22 ms·

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

164 points by blatherard 10y ago

brwnll 10y ago
"Almost immediately, they found that they could debunk the time-worn idea that anonymity leads to abuse. Although anonymous comments are "six times more likely to be an attack," Hmm, that actually DOES seem to support the idea the anonymity fosters abuse...
- hyperpape 10y ago
  I think the net of it is: anonymity encourages some people to be abusive, but enough people are abusive under their real names that you can't say anonymity is the primary factor behind abuse. Whether curbing anonymity is a necessary component of fighting abuse and/or worth it becomes a further question.
  - ykler 10y ago
    The study doesn't even address the question of how much real names help. No one uses their real name on Wikipedia. It is just comparing edits from logged in users with edits from people who aren't logged in (sometimes called "IPs" since their IP address is recorded). Also, some abuse from logged in users comes from sock puppet accounts.
  - _red 10y ago
    It may in fact be self-selecting. 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.
- kazinator 10y ago
  It's a badly stated result. What they have debunked is the myth that requiring identities prevents abuse. I'm not aware of such a myth though. Plenty of abuse happens even from real name accounts. Cough ... LKML. This is another "study that confirms what everyone sort of knows already".
  - slavik81 10y ago
    It has died down a bit in recent years, but the idea that anonymity causes abuse is widely circulated in gaming circles because of this popular Penny Arcade comic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
- DanBC 10y ago
  > anonymous comments are "six times more likely to be an attack," The ratio of abusive anonymous comments to abusive logged in comments is 6:1 We don't know the ratio of non-abusive anon comments to non-abusive logged-in comments.
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  A question that always comes to my mind is that are we better off if we don't allow or cannot be abusive/intolerant/nsfw. If people do it when they are anonymous, it's still inside them, even if they can't say things. Maybe it's better for the society if there are places where they can satisfy their urges.
EekSnakePond 10y ago
I'll give up my anonymity when highly toxic partisans don't doxx me and my loved ones for wrongthink.
gwern 10y ago
Not terribly surprising. But looks like the system manages to handle them pretty well - the paper shows that the probability of getting blocked is up to ~80% after 5 personal attacks. I've never worried too much about that kind of incivility or 'abuse' - I've always been far more worried about the 'abuse' which takes the form of deleting contributions, which, because it can be justified and rules-lawyered and is not as clearcut as 'you suck', the system does not handle well and culturally encourages.
HarryHirsch 10y ago
So - how do you rate partisan editors in geopolitical conflicts? The Irish Troubles, Russian Federation and especially Israel-Palestine come to mind. Especially the Israeli side was very successful in casting a very favourable light on its position, and it took great effort to rein them in a little. Would the pro-Israel faction be called abusive under the present metrics?
- sndean 10y ago
  This became really obvious to me in June 2014. For whatever reason I became really interested in ISIS taking over northern Iraq and spent ~10 hours / day editing pages (to the detriment of my PhD). There were so many sides, a lot of fake news (before that was a thing), and abusive editors. After getting multiple 24-hour bans I realized I was also becoming an abusive editor for reverting edits that seemed "obviously wrong" within seconds. It's pretty easy to emotionally pick a side. Luckily I deleted my account.
aaaksdhf 10y ago
wikipekia is a normative self-indulgence of the normies, who wish to wallow in the maya that sustains them, and bark at those who question the very basis of their existence.
- jboogie77 10y ago
  ... ok thanks, that clears it up
notadoc 10y ago
An impressive amount of information on Wikipedia is just outright wrong, misleading, clearly biased, or astroturfed. At the rate in which I encounter inaccurate data on Wikipedia that I can identify, it makes me suspicious of nearly everything on the site. It's an interesting experiment to allow the masses to create and edit their own facts and it can provide a broad (albeit often inaccurate) overview of some topics, but it's hardly a substitution for a legitimate source let alone encyclopedia. Nonetheless, I know plenty of people who take it as legitimate and cite it as if it's an authority.
- kyled 10y ago
  Curious, what areas do you find are usually flat out wrong? The math sections seem to be pretty good. A friend found a flaw in a crypto algorithm though.
  - Ralfp 10y ago
