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.
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.
It has a lot to do with the community governance structure.
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.
The much bigger difference is that Wikipedia conversations/disputes are long-running and relate to the state of permanent artifacts.
The technology of Hacker News makes it literally impossible to carry on a long-running conversation or collaborate on serious permanent artifacts. There’s no point in going back to last week’s discussion and vandalizing it with troll comments, because nobody is ever going to read it. There’s no need to invent complicated rules for productive collaboration, because there’s no work to collaborate on in the first place.
But the thing is, at the end of the day Wikipedia is still the best website on the web. It's amazing. It's continually accurate, inaccuracies get fixed very quickly because just about every article is someone's pet project, etc.
Yeah there are a few things - like some political articles - that you should be careful with, but everything has citations. You can see the historical edits, you can see the talk page, it's all very transparent.
Whether it's fun and nice to contribute to is irrelevant to me. To me it's a fantastic source of information. And so whatever they're doing, they must be doing right.
Many open-source projects and standards bodies operate the same way. Many's the time I've attempted to make a contribution and discovered that first one has to get on the inside of a particular clique, else be ignored.
It's rare for me to persist in such circumstances; life is too short to play other people's games. I usually abandon the contribution, or maintain a fork if it was of utility to me.
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.
Backing up what you said here, I've played a few online games with (at times) abusive communities (DotA, Overwatch), and in my experience:
- 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")
>- On death, there is enough downtime to vent frustration at your team
Now that you mention it, dead time in LoL (not sure what the player lingo for it is, "black and white" time?) really is a special timeslot for flaming. The angriest point for a player is also the time they can most easily communicate. If communication ability was uniform throughout the game, there wouldn't be flareups. When players are in action, they have only half the will to type/communicate. Suddenly that dampener is removed.
>but the difference is that here dang or somebody will show up to calm down incivility and point to the guidelines
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.
This comes up all the time, but I think it just comes down to that HN is not a democracy, does not aspire to be one, and as far as I can tell, it never has had that aspiration.
I think the best metaphor for HN is that Paul Graham has invited all of us to his house for drinks and discussion. There are not a lot of limits on that discussion, but sure, if you are boisterous enough, someone will ask you to leave. There isn't due process and you don't have any rights, because we're just guests at a party. The rules are not applied by the admins as a judge might interpret statutes. Rather, they are there as helpful guidelines for the socially clueless as to how guests should behave.
I feel approaching HN in this way makes it very enjoyable. Personally, I have found the discussion at this gathering to be top notch.
Of course, it's not for everyone. If you would prefer discussion board as mini-nation state (another excellent model, in my opinion), I think reddit does a good job with that.
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.
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.
The disease is uniformly called celiac disease in page after page after page of results. What does Wikipedia gain by building a castle in the clouds (or distant UK past usage) and moving in?
Yes, it's a U.S. service but covers journals from all over the world.
"Celiac disease" is consistently between 15 and 20 times more popular than "coeliac disease".
Also, the Wikipedia article opens with "Coeliac disease, also spelled celiac disease,…"
Given the widespread use of "celiac", not only among the public, but also in the literature, one might reasonably argue at this point that "celiac" is the proper name.
>"Celiac disease" is consistently between 15 and 20 times more popular than "coeliac disease".
Because Americans don't know how to spell. The fact is that it's called 'Coeliac disease' by sane people and 'Celiac disease' by non-medical Americans. Medical Americans know how it's actually spelt, as do all non-Americans.
Because Americans don't know how to spell. The fact is that it's called 'Coeliac disease' by sane people and 'Celiac disease' by non-medical Americans. Medical Americans know how it's actually spelt, as do all non-Americans
Attacks like this are unwarranted.
Reviewing the references for the coeliac disease article shows plenty of "Medical Americans" and international papers referring to "celiac disease".
- Tonutti E, Bizzaro N (2014). "Diagnosis and classification of celiac disease and gluten sensitivity". Autoimmun Rev (Review)
- Ciccocioppo R, Kruzliak P, Cangemi GC, Pohanka M, Betti E, Lauret E, Rodrigo L (Oct 22, 2015). "The Spectrum of Differences between Childhood and Adulthood Celiac Disease". Nutrients (Review).
