Psychologist finds Wikipedians grumpy and closed-minded | Hacker News Reader

Psychologist finds Wikipedians grumpy and closed-minded

newscientist.com

20 pointsrazorburn18 comments

I think that study ( and the others mentioned in post ) need to consider carefully their control (comparison) groups.

Yes, posting anything online is an activity that draws more introverts than extroverts. Hence: more people who are less practiced in their social skills, perhaps partly because they enjoy less practicing/developing social skills.

Similar findings (not necessarily the "grumpiness" factor") might be discovered comparing fiction writers and night club entertainers.

As for the scoring lower on "openness" - I'd have to see how that was operationalized. Were they "less open" to unsubstantiatable claims of UFO sightings, etc., and insisting on documentation?

One man's closed-mindedness is another's insistence on scientific method.

--recovering research psychologist

I agree. Where, for example, is the data on writers in general?

Writing, of any sort, is not a social activity. You sit alone and type. Or you sit alone and read things that you or others have typed. Or you sit and fret about the things that you're not typing.

It's hard for me to take this study seriously when I can close my eyes and imagine James Thurber's results. Or Harlan Ellison's. Or Hunter S. Thompson's.

> Amichai-Hamburger speculates that rather than contributing altruistically, Wikipedians take part because they struggle to express themselves in real-world social situations.

I've made small contributions to a few public wikis, without really thinking about why. And that's pretty plausible.

Agreed. I look forward to a future paper on the personality characteristics of academic psychologists, although I suspect I might have to wait a while for that one.

This news report badly needs checking by Peter Norvig's helpful checklist of what can go wrong in interpreting scientific research findings.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

My favorite line there is "Cell phone masts ward off cancer clusters 99.985% of the time". I have a friend who specializes in RF safety and finds himself counter to public hysteria on this topic constantly.

I would also like to see how exactly they define "grumpiness". It could be that they view being argumentative, questioning, challenging assertions as being "grumpy", which would surely describe many of us.

Also, weird how they chose only Israelis to question. Check out this interesting study: "You Are Where You Edit: Locating Wikipedia Contributors Through Edit Histories": http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/publications/Lieberman_L...

The lack of social skills leading one to contribute more often online sounds about true, in my case anyway. I used to post a lot more on BBSes (the old dial-up kind) and message boards during high school / pre-college when I suffered from some minor social awkwardness.

A bit off topic, but the comments on that page are hilarious. They would be trolls if posted anywhere else.

I contributed to Wikipedia for years and was fairly involved in it. This is the main reason I got out. It's permeated the culture too deeply. The worst part is, that's the only real part of the culture that's stuck, since the project grew too fast to fully indoctrinate everyone into the culture. Hence the frequent civil wars on Wikipedia.

Maybe they have reason to be grumpy and closed-minded, such as sifting through joke edits all day.

That's the myth, as it is in publishing.

On the one hand, they say a novel is 'written in crayon'.

On the other hand, with a well-crafted novel that they can't sell, what is the excuse there? Simple, they just don't say it in public.

This is the same with Wikipedia: Perfectly reasonable edits that are flamed down with arbitrary rules, with the public excuse, again: 'Written in crayon'.

Agreed. I worked helpdesk for a few semesters in college. The first semester, I had a great time showing off, helping people format their floppies add page numbers to their term papers. The second semester, I got tired of the repitition and started to want for more challenging questions.

By the third and fourth semesters, I couldn't understand how humanity survives when everyone is so universally stupid. Nothing about the job had changed, but I began to realize that there can be no "forward progress" because a new batch of (understandably) ignorant freshmen appears every term.

I'd imagine the same jaded bitterness creeps into any situation where the senior users act as a bulwark against a constant stream of newbies. How can you prevent "Forum fatigue" from setting in?

How can you prevent "Forum fatigue" from setting in?

The same way you prevent burnout in any other endeavor. You must learn to enjoy the process as much as the result.

You take up teaching because you enjoy explaining things to curious but ignorant people, not because you're hopeful that one day your job will be finished because everyone will know everything.

A lot of the enjoyment comes from theme-and-variations. How many ways can you find to explain the same thing? Which way will work best, given the nature of the questioner in front of you? It's like music: You will play "the same piece" thousands of times, and yet each playing will be subtly different, and those differences are what keep it interesting.

Hence, deletionism.

I'd like to see a wikipedia mirror that ignored deletions.

Edit: Already exists, but seems to be missing some articles I know were deleted.

http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/

heh. I find most psychologists to be a bit too open-minded. maybe it's just me.

I'd like to see a similar study conducted on frequenters of HN and Reddit. If the study is correct, there should be a correlation between grumpiness and higher karma on these sites too.

Spoken like a low karma user. /grump

Reply on news.ycombinator.com