    I've eventually learned to limit my usage of the Wikipedia to science, distant history, and synopsis of works of popular culture while avoiding like plague current politics and ongoing events. ...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.
    - belorn 10y ago
      Honest question, what alternative do you use instead? HN mostly links to news article, and I would question if current politics and ongoing events are more accurately written by news media and with less bias. I don't know about polish news companies, but its not uncommon elsewhere that news companies are openly biased towards one political party or bias their articles towards their main customer group (UK example from Yes, Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M). We have books or research papers, but meta research generally acknowledge that researchers include bias into their work, often linked to the opinion of those that funds the research. Meta research is thus generally a bit better, especially the meta-meta-research papers, through it generally takes a quite political contested topic for that to happen which then further increase the risk of bias by the meta researchers selecting results that favors their side.
WikipediasBad 10y ago
Ah..Wikipedia. Nice to know my HN Username is relevant for this thread. Jokes aside, Wikipedia has a ton of flaws and the abuse is definitely one of them regardless of what percentage of people do it, but there are just no other realistic substitutes that are actually large enough to matter. The largest and most respectable competitors are Everipedia (only one that doesn't reuse mediawiki software), RationalWiki, InfoGalactic, and some other rolled mediawiki crap. And none of those alternatives are even Alexa top 1,000 let alone Alexa top 100 traffic.
- projektir 10y ago
  Online encyclopedias suffer from the network effect like everything else.
Fej 10y ago
If you want to see for yourself the seedy underbelly of Wikipedia, check out http://wikipediocracy.com/ http://wikipediocracy.com/
- sparkzilla 10y ago
  Wikipediocracy is so over. All the cool kids have already moved on to http://wikipediasucks.boards.net/ http://wikipediasucks.boards.net/
  - DanBC 10y ago
    Was that link dead when you posted it?
    - sparkzilla 10y ago
      No. It seems the site was closed down a few days after I posted.
    - makomk 10y ago
      At a guess: certain people behind Wikipediocracy apparently really like to use legal threats to try and shut up people who disagree with them.
camdenlock 10y ago
I expend a lot of effort to avoid Wikipedia as a bona dude source of truth, and man is it difficult. The desire for a single easy-to-access repository of knowledge is incredibly strong, but over the years, I've been stung repeatedly by this particular one. As it turns out, the "Neutral Point of View" rule that Wikipedians so proudly tout is quite strongly biased toward a specific world-view: that of the so-called "progressive" mindset. It doesn't matter how much value a system of ideals has; if it transforms a purportedly neutral source of information into a dogmatic one, then the source loses all credibility and usefulness. This seems to be happening on Wikipedia at an alarming rate, which is a real bummer. It's not as ridiculous and blatant as (e.g.) Conservapedia, but... well, frankly, that makes it all the more concerning. Zealotry is way harder to call out when it's cloaked, as Wikipedia tends increasingly to be, in the sly guise of unassailable moral high ground.
- zubat 10y ago
  You might be interested in Gee's approach. https://georgiebc.wordpress.com/2015/12/24/getgee-tools-for-self-governance-part-1/ https://georgiebc.wordpress.com/2015/12/24/getgee-tools-for-...
- BuuQu9hu 10y ago
  Former WP editor, left because I was tired of abuse after the Esperanza project disbanded. There is always the distinct possibility that progressivism is part of the correct way to interpret the universe. It seems to pop up in many places. Consider Pirsig's argument: "The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems run down like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only 'runs up,' converting low energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep 'running up' faster and faster. Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive? If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other minerals. It's a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor we use and no matter what process we use we can't turn these compounds back into a chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun's heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That's a scientific fact. The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process? What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn't the sun's energy. We just saw what the sun's energy did. It has to be something else. What is it?"
NelsonMinar 10y ago