That's four from the first six references.
Of the first 25 references for the Wikipedia article, 13 spell it "celiac", 8 spell it "coeliac", 1 spells it "cœliac", and 3 don't mention the disease specifically. To my eye (granted, quickly scanned), they all look like solid references, mostly journal articles. To me, especially given the dipthong œ used in one case, this looks like a clear case of a word that has legitimate spelling variants, just as you used "spelt", where others would spell it "spelled".
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.
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.
This is a rare opportunity to cite the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: "You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray [Gell-Mann]'s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the 'wet streets cause rain' stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
There's a similar saying referred to as Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy: "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge."
I've been pointing this out about journalism for years, and it's awesome that it has a name. However, I still want a name for just the first part of the effect - the part where you notice an article about your area of expertise is laughably wrong. And you never forget it and conclude that journalism is just terrible.
I'm not sure that's a Wikipedia problem, as opposed to a general sources problem. Wikipedia at least often shows proponents and critics of a given idea, while the average source just presents its own position and doesn't provide any sort of context. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "legitimate source", I don't think I've ever seen one. Often an old book has more bias and inaccuracies in it than a blog post. I recall reading a discussion on how The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire is no longer perceived as accurate, and few people will call that an illegitimate source. Information is hard.
All Wikipedia does half the time is reference such sources, so it's about as biased as the sources are, except it tends to combine them, and there's nothing forcing it to do so in a way that represents the true balance. That's up to the content editors. The only thing I can suggest is, if you see a problem, try to correct it.
Also, pretty much every page these days has a warning on it.
Wikipedia is great for basic coverage of a fairly broad range of topics, such as physics, psychology, linguistics, religion, biology, computer science, etc. As long as you're sticking to information that's mostly perceived as fact, as opposed to opinion. I have yet to find a source that rivals Wikipedia in this regard. Wikipedia had a huge, huge influence on information transfer for many people, I think we forgot how big of a deal it is because it's been around for so long. It's absolutely invaluable to many people.
I don't believe it's Wikipedia's job to identify answers to opinionated stances, so don't expect it to be "accurate" on things like controversial history, politics, design, etc. Those things are usually not covered accurately by anyone.
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.
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).
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.
In terms of news, I use Haystack (http://www.haystack.tv). It aggregates YouTube videos from various media sources daily, much of it American (then again, that might be intentional). You can also pick and choose specific sources and topics you want to follow, even cast to Chromecast. The developer(s) are pretty responsive too and the app is free.
My only frustration is that it only aggregates videos on YouTube. If you want to get video news segments from media companies that publish their videos to a proprietary CDN or hosting service, you can't use it with Haystack.
> Plenty of philosophy articles are also very poor
Try the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; it's amazing and authoritative, written by the experts. And free (but takes donations!). You'll never look up a philosophy topic in Wikipedia again.
Many of them seem to be written/edited by people who are more interested in using an equation editor than in trying to explain the topic. I don't necessarily expect ELI5 level but I wonder how many people who don't already understand the topic in depth can decode most of those math pages.
They dive into a lot of jargon and rarely attempt to provide any real context that a non-specialist can understand.
I understand that it's hard to do and it also reflects the fact that Wikipedia pages are wildly variable in the audience they're written for.
I think all articles should be at formers level since people with a deeper knowledge will be using sites, books, etc where that deeper knowledge is assumed. If they aren't already they can get started by reading reading the sources in the article
It is an encyclopedia, not a collection of tutorials. That seems more appropriate for something like wikibooks. Otherwise, every single article would be in inordinately long with a lot of redundancy. I like it better in which pre-requisites are often linked to other pages, so you can brush up on the pre-req's if you don't understand them.
Topics of contention between two nations (or worse, between two political factions inside a nation) are usually suspect. Even if every sentence is meticulously sourced, you can't tell if someone is "lying by omission." Basically, the tone of the article is determined by which country (or faction) can muster more people with free time and passable English skills, which may not correspond to actual expertise on the topic...
I agree that math/physics sections are pretty good. It's difficult for knowledgeable people to disagree on these matters...
> This is a problem for literally every source on Earth, and persists even among the most prestigious newspapers, books, etc.
