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34 'Highly Toxic Users' Wrote 9% of the Personal Attacks On Wikipedia (bleepingcomputer.com)
Researchers used machine learning to analyze every single comment left on Wikipedia in 2015. An anonymous reader shares their results:
34 "highly toxic users" were responsible for 9% of all the personal attacks in the comments on Wikipedia, according to a research team from Alphabet's Jigsaw and the Wikimedia Foundation. They concluded that "significant progress could be made by moderating a relatively small number of frequent attackers." But at the same time, in Wikipedia's comments "less than half of attacks come from users with little prior participation; and perhaps surprisingly, approximately 30% of attacks come from registered users with over a 100 contributions. These results suggest the problems associated with personal attacks do not have an easy solution... the majority of personal attacks on Wikipedia are not the result of a few malicious users, nor primarily the consequence of allowing anonymous contributions."
The researchers "developed a machine learning algorithm that was able to identify and distinguish different forms of online abuse and personal attacks," reports Bleeping Computer, adding that the team "hopes that Wikipedia uses their study to build a comments monitoring dashboard that could track down hotspots of abusive personal attacks and help moderators ban or block toxic users." The paper describes it as a method "that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning to analyze personal attacks at scale."
The researchers "developed a machine learning algorithm that was able to identify and distinguish different forms of online abuse and personal attacks," reports Bleeping Computer, adding that the team "hopes that Wikipedia uses their study to build a comments monitoring dashboard that could track down hotspots of abusive personal attacks and help moderators ban or block toxic users." The paper describes it as a method "that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning to analyze personal attacks at scale."
In further news, it was discovered that all 34 of the "toxic users" were Administrators or Wikipedia employees.
The entrenched fiefdoms are 100000%+ more harmful than the random drive-by. The drive-by will be deleted while the entrenched (college professors with beards, etc.) will be considered ***absolute truth***.
Do you mean that tab on the articles where all the aspies spend hours bickering about whether sentence 4 of paragraph 32 should have an oxford comma? Because if the people there in charge of distributing the personal abuse are overworked I could probably volunteer one or two hours a week.
were in regard to overly territorial Wikipedia moderators?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Sounds like the "ruling council" of Wikipedia.
Don't cross them, or dare to post facts they disagree with.
With 9 comments here already, I see the problem being blamed on:
- Freedom of speech
- Admins
- Muslims
- Liberals
No surprise that they're all ACs.
I'm sure it would be very upsetting for the ACs if /. started tracking IPs, but I suspect that a disproportionate number of "Trolls" come from the same IPs.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
On behalf of myself and my 33 sock-accounts.
Sorry.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
34 people mysteriously killed with claw hammers.
I wonder how these guys would behave in real life. What kind of mind do you have, when you're one of the most productive in the area of spewing hate, anger and vitriol.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I'd like to verbally abuse the guy whose mission it is to make sure "portmanteau" is the most highly-referenced article.
I'm not really sure this is a problem for Wikipedia, but the ABC guys seem to think so. But take a look at their methodology. "Crowdsourced" "Machine Learning" via proprietary website, after we removed "common comments" which they assume to be bots. I'm sure anyone using the same data set would be hard pressed to recreate their results. They are very fuzzy despite all the algorithmic pruning.
We use this data to train a machine learning classifier, experimenting with features and labeling methods
Isn't this what they're really testing? An unspecified machine learning with "features" and "labeling"? Absolutely bewildering.
The entrenched fiefdoms are 100000%+ more harmful than the random drive-by. The drive-by will be deleted while the entrenched (college professors with beards, etc.) will be considered ***absolute truth***.
The entrenched fiefdoms, pages where one user (or a small cabal of users) believe that they own the article and will dispute and revert every change to their perfect prose are indeed a problem in Wikipedia-- their motto should be "the encyclopedia everybody can edit, except don't bother trying with these articles." But in my experience it's rarely college professors-- it's dedicated amateurs who have simply decided that they are the world's expert in this field.
Many of them actually are quite knowledgable-- there are some pretty good articles there. But sometimes these are by people who just don't have a good grasp on writing for clarity and sticking to the topic.
Most of the college professors I know are at best amused by wikipedia, and in general disdain it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The best way to troll Wikipedia is to insert [citation needed] next to all the most obvious parts of the article.
I was going to do this to the Wikipedia article about "the sky", next to the part where it says "the sky is blue", but there are already 4 separate citations for that particular fact. There is a weakness in the following sentence, however - "At night, the sky appears to be a mostly dark surface". There is no citation for this so-called "fact" - until I have read a newpaper article or academic paper confirming that the sky is dark, I will go on believing the opposite. Because that's Wikipedia law.
Here you go. Add these to the article:
At night, the sky appears to be a mostly dark surface.[1][2][3][4]
[1] Harrison, E. R. "The dark night-sky riddle: a" paradox" that resisted solution." Science 226, (1984): 941-946.
[2] Jaki, Stanley L., and H. L. Armstrong. "The paradox of Olbers' paradox." American Journal of Physics, 40.9 (1972): 1354-1355.