This report reminds me of some of Jeffrey Lin (Riot Lyte)'s work on League of Legends. He found that 1% of players are toxic, frequently acting badly. But that only accounts for 5% of toxic behavior; 77% of bad behavior comes from people who are just having a bad day. That echoes this report's finding that 34 Wikipedia folks are responsible for 9% of abuse. A related finding is Riot found that toxicity in LoL was contagious; people who played with an abusive player were more likely to be abusive in their next game. The Wikipedia phenomenon of abuse pile-ons seems similar. Some links for Lin's work: http://www.nature.com/news/can-a-video-game-company-tame-toxic-behaviour-1.19647?WT.mc_id=SFB_NNEWS_1508_RHBox http://www.nature.com/news/can-a-video-game-company-tame-tox... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbYQ0AVVBGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbYQ0AVVBGU
- igravious 10y ago
  I believe this to be an example of the well known cognitive phenomenon that psychologists refer to as Monkey See, Monkey Do.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- bane 10y ago
  One of the interesting things about high functioning forums (like this one) is that there's a group of people who have as part of their job function the ability to enforce civility and reduce abuse. Like any community, HN also has "power users", in WP they're the run of the mill editors, but the difference is that here dang or somebody will show up to calm down incivility and point to the guidelines. In WP those people either don't exist or they're absent in providing that function. I contribute here, I don't to WP and this kind of active community hygiene is exactly the reason why.
  - Zuider 10y ago
    The civility and commitment to keeping discussion rational on HN is kept alive by the goodwill of its contributors rather than enforced by rules. When a power user shows up to nip incivility in the bud, they rarely have to employ more force than to remind the poster of the above ethos. 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.
ykler 10y ago
"Depressingly, the study also found that very few personal attacks are moderated. Only 17.9% of personal attacks lead to a warning or ban." I'm not sure, but it seems like 17.9% is probably close to the right rate for moderation, not "depressing" or "abysmal". Especially if there are calm comments from experienced users disapproving of the abusive behavior in many of the other cases.
- kordless 10y ago
  I find it encouraging we have some AI to throw at this. I've hypothesized for a while that people make blaming statements using biased arguments because it is cheap, effective, and presents the gain of an upper hand without too much risk.
- makomk 10y ago
  I'm curious if they have stats on how many personal attacks lead to a warning or ban against the target of the personal attack.
cooper12 10y ago
Why do threads like these talking about a specific aspect of something always devolve into hatejerks about the subject? I've noticed the same thing on threads about Apple as well. It's talking specifically about personal attacks yet people are somehow relating that to the reliability of the site. It's not wrong to criticize Wikipedia, but then you should focus on the topic of the toxic atmosphere instead like how that might compromise neutrality by keeping out editors who are more conflict-averse. (or actually back up how you think the site is unreliable, considering a study in Nature found Wikipedia to be just as reliable as Brittanica)
- DanBC 10y ago
  People can't fix the reliability of the site because of the fucking arseholes on WP that make personal attacks. Your comments ("Have you tried to correct these errors?") are answered by the submitted article. People don't try to fix errors because of the toxic culture at WP.
yongjik 10y ago
From my brief experience with (English and Korean) Wikipedia editing many years ago, the problem was not "toxic" editors but more with entrenched ones. They never resorted to personal attacks, but instead used their vast knowledge of WP:this and WP:that to provoke other people until either they left or get banned. E.g., for a long time, the article title in the Korean wikipedia for Japanese Empire was 대일본제국, literally, Great Empire of Japan. Well, this being Korean wikipedia, you could see how some people took offense at it. The sensible thing would be just to drop the "Great" part: everybody knows which Empire we're talking about, nobody thinks the Empire was particularly Great anyway, and then we could move on to actually talking about the article's content. But no, some editors would object, because we have to use Official Names(TM) for everything. (For some reason, nobody bothered to change Bangkok's name to the official "Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilokphop Noppharatratchathaniburirom Udomratchaniwetmahasathan Amonphimanawatansathit Sakkathattiyawitsanukamprasit", but if anybody did that I'm sure it would be quickly reverted, citing WP:(You can't make an edit just to prove a point) or something like that.) To this day, I suspect some editors' criterion for "Official Names" and other similar policy was maximal likelihood for alienating potential contributors. Classic power game move.