That's true but practically meaningless. Some sources are dramatically more reliable and accurate than others. I can't completely trust my 4 year old nephew about physics, nor can I completely trust a leading physics text book, but that doesn't make those sources similarly reliable.
What we're discussing here is where Wikipedia falls on that continuum. I agree with the GP; there is so much deception by omission in WP that I don't trust it. For example, I was just looking at (American) football player Peyton Manning's article; it completely omitted a major sexual assault/harassment allegation, one about which there was a court settlement, book, major news coverage, etc.
The Biographies of Living Persons policy is rather strict, because of the potential for libel lawsuits. The Wikipedia foundation can barely afford to keep Wikipedia running as it is, let alone deal with hundreds of libel lawsuits.
I mean explicitly that Wikipedia does as least as good on lying by omission as the most reputable sources (NYTimes, the Wall Street Journal, whatever).
Surely there must be some significant differences? It's hard to believe they are all the same. Claiming they are all the same is a strategy of propagandists (I'm not saying you are one; I'm saying it's a dubious approach). 'It's all the same' is the opposite of truth and accuracy, which require discernment; it the justification of liars (again, not the parent).
Anyway, the parent's claim isn't my experience, but now we're just one person on the Internet disagreeing with another.
I'm not saying their all the same. I'm saying Wikipedia is generally better (though of course far from perfect), without trying to make difficult-to-quantify claims about how much better.
> It's difficult for knowledgeable people to disagree on these matters...
See eg "Speed of light" for an example of the complications that people get into in writing an article that's readable by the general population, but which is also correct for the 5% of wikipedia editors who have a good grasp on this.
I find that quality on technical and mathematical subjects varies wildly.
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.
Ah, yes some areas are lacking. I am more concerned about correctness though. Do you ever find math material that is completely wrong on Wikipedia? Stuff like number theory, abstract algebra, and category theory seem to hold up when I cross reference. I'm in no position to qualify myself as mathematician though, I just enjoy mathematics a lot.
Anecdotal, but what here isn't now: I used to edit as well after noticing how incredibly wrong some of the less popular but obviously wrong articles were. Until one day I made some anonymous corrections with proper sources properly cited. I would see my edits immediately undone. I went back and re-did my edit, rewording it to be clearer, and explaining my citations, assuming I was at fault and if I simply corrected MY mistakes the edit would go through. It did not, and this time I was notified I had attempted to vandalize said page and would be banned from making further edits if I persisted. I went on to create an account and try and argue my points civilly in the talk page, to no avail, and being attacked by the article's caretaker (who by the way knew ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the article's underlying facts/science, anything). After this I left the editing of wikipedia to people with far more patience than I, and I really believe after seeing other talk pages with glaring errors on the wiki article, that this is the modus operandi for many of these "caretakers". You step on their territory and they shoo you away as quickly as possible(they get so bad and pedantic with their arguing they call themselves "wikilawyers"). Still upsets me to this day that when I see an obvious mistake such as a bad date, misspelling or other easily identifiable misinformation I can't be bothered to do more than wonder about what the poor soul who tried to correct it went through. /rant
> Until one day I made some anonymous corrections with proper sources properly cited. I would see my edits immediately undone.
I understand where you're coming from. I've edited for items such as the citation having nothing to do with the content, and seen it reversed and gone through the same thing. Sometimes something as simple as "show me where I can find this in your citation" brings more than civil discourse -- it brings obvious animosity and is countered with straw man attacks or other logical fallacies. I think people have psychological and emotional needs, and some have a need to feel important, dutiful and powerful. This is where they satisfy that need.
Another problem is I think people in authority--sometimes very smart people--draw conclusions that they haven't properly thought about.
Do you? Seems like there should be a xkcd covering this. The usual case as near as I can tell is something like: Make a minor correction to an obvious error, including a link to a source and other wikipedia articles. Edit gets immediately reverted by whoever has declared themselves the guardian of that particular page. Talk page lights up with all sorts of tangential discussion of whether or not this particular subtopic should be corrected or deleted or reworded or something else. Someone else tries making a modification, which again is immediately reverted. People who enjoy the drama have a self-interested desire to perpetuate it. If you are lucky you could go back 6 months later and there's maybe a 50% chance that the original has been corrected (that's if the original topic hasn't come into contact with the non-notable deletionists).