[3] Harrison, E. R. "Olbers' paradox." Nature 204, (1964): 271-272.
[4] Wesson, Paul S., K. Valle, and R. Stabell. "The extragalactic background light and a definitive resolution of Olbers's paradox." The Astrophysical Journal 317, (1987): 601-606.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Why do people think that having a recognizable user name makes them right? You do realize that is just an ad homonym attack, right?
1. It's hominem, as in person.
Did you realize that you just made an ad homonym attack?
You attacked the AC post for using a homonym.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Having a recognizable user name doesn't automatically make someone right. But having the ability to go back and view their comments in prior conversations sure makes it easier to gauge if their opinion is worth a shit or not.
Yep. And after a while you get to notice that some usernames are usually very insightful.
There are only 2 uses I've seen for AC: Trolls, and people who claim they can't comment under their name because their employer would recognize them (or some flavor of that).
Yes on 1, no on two: these people could simply chose a username like "haX0r42" or "Pringleeater" that their boss won't recognize. /., there's one more reason a person might comment as AC: they have already moderated the thread and don't want to remove their moderations..
You're right, though, the worst of the drive-by flaming and pugnacious idiocy is almost always anonymous.
Due to the particular nature of
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Leave Toxicity to the chemistry and use real words to describe what you want to accuse people of. Terms like toxic behaviour and hate speech are cool, because there is no clear definition, which means you can redefine them each time you use them. If somebody refutes a claim, you tell them, that the word was used in another context than what he refuted.
I would have moderated it down if I'd though it worth wasting the mod point. It's a snarky attack on Wikipedia admins. Only a mild one as /. attacks go, but nevertheless, an attack, and thus properly rated flamebait.
Or the jerks that hang around the comment sections.
" In 9/10 cases, if your opinion isn't worth putting a name to, its probably bullshit."
You'll need a citation for this. I've seen many insightful comments from A/C's. The key point is their name doesn't carry any weight (or historic context) so the comment itself has to be self consistent and easy to confirm on it's own.
And conversely putting a name on a lying opinion doesn't make it less of a lie. (I cite every word out of Trump's mouth as evidence of that).
This news supports the frequent observation that the Internet and associated communications platforms give a very disproportionate voice to a very small minority of jackasses who seem to have nothing better to do.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Trolling and abusive speech is protected speech. Ban it and you will see more of it. If you really want to get rid of it then stop cracking down on it.
It was clearly not intended to be a truthful statement. No Slashdot reader could genuinely believe it to be true. How, then, can it constitute an attack?
Perhaps it is a cultural misunderstanding. In my country, that statement would be considered satire at best, ludicrous nonsense at worst, but certainly not an attempt to make anyone angry.
You have people that have their own little fiefdoms, and think they "own" their pet articles. I've tried to fix incorrect, factually verifiable information once or twice, and it instantly gets reverted back. Screw that noise.
Poe's law in action folks.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Wikipedia is a DISGRACE when it comes to any article linking to politics. A 'fake news' page was created recently, and the admin trolls used it to list news sites they didn't like, not sites who are open about using fake headlines for the traffic. But no-one can correct that page because the trolls ARE the admins - and comments pointing out the abuse of process are described by the admin trolls as 'attacks'.
Wikipedia is a mouth-piece for Israel, and the deep state. It may as well be another Soros outlet, tho Wikipedia's connections are more direct NSA (as a propaganda outlet).
Off politics (tech, maths, science, TV, movies, etc) and Wikipedia is mostly brilliant as a port of first resort. But this is standard state propaganda operation. Create a resource with a LOT of 'sugar' to draw people in so you can get as much 'medicine' down their throats as possible. Smart, informed people take the 'sugar' and avoid the 'medicine' (and yes I know in the real world medicine is 'good'- but that's not how this intelligence concept uses language).
Poe's law in action folks.
A useless meme based on anecdotes.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I can understand where you are coming from, but to give you some insight on how odd this situation gets: First of all, there are people who genuinely believe this sort of thing. Second, it's not _entirely_ without merit, since once or twice even the co-founder of WP, the great Jimbo Wales has gotten out of line and behaved inappropriately; although it's always related to boring administrative stuff like arbitration committee cases, and when it has happened he was either taken to task or noticed his mistaken and taken himself out of the matter. Third, there at least used to be a group of submitters from an anti-wikipedia activism site (yeah, that's a thing that exists) that would spam submissions to Slashdot. Many of them were ridiculously biased or entirely without merit, and more than one of those bad ones managed to get posted.
There is a weakness in the following sentence, however - "At night, the sky appears to be a mostly dark surface"
How can anything that doesn't reflect light appear to be a surface? At night, the sky appears to be mostly dark - with stars. I suppose if it's cloudy and you live in a city, it might appear to be a surface. But then, I have to wonder, are the clouds part of the sky, or are they something separate that obscures the sky? If there's a space elevator, and the bottom part of it misses touching the ground by 2 centimeters, is it an exceptionally low lying part of the sky?