- milesrout 10y ago
  Changing titles to avoid offending people is exactly the wrong thing to do.
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    But changing the current title "Coeliac disease" to celiac disease in Wikipedia might reduce confusion, and since celiac death rates are quite high if undiagnosed, over millions of users, save some lives. (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.
    - 10y ago
sparkzilla 10y ago
Abuse and harassment on Wikipedia does not belong to a handful of editors, it's endemic, because the only way to succeed on Wikipedia is to be an asshole. But it's important to note that bad behaviour on Wikipedia is a symptom of poor software design. The software that Wikipedia is built encourages conflict, and uses hundreds of rules combined with poorly-trained admins to try to patch things up. The boundaries between conflict and abuse are wide, arbitrarily defined, and patrolled by people who have neither training, nor consistency. A better designed system would install systems to minimize conflict, and would give clearer rules and standards to it's moderators.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I suspect the sentence "A handful of 'highly toxic' <members> cause <overly large> amounts of abuse." is true for all groups.
- wallace_f 10y ago
  Well, of course, because the terms 'handful,' and 'overly large' are undefined. In the article's case, it refers to 1% causing 9%. Disproportionate, but far from a majority. Contrast with threads about the '80/20' rule. In those, people start saying something not much different, like: > I suspect the sentence "80% of <effects> come from 20% of <causes>," is true for all groups. We'll always have a distribution of a range of behaviours, and we'll always have cognitive bias; these in combination will lead to any number of reasonable 'x of y' rules about populations.
anigbrowl 10y ago
Good article, but I wish she'd reached out to Wikipedia or the community of editors to solicit some answer on what they intend to do about it. Once one is aware of such an issue, failure to wield the banhammer is treated as an implicit endorsement.
guscost 10y ago
This is an example of what Jo Freeman famously called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness": http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
dredmorbius 10y ago
Somewhat tangential, for those who think Wikipedia's ideologically-driven revert wars are anything new, a 19th century instance I ran across some months back involving Chamber's Encyclopaedia: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chambers_encyclopaedia_editorial_statement/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...
BrailleHunting 10y ago
One has to wonder about the logic of unemployed lute players (people like most armchair anchor "journalists" without a shred of topical understanding) given power to referee edits on highly-scientic topics or judging vital concepts/details "irrelevant" because they don't understand historical context or subject matter.
milesrout 10y ago
Well you know what they say: reality has a left-wing bias. The truth is that the "progressive" mindset is right. Wikipedia isn't biased, you are. Wikipedia has no end of articles about all the horrible things that Mao and Stalin have done, or about the many general strikes in Britain and all the economic damage they caused. They also don't hesitate to be accurate about things like climate change or the horrible effects of electroshock therapy on gays and transgenders.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't use HN for partisan battle. That's destructive of what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13623849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13623849 and marked it off-topic.
bjourne 10y ago
This is very interesting! So if anonymitiy isn't correlated with abuse, then what is? I believe the answer is community standing. Anonymous and low-ranking users know they will suffer the consequences for foul language therefore they moderate themselves. Users with thousands of edits to their name, knows they will get away with it. About ten years ago when I edited Wikipedia, there was one particularily nasty user who accused everyone who didn't agree with exactly everything he wrote. I belive this person was mentally ill, but he spent a lot of time on Wikipedia and wrote a lot of content. Several people brought complaints about him and his toxic behaviour, but he always had the backing of Jimmy Wales (the leader of the project), who would make excuses for him. If the community intervened against this person by for example temporarily banning him, Wales would intervene and undo the ban. So this person kept being nasty because there were no repercussion. Eventually I believe he got tired of the Wikipedia project and left on his own violiton.