Anyone know when C2 became a javascriptified dumpster fire? Seems like that's a "Day the Music Died" event that should have a date associated with it.
(Not OP) I have in the past, and my experience was that the talk page was civil, my changes were discussed and we came to a common agreement as to what the change should be.
Nothing like the fiasco you're describing.
You still haven't answered the question though; do you submit corrections?
> The usual case as near as I can tell is something like:
Based on this I'm not sure you have edited yourself, despite retorting the parent. First off articles don't have guardians; [0] just because someone disagreed with you, it doesn't mean they disagree with everyone or on every article, you're making a huge generalization. Second, I'm not sure why you see talk page discussion as a bad thing; when two parties disagree on something, they usually discuss and try to reach a consensus. [1] Do you believe you're above that or something?
> Someone else tries making a modification, which again is immediately reverted.
This is called edit warring [2] and shouldn't be done. You shouldn't just try to force your revision in after it has been disagreed with.
All you're doing in your comment is painting up some illusory image to discourage someone from trying to engage the system themselves. How about you let them edit and see for themselves if what you said is true? Based on my experience Wikipedia isn't anything like that at all, in fact most articles aren't watched enough for anyone to care how you tweak them.
Yeah, that's a hopelessly optimistic viewpoint, I fear. I have many hundreds or more contributions, but stopped a few years ago.
Tried coming back and immediately ran into edit wars on a list of fastest production cars, when legions of people were eager to get the Tesla on there on the strength of a press-release of an upcoming release. Rules warring, silent reversion, you name it.
Wikipedia Review (though not without its share of cranks, and now largely dead), shares a pretty good history of the more sordid history of WP.
When complaining about inadequate behavior from other Wikipedia editors, it would be very useful to point out concrete links to edits and reverts. This gives a chance to other interested parties to fix the article and contribute to the discussion.
> At the rate in which I encounter inaccurate data on Wikipedia that I can identify
Why haven't you tried to address those inaccuracies? I could sympathize if you said you did and were rebutted, but sounds to me like someone complaining that their local beach is full of trash when they themselves never bothered to help clean it.
> 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.
If you don't do that for every source you use, you might be suffering from the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
> but it's hardly a substitution for a legitimate source let alone encyclopedia.
>Why haven't you tried to address those inaccuracies?
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.
> Trying to edit wikipedia is a hellish experience. The vast majority of articles have one or more de facto owners
I'm so tired of this meme. No one owns an article. [0] You say "de facto", but just because someone disagrees with you on something, it doesn't mean they disagree with every edit or do it only for that article. The vast majority of articles barely have anyone watching them.
> who will do everything they can to preserve control over their turf.
The fact that you describe it as "turf" only further proves that you have this mentality of the article being a battleground.
> They tend to be experts in rules laywering which is how they got their power in the first place.
What power? Even admins on Wikipedia can't overrule consensus and discussion. What's this about rule lawyering too? They just understand the community norms better. I don't walk into a fancy restaurant and complain about "rules lawyering" after I get kicked out for breaking the dress code. Once someone tells you about a rule, you should read up on it, not boisterously claim that you should be above the community rules.
> Just the rules covering acceptable usernames are almost 4000 words long
Seems simple enough to me:
> This page in a nutshell: When choosing an account name, do not choose names which may be offensive, misleading, disruptive, or promotional. In general, one username should represent one person.
Those 4000 words should only matter if you don't find the above to be sufficient explanation.
This is a page on internal Wikipedia policy, so there is no question about the accuracy here. The parent comment was pointing out that, in principle, Wikipedia policy is that contributors do not "own" content on Wikipedia in the sense of having a right to refuse edits to content that they contributed.
On the contrary: Wikipedia users are just as much (if not more) subject to their own wishful thinking and dirty politics when writing internal policy pages as they are when writing regular articles. Especially that there is no requirement to cite sources for the former. The policies as written may fail to reflect how editing actually looks like; hell, they might even not be actual policies at all. A single person could slip a passage in a policy page that supports their own opinion without anyone else noticing, and later cite that passage as if it were authoritative. (Or imply authoritativeness by simply placing a mere 'essay' in the Wikipedia namespace.)
