11 ms·
Craig Newmark donates $500k to reduce harassment on Wikipedia
- akjainaj 10y agoWikipedia is the worst online community I've seen in my entire life, and believe me, I've seen a lot. It's like a steel cage death match between autists and narcissists. I doubt there's enough money in this world to fix something like that.
- tptacek 10y agoI mean, it's the single most ambitious volunteer resource on the Internet and almost certainly the greatest encyclopedia to have existed in the history of the world and possibly the among the greatest knowledge resources to have existed in the history of the world. But, sure. The admins are obnoxious sometimes. I agree with you. Worst site ever.
- akjainaj 10y agoI didn't say "worst site ever", I said the community is insufferable. If you don't edit you don't have to deal with the monkeys there and thus the website is, as you've said, the greatest encyclopedia to have existed in the history of the world and blah blah. But don't you dare to register.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y agoI can't believe a half a million dollars is necessary to reduce harassment. I'm all for reducing harassment online but that much money could make a serious difference applied in a different way. Look at Wikimedia's report on harassment (which this is in response to): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Harassment_Survey_2015_-_Results_Report.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Harassme... There's room for improvement but not a half a million dollars worth of room for improvement. I suppose people will donate to what's important to them, though.
- fnovd 10y agoThat survey is from 2015. 2016 saw a surge in harassment (or, at the very least, a perceived surge in harassment). I'm sure this donation is somewhat of a preventative measure, given our political climate.
- anigbrowl 10y agothat much money could make a serious difference To what, things you care more about? You could make the same argument about anything. It would be one thing if you were critiquing the administrators of Wikipedia deciding to allocate resources to this - since they are answerable to a variety of stakeholders - but when you critique someone for choosing to donate to alleviate a specific problem then I fail to see how that's any of your business.
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y agoEveryone is open to criticism for their actions. I'm free to disagree with this person just as much as you are free to disagree with me about it.
- anigbrowl 10y agoSure, but I notice a distinct absence of any justification for why your concerns should hold a higher priority, which says to me that you consider harassment to be an issue of inherently low importance.
- throwaway420 10y agoNot a huge fan of this. The editors on Wikipedia wield a large amount of power in shaping the site. When they go and make arbitrary decisions about the content on the site, and users start calling out the editors for bias and bogus decisions, well now all of a sudden the crooked editor can just cry "harassment and cyberbullying!" and go a long way to shutting down rational criticism.
- throwaway420 10y agoBesides this post, it looks like other posts that are getting to some of the real symptoms of Wikipedia's issues are getting down voted. When you take a lot of flak, you know you're over the target...
- andrepd 10y agoOr, you're legitimately making a bad decision.
- ClassyJacket 10y ago>the crooked editor can just cry "harassment and cyberbullying!" and go a long way to shutting down rational criticism. This is becoming a standard way of dealing with anyone who disagrees with you online. Reddit has been ruined by it. Someone sent you a PM? Harassment. Comment you don't agree with? Harassment. Someone not sustaining your narrative? Harassment.
- matt4077 10y agoReddit has been ruined by a mob of barely-literate jocks peddling fringe conspiracy theories constantly threatening – but perpetually failing – to leave.
- akhilcacharya 10y agoThe more time passes, the more I think GamerGate and it's adherents have ruined almost every community I take part in.
- netman21 10y agoI wish he would donate $500K to filtering scams from Craig's list.
- pinnbert 10y agoInstead of typing on Hacker News, why not become successful and do it yourself?
- vdnkh 10y ago> Blocking – making it more difficult for someone who is blocked from the site to return If they're talking about IP bans on viewing Wikipedia here, this is a terrible idea. If some troll gets banned on a college campus that will result in the inadvertent ban of thousands of other connected to the same network. This line strikes me as naive.
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoThey've been dealing with this issue for years. If you're on a university campus you can access wikipedia and see the recent changes, there's usually a weird mix of very obscure academic content getting added and undergraduates adding insults about their friends. If there is a sudden spike in vandalism I believe they just require you to log in with an account usually.
- prawn 10y agoI've also found IP bans to be ineffective due to serious collateral damage. I think shadow-banning is one of the most effective methods.
- celticninja 10y agoHow possible is that on Wikipedia though where you are expecting to see your edits? On Reddit people rarely go back and look at a thread they commented on from an unlogged in computer.