164 points by blatherard 10y ago

"Almost immediately, they found that they could debunk the time-worn idea that anonymity leads to abuse. Although anonymous comments are "six times more likely to be an attack," Hmm, that actually DOES seem to support the idea the anonymity fosters abuse...

hyperpape 10y ago
I think the net of it is: anonymity encourages some people to be abusive, but enough people are abusive under their real names that you can't say anonymity is the primary factor behind abuse. Whether curbing anonymity is a necessary component of fighting abuse and/or worth it becomes a further question.
- ykler 10y ago
  The study doesn't even address the question of how much real names help. No one uses their real name on Wikipedia. It is just comparing edits from logged in users with edits from people who aren't logged in (sometimes called "IPs" since their IP address is recorded). Also, some abuse from logged in users comes from sock puppet accounts.
- _red 10y ago
  It may in fact be self-selecting. 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.
kazinator 10y ago
It's a badly stated result. What they have debunked is the myth that requiring identities prevents abuse. I'm not aware of such a myth though. Plenty of abuse happens even from real name accounts. Cough ... LKML. This is another "study that confirms what everyone sort of knows already".
- slavik81 10y ago
  It has died down a bit in recent years, but the idea that anonymity causes abuse is widely circulated in gaming circles because of this popular Penny Arcade comic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
DanBC 10y ago
> anonymous comments are "six times more likely to be an attack," The ratio of abusive anonymous comments to abusive logged in comments is 6:1 We don't know the ratio of non-abusive anon comments to non-abusive logged-in comments.
angry-hacker 10y ago
A question that always comes to my mind is that are we better off if we don't allow or cannot be abusive/intolerant/nsfw. If people do it when they are anonymous, it's still inside them, even if they can't say things. Maybe it's better for the society if there are places where they can satisfy their urges.

EekSnakePond 10y ago

I'll give up my anonymity when highly toxic partisans don't doxx me and my loved ones for wrongthink.

gwern 10y ago

Not terribly surprising. But looks like the system manages to handle them pretty well - the paper shows that the probability of getting blocked is up to ~80% after 5 personal attacks. I've never worried too much about that kind of incivility or 'abuse' - I've always been far more worried about the 'abuse' which takes the form of deleting contributions, which, because it can be justified and rules-lawyered and is not as clearcut as 'you suck', the system does not handle well and culturally encourages.

HarryHirsch 10y ago

So - how do you rate partisan editors in geopolitical conflicts? The Irish Troubles, Russian Federation and especially Israel-Palestine come to mind. Especially the Israeli side was very successful in casting a very favourable light on its position, and it took great effort to rein them in a little. Would the pro-Israel faction be called abusive under the present metrics?

sndean 10y ago
This became really obvious to me in June 2014. For whatever reason I became really interested in ISIS taking over northern Iraq and spent ~10 hours / day editing pages (to the detriment of my PhD). There were so many sides, a lot of fake news (before that was a thing), and abusive editors. After getting multiple 24-hour bans I realized I was also becoming an abusive editor for reverting edits that seemed "obviously wrong" within seconds. It's pretty easy to emotionally pick a side. Luckily I deleted my account.

aaaksdhf 10y ago

wikipekia is a normative self-indulgence of the normies, who wish to wallow in the maya that sustains them, and bark at those who question the very basis of their existence.

jboogie77 10y ago
... ok thanks, that clears it up

notadoc 10y ago

An impressive amount of information on Wikipedia is just outright wrong, misleading, clearly biased, or astroturfed. At the rate in which I encounter inaccurate data on Wikipedia that I can identify, it makes me suspicious of nearly everything on the site. It's an interesting experiment to allow the masses to create and edit their own facts and it can provide a broad (albeit often inaccurate) overview of some topics, but it's hardly a substitution for a legitimate source let alone encyclopedia. Nonetheless, I know plenty of people who take it as legitimate and cite it as if it's an authority.