Nobody cares what should happen 'in principle' unless the principles are enforced — which they are often not. See for example how the enforcement of the verifiability policy looks like.[0]
As Tycho Brahe[0] once said: 'because I don’t have time to babysit the Internet'.
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.
>> someone complaining that their local beach is full of trash when they themselves never bothered to help clean it
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.
My point with the example was to show that Wikipedia is a public resource. It's not "that other guy's" responsibility to fix it. Every editor is a volunteer. If you have the energy to complain about a public resource that you benefit from for free, that is maintained by volunteers, you absolutely should be shamed for not chipping in yourself and instead writing about it elsewhere. As the famous line goes: "patches welcome".
Here we are in a topic that actually documents the hostility people encounter when participating in Wikipedia, a topic that provides overwhelming anecdotal evidence among the comments that people are being actively discouraged from contributing to Wikipedia by hostile admins and topic campers (something I have personally experienced) and you pretend the actual problem is lazyness.
Except that WP has its own arcane laws and policies used to great effect by regulars to ensure no outside voice is given a say in truly contentious articles. e.g. If you try to get involved, you are a "single purpose account". If you contest the veracity of a source, it turns into a meta debate where you are expected to provide an alternative view that is nevertheless considered a reliable source by everyone there who thinks otherwise.
It's a trap, because it ensures the only people who direct it are the ones who also have time to fill the site with unimportant trivia and camp out. Unsurprisingly, anything to do with the current culture war is a lost cause.
I also find it funny to see what sort of living persons have biographical pages there, as it seems often the result of mutual backpatting in various niches.
Anything that touches on politics or religion is a tire fire, but the math and science articles aren't bad. I mostly use Wikipedia to help me find actual resources.
Science is political now because evidence, studies, and results can impact policy, so it's deeply polluted.
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.
I now recognize Wikipedia as the original 'fake news' or 'fake information' on the Internet. Just like all those news stories people pass around, nobody cares about Wikipedia's accuracy. It's the same phenomenon, and possibly (I have no evidence) Wikipedia conditioned people to accept unreliable information.
I was about to write the same thing. Many articles have fake information.
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.
With the widespread adoption of the term "fake news", I'm wondering what you mean by "fake information" as opposed to wrong, or false, or mistaken, or in more subtle cases, from a different perspective (think "freedom fighter" vs "terrorist"). "fake" to me implies purposeful deception. Is that what you mean here?
It doesn't have to be deliberate, purposeful, or even conscious - though it often is. An exaggeration can be treated as fact. That fact can again be exaggerated, until the words bear no relation to reality. Wikipedia practically invented this mechanism.
I do think in that case that fake is not the right adjective to use. Every definition of fake implies intent to deceive. If you're trying to encompass the meanings you describe above, fake doesn't appear to cover it.
You are right. But I do think that what is now called "fake news" is generated by a similar mechanism. I don't know what term to use. Wrong or false don't quite cover it. Perhaps 'unmoored' - a boat can be unmoored accidentally or deliberately, or by outside events - a big wave.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the appropriate term is here, either. Perhaps contentious? disputed?
I'm still trying to get my head around what fake news is actually trying to describe. I'd like it to refer to intentional deception, but I think it's being used much more broadly than that. I fear that it's effectively meaningless at this point, other than as a generic insult.
What does this mean in practice? Editors on Wikipedia are not a balanced cross-section of the world. I would guess they at 90% male, nerdy, middle class, and disproportionately liberal. This will be reflected in their articles, and the leeway given to certain 'facts'. And god help you if there is an article edited about you after you die - then the gloves are off and slander is fine.
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.
"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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?"
That quote is wrong in so many ways - the man clearly didn't understand thermodynamics. Life doesn't reduce universal entropy, and inorganic compounds will spontaneously form more more energetic and complex compounds given a little input energy.
> 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.
I'm not referring to Wikipedia's written definition of NPoV, I'm referring to its application. Many Wikipedia articles in their various states (past and present) don't fit into any kind of "neutral viewpoint" ideal. They may appear as such, of course, to one who shares the bias; in that case, Wikipedia's content must seem like a bastion of truly neutral rationality.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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-tox... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbYQ0AVVBGU