Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

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.

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 :)

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.

And the worst abuses come from moderators who are _encouraged_ to be abusive.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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

[1] - https://en.citizendium.org/

[2] - http://www.scholarpedia.org/

That literally happened hundreds of times and every single one of them is dead.

Whatever is it what Wikipedia is doing, it seems to be working far better then alternatives.

after that my son hasn't tried editing Wikipedia.

Is this group you're talking about political or just the "I/we own this and will do this my way" of English Wikipedia?

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.

- Fine granularity forkability. Fork functions, not just projects

- Curators/Reviewers who endorse the validity/security aspects of those forks.

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.

It's a vicious circle.

Dead comments fall into a few categories: trolling, advertisements, conspiracy/culture war and toxic.

It's pretty easy to figure out which is which.

And the moderators are given free reign to behave that way _because_ of so-called "toxic behavior" from the users.

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.

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.

And the finances of the foundation, good lord.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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

> 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.

Would this be Andrew Heaton? Here is the discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... it doesn't look particularly contested.

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.

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?

Then you might be interested in reading the publication you are commenting on, especially under the heading ”Results”.

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.

That water is wet is state of the art.

Note it's not "obscene", or "insulting" or "offensive". "Toxic" here serves as a synonym to "bad", which meaning is entirely subjective.

This comment of mine might be considered toxic, your comment might too, there is no way to argue otherwise since it entirely depends on the beholder.

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.

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.

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.