kyled 10y ago
Curious, what areas do you find are usually flat out wrong? The math sections seem to be pretty good. A friend found a flaw in a crypto algorithm though.
- Ralfp 10y ago
  I've eventually learned to limit my usage of the Wikipedia to science, distant history, and synopsis of works of popular culture while avoiding like plague current politics and ongoing events. ...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.
  - belorn 10y ago
    Honest question, what alternative do you use instead? HN mostly links to news article, and I would question if current politics and ongoing events are more accurately written by news media and with less bias. I don't know about polish news companies, but its not uncommon elsewhere that news companies are openly biased towards one political party or bias their articles towards their main customer group (UK example from Yes, Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M). We have books or research papers, but meta research generally acknowledge that researchers include bias into their work, often linked to the opinion of those that funds the research. Meta research is thus generally a bit better, especially the meta-meta-research papers, through it generally takes a quite political contested topic for that to happen which then further increase the risk of bias by the meta researchers selecting results that favors their side.

WikipediasBad 10y ago

Ah..Wikipedia. Nice to know my HN Username is relevant for this thread. Jokes aside, Wikipedia has a ton of flaws and the abuse is definitely one of them regardless of what percentage of people do it, but there are just no other realistic substitutes that are actually large enough to matter. The largest and most respectable competitors are Everipedia (only one that doesn't reuse mediawiki software), RationalWiki, InfoGalactic, and some other rolled mediawiki crap. And none of those alternatives are even Alexa top 1,000 let alone Alexa top 100 traffic.

projektir 10y ago
Online encyclopedias suffer from the network effect like everything else.

Fej 10y ago

If you want to see for yourself the seedy underbelly of Wikipedia, check out http://wikipediocracy.com/ http://wikipediocracy.com/

sparkzilla 10y ago
Wikipediocracy is so over. All the cool kids have already moved on to http://wikipediasucks.boards.net/ http://wikipediasucks.boards.net/
- DanBC 10y ago
  Was that link dead when you posted it?
  - sparkzilla 10y ago
    No. It seems the site was closed down a few days after I posted.
  - makomk 10y ago
    At a guess: certain people behind Wikipediocracy apparently really like to use legal threats to try and shut up people who disagree with them.

camdenlock 10y ago

I expend a lot of effort to avoid Wikipedia as a bona dude source of truth, and man is it difficult. The desire for a single easy-to-access repository of knowledge is incredibly strong, but over the years, I've been stung repeatedly by this particular one. As it turns out, the "Neutral Point of View" rule that Wikipedians so proudly tout is quite strongly biased toward a specific world-view: that of the so-called "progressive" mindset. It doesn't matter how much value a system of ideals has; if it transforms a purportedly neutral source of information into a dogmatic one, then the source loses all credibility and usefulness. This seems to be happening on Wikipedia at an alarming rate, which is a real bummer. It's not as ridiculous and blatant as (e.g.) Conservapedia, but... well, frankly, that makes it all the more concerning. Zealotry is way harder to call out when it's cloaked, as Wikipedia tends increasingly to be, in the sly guise of unassailable moral high ground.

zubat 10y ago
You might be interested in Gee's approach. https://georgiebc.wordpress.com/2015/12/24/getgee-tools-for-self-governance-part-1/ https://georgiebc.wordpress.com/2015/12/24/getgee-tools-for-...
BuuQu9hu 10y ago
Former WP editor, left because I was tired of abuse after the Esperanza project disbanded. There is always the distinct possibility that progressivism is part of the correct way to interpret the universe. It seems to pop up in many places. Consider Pirsig's argument: "The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems run down like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only 'runs up,' converting low energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep 'running up' faster and faster. Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive? If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other minerals. It's a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor we use and no matter what process we use we can't turn these compounds back into a chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun's heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That's a scientific fact. The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process? What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn't the sun's energy. We just saw what the sun's energy did. It has to be something else. What is it?"