- 10y ago
- sparkzilla 10y agoIt's interesting that after 15 years of operation, Wikipedia does not apparently have decent tools to detect harassment /sarc. There will be a lot of discussion about the symptoms here, but the cause is straightforward: Wikis are built through conflict, and much of that conflict involves harassment, doxxing etc. Ask anyone who has tried to edit any major page. The real solutions to harassment are counterintuitive: Enforce full anonymity, take measures to stop people and gangs "owning " pages, stop using a system that lets any user at any level veto other user's edits, have a proper editorial workflow, and many more. But none of these will never happen, so the harassment will continue. It should also be noted that the Wikimedia Foundation just raised millions of dollars in its latest fundraising drive, and has millions more in the bank, so it really doesn't need the money.
- DanBC 10y ago> Wikis are built through conflict, and much of that conflict involves harassment, doxxing etc. Ask anyone who has tried to edit any major page. Wikipedia has tainted the well. Places like Meatball wiki were really good for a long time.
- WhitneyLand 10y agoIs this talking about harassment by moderators? Serious.
- racl101 10y agoThat's what I'm trying to determine myself. Geez, talk about burying the lede.
- smcmurtry 10y agoIn 2012 I wrote my first Wikipedia article on the 50-person startup I was working for at the time. I didn't include anything overly self-promoting, just the basic facts and referenced some news articles. My article was immediately nominated for deletion and a number of community members accused me of being a "single purpose account", i.e. not interested in contributing, just advertising. Needless to say I did not go on to create/edit more articles after a welcome like that. A couple of editors did come to my defence. I got the impression there was a lot of internal conflict about this sort of thing. Edit to add the following: The article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecobee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecobee Deletion discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ecobee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
- koube 10y agoI think they have a point in that case. You didn't have any interest in contributing until you had a startup you needed to promote. Also, unless your startup is notable it's not supposed to have an article. "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list... If a topic does not meet these criteria but still has some verifiable facts, it might be useful to discuss it within another article." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Whether_to_create_standalone_pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Whether_t...
- smcmurtry 10y agoI actually had been contributing small edits for grammar anonymously for a while, and was interested in getting more involved in Wikipedia. My intention wasn't to promote my employer, I just thought it met the notability requirements.
- delhanty 10y agoI agree with the above. However, from my experience in CAD, Wikipedia's notability and importance ratings are strongly skewed towards open-source and against commercial systems. High-importance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:FreeCAD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:FreeCAD Low-importance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:SolidWorks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:SolidWorks No disrespect meant to the FreeCAD folks, but that is definitely back-to-front! The article on Solidworks lists 165,000 companies using the product as of 2013. How is that low-importance? The skew tends to be even worse against enterprise class systems.
- sergiotapia 10y agoWill this money be put towards reducing harassment from the moderators? Wikipedia and it's gaggle of moderators make it difficult to add/remove things. Consider using an alternative such as: https://infogalactic.com https://infogalactic.com
- andrepd 10y ago"Starlords"? "Planetary Knowledge Core"? The "Seven Canons"? What is this, an encyclopedia, or bad sci-fi? I'm curious, their thing seems to be reject "published sources" in favour of "reliable truth". How does it expect to define what is "reliable truth" then, if not through citing reputable sources?
- mattcoles 10y agoI clicked random page a few times to see what was available and a lot of the information seems to be lifted directly from Wikipedia anyway. Also it all feels pretty silly with all the 'galactic' titles, at least Wikipedia has an air of professionalism, despite the rampant bureaucracy.
- sergiotapia 10y agoIt just has an air of professionalism because you're used to it.
- redsummer 10y ago"support the development of tools for volunteer editors and staff to reduce harassment on Wikipedia and block harassers." The only harassment I've seen on Wikipedia is from Little Napoleon long-term admins who grind contributors down with petty bureaucracy.
- swayvil 10y agoThis has been my experience also.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- chris_wot 10y agoYou might want to review the debacle that was the Salim Mehajer article then.
- nl 10y agoDo you have a reference? I'm interested.
- 542458 10y agoI think this is the incident in question: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-May/084230.html https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-May/0... There's a summary here, but it rather understates the whole thing - read the above link first if you have time: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wikipedia-editor-says-sites-toxic-community-has-him-contemplating-suicide http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wikipedia-editor-says-sites...
- nl 10y agoThanks. That's... wow. I assumed it was something about the subject of the article getting involved in harassment, but it doesn't seem to be. I'm glad that the author got some help.
