Handful of “highly toxic” Wikipedia editors cause 9% of abuse

Wikipedia is something akin to a democracy. Every editor has the potential to become an Administrator or a Bureaucrat. This means that a lot of editors engage in metrics-gaming behavior and become involved in the Wikipedia community, which by its very nature means weighing on on various controversies, like whether or not to delete an article. There's nominally a focus on creating a consensus, but in practice, the opinion of the Right People wins the day. There's a process for everything, and everyone has a refuge in some guideline or another which leads to lots of rules-lawyering. It's difficult to get rid of problematic people who are good at rules-lawyering and garnering support.

On HN, dang and sctb are kings. If you cause problems, you are warned. If you continue to cause problems, you are banned. There are no higher appeals. Your interpretation of the guidelines is irrelevant; that of dang and sctb is irrefragable.

I think it is possible to construct well-run, friendly 'democratic'-type communities on the Internet, but very difficult. In practice, it's always seemed to me that dictatorial moderation creates the best communities - of course, there are communities with bad administrators, but they generally die out. I've seen some really excellent forums where moderators ban posters simply for not having sufficiently high-quality content, and the result was amazing.

Granted, for any reasonably active community, it means that someone is going to spend a lot of time doing the moderating. I think HN strikes a good balance with allowing users to downvote and flag, even though I feel that most people generally downvote for reasons I disagree with (disagreement.)

One other key factor I've found in community civility actually seems a little strange at first. In my experience, it is very important for no communication backchannels to exist - for example, no IRC channels. Those effectively breed the creation of cabals and all sorts of strategic interventions in discussions, or in the case of Wikipedia, talk pages and votes. That's been a major problem on Wikipedia. It is nominally community-run, but "community" really refers to the insiders who frequent the right IRC channels and are friends with the right people - connections you have no way of seeing simply by looking at Wikipedia talk pages. On top of that, people who are friends with the right people outside of Wikipedia always, simply by human nature, get much more leeway when engaging in abusive behavior than do people who aren't.

Commonly, guidelines will be referenced, but the guidelines are very numerous and sometimes there are 'unspoken' rules backed up with 'a decision had to be made'. For example, blocking an article from being editing, and then marking for deletion, so you can't add content to it. Badmins will argue 'its not in the guidelines', so obviously they can do what they deem right.

We really need better wiki software so people can make their own.

Rules and moderators alone cannot enforce civility. A common ethos such as the one which miraculously survives here on HN is also a prerequisite.

Rules can easily be subverted. They are a two-edged blade which can be forced to operate in an opposite manner to their original purpose. For example, the abusive users on Wikipedia often know all the rules, no matter how obscure, and they silence and confound their targets with such legalisms.

I have participated in forums where the first demand of hostile invaders was for a set of rules against abuse. Those forums where rules were provided quickly became toxic. Those forums where the moderators did not provide a rule-book to be subverted, but simply addressed abuse whenever it arose thrived.

- Games go for 30-60 minutes on average, and generally have a clear winner by the halfway point. Players are forced to sit through a defeat, building frustration.

- Games rely on team coordination on top of individual skill, so players who are scoring high (kills, etc...) may not actually be helping complete the objective.

- On death, there is enough downtime to vent frustration at your team, and blame them for the bad situation that caused your death.

- People often try to get the rest of their team to side against an individual, calling them out as the cause of other players dying / losing objectives.

It can be extremely toxic (to the point I've moved on), but I found pushing back with civility and calling people out often helped the situation.

Whenever I noticed it starting, I'd jump in and tell the frustrated player to take charge. I'd acknowledge the valid issues they call out, and try to reword them constructively and focus on the team rather than the individual. (eg: "Don't run in until we're all there to support you, we'll follow you now and see if we can outnumber them", or: "Try moving over there, their sniper is really good, and is protecting the area you were just in")

(Against this, search engines are now very good at matching synonyms.)

I know, you didn't like the hint of political correctness in the particular Korean example. That's a judgement call, I might agree with you in general, but with such an emotional topic (comfort women, atrocities, etc) I wouldn't resent the change.

...but thats on english wiki only. As pole understanding english, I despair for my natives trying to use polish wikipedia, because here politics creep everywhere. I remember what a disaster polish's article on Big Bang was before its ridiculous state was called out and went viral in sceptic circles as being plainly antiscientific. Until then it's contents were more fittingly titled as "philosophical and religious criticisms of Big Bang theory". Remnants of those may be found in Article's discussion which filled with philosophical and religious debate about Big bang.

I agree that math/physics sections are pretty good. It's difficult for knowledgeable people to disagree on these matters...

Plenty of philosophy articles are also very poor. For example the page on Deconstruction, though its better than it was ~4 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

I remember once looking up a very specific topic, just to be sure that I don't misremember a certain simple but crucial core relation. What I found was a page that was so shockingly disorganised that I had to wade through 5 pages of mindbendingly complexified, quasi-obscurantist... drivel... just to extract that central piece of information that really should have been mentioned in the bit above the TOC, or at least easy to find.

So, YMMV.

There's also another related topic on TVTropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CowboyBebopAtHisC...

Trying to edit wikipedia is a hellish experience. The vast majority of articles have one or more de facto owners who will do everything they can to preserve control over their turf. They tend to be experts in rules laywering which is how they got their power in the first place. So "addressing inaccuracies" typically involves 5 minutes of editing and a month-long war afterwards.

And that doesn't even begin to address that wikipedia's rules are insane to begin with. Just the rules covering acceptable usernames are almost 4000 words long (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy).

Maybe because the moment he would try to actually go and even, say, enforce the verifiability policies that already exist, an angry crowd of self-important ignoramuses would stop him in his tracks shouting 'Stop right there, you filthy deletionist! The article is notable!' and drag him to the dramaboards to have him blocked. And I should know, I have had the same thing happen to me on Commons.

> A Nature study (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm) found it to be comparable in accuracy to Brittanica.

Are you seriously referring to that one over-ten-year-old study which used a non-representative sample of articles?

[0] As in, the writer of Penny Arcade, of course.

Here you're shouting others down by trying to shame them. Please don't do that. Being unwilling or incapable of cleaning up the messes others make does not disqualify one from criticizing the mess makers.

For instance, someone might edit an article to say that a person was a known political extremist. Someone else might write an article (not on Wikipedia) saying the same thing (after having read the Wikipedia article). Years later, if the information is questioned on Wikipedia, then editors will add a reference to the off-wiki article, and everyone will be happy. Circular fake news, with truth going down the plughole. The entropic heat death of information.

Personally I've found many medical and scientific articles to contain vast amounts of misinformation and disinformation. I would recommend not relying on any of it, it is at the whims of whoever bothers to edit.

Out of the total corpus of people, there are some who would be abusive if anonymous, however they have enough 'social awareness' to not behave that way when real names are used.

However, there are another subset of this group who lacks the social awareness to curb their abusive behavior even though they are using their real names.

By enforcing a "no anonymity" policy, you filter out the first group effectively but wind up increasing the percentage make-up that the second group has in the overall community.