NelsonMinar 10y ago

This report reminds me of some of Jeffrey Lin (Riot Lyte)'s work on League of Legends. He found that 1% of players are toxic, frequently acting badly. But that only accounts for 5% of toxic behavior; 77% of bad behavior comes from people who are just having a bad day. That echoes this report's finding that 34 Wikipedia folks are responsible for 9% of abuse. A related finding is Riot found that toxicity in LoL was contagious; people who played with an abusive player were more likely to be abusive in their next game. The Wikipedia phenomenon of abuse pile-ons seems similar. Some links for Lin's work: http://www.nature.com/news/can-a-video-game-company-tame-toxic-behaviour-1.19647?WT.mc_id=SFB_NNEWS_1508_RHBox http://www.nature.com/news/can-a-video-game-company-tame-tox... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbYQ0AVVBGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbYQ0AVVBGU

igravious 10y ago
I believe this to be an example of the well known cognitive phenomenon that psychologists refer to as Monkey See, Monkey Do.
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bane 10y ago
One of the interesting things about high functioning forums (like this one) is that there's a group of people who have as part of their job function the ability to enforce civility and reduce abuse. Like any community, HN also has "power users", in WP they're the run of the mill editors, but the difference is that here dang or somebody will show up to calm down incivility and point to the guidelines. In WP those people either don't exist or they're absent in providing that function. I contribute here, I don't to WP and this kind of active community hygiene is exactly the reason why.
- Zuider 10y ago
  The civility and commitment to keeping discussion rational on HN is kept alive by the goodwill of its contributors rather than enforced by rules. When a power user shows up to nip incivility in the bud, they rarely have to employ more force than to remind the poster of the above ethos. 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.

ykler 10y ago

"Depressingly, the study also found that very few personal attacks are moderated. Only 17.9% of personal attacks lead to a warning or ban." I'm not sure, but it seems like 17.9% is probably close to the right rate for moderation, not "depressing" or "abysmal". Especially if there are calm comments from experienced users disapproving of the abusive behavior in many of the other cases.

kordless 10y ago
I find it encouraging we have some AI to throw at this. I've hypothesized for a while that people make blaming statements using biased arguments because it is cheap, effective, and presents the gain of an upper hand without too much risk.
makomk 10y ago
I'm curious if they have stats on how many personal attacks lead to a warning or ban against the target of the personal attack.

cooper12 10y ago

Why do threads like these talking about a specific aspect of something always devolve into hatejerks about the subject? I've noticed the same thing on threads about Apple as well. It's talking specifically about personal attacks yet people are somehow relating that to the reliability of the site. It's not wrong to criticize Wikipedia, but then you should focus on the topic of the toxic atmosphere instead like how that might compromise neutrality by keeping out editors who are more conflict-averse. (or actually back up how you think the site is unreliable, considering a study in Nature found Wikipedia to be just as reliable as Brittanica)

DanBC 10y ago
People can't fix the reliability of the site because of the fucking arseholes on WP that make personal attacks. Your comments ("Have you tried to correct these errors?") are answered by the submitted article. People don't try to fix errors because of the toxic culture at WP.

yongjik 10y ago

From my brief experience with (English and Korean) Wikipedia editing many years ago, the problem was not "toxic" editors but more with entrenched ones. They never resorted to personal attacks, but instead used their vast knowledge of WP:this and WP:that to provoke other people until either they left or get banned. E.g., for a long time, the article title in the Korean wikipedia for Japanese Empire was 대일본제국, literally, Great Empire of Japan. Well, this being Korean wikipedia, you could see how some people took offense at it. The sensible thing would be just to drop the "Great" part: everybody knows which Empire we're talking about, nobody thinks the Empire was particularly Great anyway, and then we could move on to actually talking about the article's content. But no, some editors would object, because we have to use Official Names(TM) for everything. (For some reason, nobody bothered to change Bangkok's name to the official "Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilokphop Noppharatratchathaniburirom Udomratchaniwetmahasathan Amonphimanawatansathit Sakkathattiyawitsanukamprasit", but if anybody did that I'm sure it would be quickly reverted, citing WP:(You can't make an edit just to prove a point) or something like that.) To this day, I suspect some editors' criterion for "Official Names" and other similar policy was maximal likelihood for alienating potential contributors. Classic power game move.

