also not "solved" this problem. This is how humans behave, this is what "connecting" people means sometimes. Especially when you bring a lot of people together from all walks of life and ask them to share a resource considered valuable. Sometimes that resource can just be "status" instead of a famous online encyclopedia.

Still, the stronger toxicity of online community is a thing. So is the agressiveness in cars. Several studies have shown how anonimity and not seeing the other person disinhibits agressive behavior

Yeah, I had a longer bit that covered that I cut out. The virtuality of the interaction makes people less empathetic.

However it also caps the potential for harm, the worst case is doxxing and bullying. In real life the worst case is lynching.

You can also turn off the internet and be safe, in real life you better be able to run faster than they can.

This seems like a fantastic trade-off to me. Seriously, the worst parts of the internet are fucking toxic as hell. The worst parts of the real world involve war, sadism, slavery and torture.

Toxic online communities are basically the best human beings have ever acted when in groups that large.

This is over six months old.

Editing wikipedia is a great place to refine your use of stoicism...

How do people bring themselves to care so much about editing wikipedia articles? Who on earth are these people?

It's in human nature, to belong to a clan, and to leave a mark for future generations. Wikipedia success comes from exploiting both instincts: you belong to a great organization, you're doing a great service to humanity, you have value for the clan.

Wikipedia has an enormous audience, and its contents are widely trusted whether they should be or not.

If you care about the subject matter of the article you're editing, the potential for those edits to influence millions of people is extremely valuable.

Your handle reminds me of the word 'cutlasslessness', the state of being without a cutlass...

I definitely do not have a cutlass.

Yeah, enlightenment, the world would be a better place without it. For example there would be no computers, no internet and no parent comment.

If you've ever answered a question on stackexchange, you're not too different from them.

WHY is this flagged?

Enough users likely feel it's either not an appropriate submission for HN or that it will lead to a great deal of non-constructive or flame-war-like discussion. Many weeks of a large number of inflammatory threads have understandably lowered the HN community's tolerance.

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