- redthrowaway 10y agoToxicity, not harassment, has always been the glaring issue with the Wikipedia community. Of course there are the occasional miscreants who look to personally attack and harass people, but the entire site seems to be dedicated to finding the most lawyerly and acrimonious way to discourage contribution. Some of that is certainly warranted. When political topics are the target of massive edit wars as each side seeks to enshrine their particular truth in the public record, you need rules and enforcers and arbitrators. But it can get extraordinarily toxic.
- guaka 10y agoI started editing Wikipedia in 2003. It was fun. Over the years it became less fun, I gave up on participating and quite a few articles I had started ended up being deleted. I also often found myself looking for articles I knew had been on Wikipedia, but had been deleted. In December 2013 I had enough of the deletionism. I spent a few hours to set up http://deletionpedia.org/ http://deletionpedia.org/ - to rescue articles from deletion. It doesn't deal with harassment, but it's a useful resource if you want to find back something that was deleted on Wikipedia. (The site had been set up before, but the original creator let it slip.)
- tptacek 10y agoWhat are some examples of articles you've written that you feel definitely shouldn't have been deleted?
- MrLeap 10y agoI'm not the parent, but I remember reading good articles - going back to them some time later and finding them deleted. Can't really recall the specifics but I bet they were for esoteric programming languages or something. http://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_Issuer_Identification_Numbers http://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_Issuer_Identification_Nu... that page seems like a decent example though. That seems like a really useful resource if I were looking for that information. I can't figure out why it would have been deleted.
- MatmaRex 10y agoThe reasoning can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_Issuer_Identification_Numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
- vonklaus 10y agoThe reasons states were essentially: - Not Comprehensive - Not wholly accurate - Difficult to keep updated - Not all sourced/vergiable or unsourced Which is totally fair, except that would apply to a lot of articles...
- swayvil 10y agoIn my experience the editors of Wikipedia definitely deserve to be harassed.
- kaslai 10y agoI was hoping that this was a donation intended to lessen Wikipedia's nagging for donations...
- kaslai 10y agoI was hoping that this was a donation intended to lessen Wikipedia's nagging for donations...
- briholt 10y agoThe anti-online harassment industry is becoming a toxic den of snake oil salespeople. Those offering "solutions" tend be politically-motivated cash grabbers who line their own pockets by manufacturing vague and amorphous problems to exploit society's genuine empathy.
- WhitneyLand 10y agoMaybe so. But they do need a solution. What are the options?
- aaron695 10y agoIs Wikipedia getting worse - No Is Wikipedia losing editors - Yes, because it's 99% done. The work is not there. Do people not like the fact what they think is important gets rejected - Yes Do they blame that on harassment - ? I really think this is solving a problem that doesn't exist. Wikipedia is winding down not ramping up.
- WikipediasBad 10y agoThis is a great donation by Craig. I fully support it. I also think there should be more legitimate alternatives to Wikipedia and some more competition, but there is not unfortunately. I've tried to edit Everipedia which bills itself as an alternative to Wikipedia like other alts like rationalwiki etc and although they have a long way to go to get their software and UX up to par, their premise is pretty cool. They want to have a live updating branch of wikipedia always on their site in real time to edit and fork by their own community. I'd say the best alternatives so far are Everipedia, RationalWiki (if you can call this an alternative), and smaller projects that are niche like Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. There should be more legitimate ones in my opinion though.
- toodlebunions 10y agoWikipedia has almost as many trolls as social media.
- nl 10y agoI'm reading the harassment report[1] and I'm having trouble understanding it. Of those surveyed, 38% said they had experienced harassment. I understand that bit. Then, those who had been harassed or witnessed harassment were asked to identify the type of harassment. Of these, one of the least common types is "hacking", with an average of 2.69 times. I don't understand what that is saying. Each person who was harassed was hacked 2.69 times on average??! How can that be possible? [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Harassment_Survey_2015_-_Results_Report.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Harassme...
- ThomaszKrueger 10y agoI wonder if there is a larger issue here. I see parallels with sites like StackOverflow - it was fun and productive in the beginning, now there seems to be an army of users and moderators on the ready to shut down questions they don't like for whatever reason.
- Nomentatus 10y agoWhat hasn't been said is that Wikipedia has adopted an explicitly narcissistic goal, of being embarrassed by being the only wrong source the fewest possible number of times (namely never) - as opposed to doing the best job of accurately informing more people, more of the time; even if the data is new, or uncommon. I've had the New York Times rejected as a source because it just wasn't prestigious enough, and deleted. Which is charming if there's a better contrary source, but there wasn't. This goal is not compatible with that of being a very widely sourced, and very current encyclopedia. It is quite compatible with ossification.