milesrout 10y ago
Changing titles to avoid offending people is exactly the wrong thing to do.
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  But changing the current title "Coeliac disease" to celiac disease in Wikipedia might reduce confusion, and since celiac death rates are quite high if undiagnosed, over millions of users, save some lives. (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.
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sparkzilla 10y ago

Abuse and harassment on Wikipedia does not belong to a handful of editors, it's endemic, because the only way to succeed on Wikipedia is to be an asshole. But it's important to note that bad behaviour on Wikipedia is a symptom of poor software design. The software that Wikipedia is built encourages conflict, and uses hundreds of rules combined with poorly-trained admins to try to patch things up. The boundaries between conflict and abuse are wide, arbitrarily defined, and patrolled by people who have neither training, nor consistency. A better designed system would install systems to minimize conflict, and would give clearer rules and standards to it's moderators.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I suspect the sentence "A handful of 'highly toxic' <members> cause <overly large> amounts of abuse." is true for all groups.

wallace_f 10y ago
Well, of course, because the terms 'handful,' and 'overly large' are undefined. In the article's case, it refers to 1% causing 9%. Disproportionate, but far from a majority. Contrast with threads about the '80/20' rule. In those, people start saying something not much different, like: > I suspect the sentence "80% of <effects> come from 20% of <causes>," is true for all groups. We'll always have a distribution of a range of behaviours, and we'll always have cognitive bias; these in combination will lead to any number of reasonable 'x of y' rules about populations.

anigbrowl 10y ago

Good article, but I wish she'd reached out to Wikipedia or the community of editors to solicit some answer on what they intend to do about it. Once one is aware of such an issue, failure to wield the banhammer is treated as an implicit endorsement.

guscost 10y ago

This is an example of what Jo Freeman famously called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness": http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

dredmorbius 10y ago

Somewhat tangential, for those who think Wikipedia's ideologically-driven revert wars are anything new, a 19th century instance I ran across some months back involving Chamber's Encyclopaedia: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chambers_encyclopaedia_editorial_statement/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...

BrailleHunting 10y ago

One has to wonder about the logic of unemployed lute players (people like most armchair anchor "journalists" without a shred of topical understanding) given power to referee edits on highly-scientic topics or judging vital concepts/details "irrelevant" because they don't understand historical context or subject matter.

milesrout 10y ago

Well you know what they say: reality has a left-wing bias. The truth is that the "progressive" mindset is right. Wikipedia isn't biased, you are. Wikipedia has no end of articles about all the horrible things that Mao and Stalin have done, or about the many general strikes in Britain and all the economic damage they caused. They also don't hesitate to be accurate about things like climate change or the horrible effects of electroshock therapy on gays and transgenders.

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dang 10y ago
Please don't use HN for partisan battle. That's destructive of what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13623849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13623849 and marked it off-topic.

bjourne 10y ago

This is very interesting! So if anonymitiy isn't correlated with abuse, then what is? I believe the answer is community standing. Anonymous and low-ranking users know they will suffer the consequences for foul language therefore they moderate themselves. Users with thousands of edits to their name, knows they will get away with it. About ten years ago when I edited Wikipedia, there was one particularily nasty user who accused everyone who didn't agree with exactly everything he wrote. I belive this person was mentally ill, but he spent a lot of time on Wikipedia and wrote a lot of content. Several people brought complaints about him and his toxic behaviour, but he always had the backing of Jimmy Wales (the leader of the project), who would make excuses for him. If the community intervened against this person by for example temporarily banning him, Wales would intervene and undo the ban. So this person kept being nasty because there were no repercussion. Eventually I believe he got tired of the Wikipedia project and left on his own violiton.