You mean the admins who will revert an article when someone adds to it, citing vandalism or not enough citations... but they will copy the same text -verbatim- to the article and have that stand?
Nobody bothers editing Wikipedia anymore... if you are not in the "A"-list crowd, you will just get your changes reverted on you, no matter how good you are.
The media has always had a preference to report statically rare events. The fact they rare is one reason they are "newsworthy"
Accidents, crime, terrorism, contraversy, scandals, etc. None of those things happen often statistically. They're not SUPPOSED to happen frequently (surprise surprise, most people work to minimize accidents and crime). But they draw the most views so they get the most coverage.
That is the nature of the beast, and this isn't the first time a minority used the media's nature to push its agenda into the mainstream. In fact, this whole rise of conservatism is largely a backlash against the left's previous use of the media to push the left's minority agenda.
The media is like the Force. It's everywhere. It surrounds and binds people. Both Jedi and Sith can use it to their own ends. On a good day you might even call the tiny creatures that speaks to us through the media are symbiotes instead of parasites!
Are you sure they weren't toxic users... on wheels ?
Have gnu, will travel.
Wikipedia could probably solve the bulk of their personal attacks simply by fixing what is typically the root cause: petty disputes between editors over minor changes. If they had a large staff of competent, credentialed administrators, they could end these arguments before they even start. Instead, you have random person A arguing with random person B over the implication of a rule entirely invented by random people who would otherwise never be given the authority to run an encyclopedia. And the users are supposed to blindly follow these rules as if they were crafted with any sort of logic or reason whatsoever, and they rarely are. Attempting to ask the admins to mediate a dispute or, god forbid, consider change a rule, is a giant mess of bureaucracy that no real organization could ever hope to match.
It shows that a small group of people can make a difference.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It was clearly not intended to be a truthful statement. No Slashdot reader could genuinely believe it to be true. How, then, can it constitute an attack?
A statement has to be true for it to be an attack?
All I know is if I was a Wikipedia editor, and was honestly trying to do the best job I could, which I believe most of them actually are, I'd probably feel kindof shitty. It's snark criticizing volunteer work without knowing the person or what they actually do. It doesn't help the discussion at all, it's part of the general trend of casually insulting people so we can look superior, be funny, or just generally feel better about ourselves. It's mild as far as these things go, so I don't know that I would have bothered using a mod point on it, but it falls into that category.
... that they're right-wing. Could "toxic" be classified as a left-wing dog whistle?
100: pronounced "one hundred". It is not a convenient short form for "hundred", so "over a 100" doesn't work.
Say "over a hundred" or "over 100".
It is one or the other.
Do many thing often to encourage a better culture.
Positively highlighting users that are both regular contributors and first (only?) timers when they have embraced a non toxic method is a good way to start building a better culture.
Set-up managed contribution groups (related to content) and Invite first time posters to those groups. Use those groups to more effectively communicate your values.
Allow buddy systems to exist where first timers could be invited to communicate with regular contributors (who want to).
Understand you will never make everyone be nice (but you knew that).
"the general trend of casually insulting people" - yep, I hate this too.
If I paraded through the town singing "Rakarra is the secret ruler of Mars and he is trying to kill us all with his mind control waves", would you really consider that an attack on yourself? Or would you conclude "This person is saying things that nobody could possibly believe, therefore my life and reputation remain unaffected, and perhaps I can even laugh at this bizarre turn of events"? In theory I am making horrific accusations, in practice there is no actual attack on your character because my allegations are absurd and impossible.
I've edited Wikipedia a number of times, and most of my contributions were insta-reverted. Until the culture of "n00b-bashing" is eradicated from wikipedia, they could use a little satirical scrutiny.
And your father smelt of elderberries.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Wikipedia has allot of propaganda and misinformation (Especially political info).
http://www.serendipity.li/cda/censorship_at_wikipedia.htm
Keeps diluting the elitism of the internet.
I wonder if this isn't true on more general forums.. especially political forums like TheHill. Some posters have over 100000 posts and those generally are the obnoxious ones.
It's a standard 1 over t-squared curve that abounds in reality. 10% of the users are responsible for 90% of the problems. 20% of the population owns 80% of the guns. 5% of the population owns 95% of the money. If you got rid of those 34 users, the relationship still holds.
We just don't acknowledge it is as universal as the other curve of statistics, the gaussian distribution of the Bell curve.
"the general trend of casually insulting people" - yep, I hate this too.
If I paraded through the town singing "Rakarra is the secret ruler of Mars and he is trying to kill us all with his mind control waves", would you really consider that an attack on yourself?
First, I might be quite intrigued by it, and I would certainly hope I could live up to the reputation. What an honor, what a responsibility!
But really, it would feel like satire, or just playful banter. I wouldn't take it seriously, no. But it was discovered that all 34 of the "toxic users" were Administrators or Wikipedia employees does not sound like playful banter to me, it feels a bit more like a stinging rebuke. Reading that, it would be hard for me to come to another conclusion than you really do think that Wikipedia moderators and administrators are bad, toxic people. It's a sentiment I've seen here more than once, echoed sometimes in summaries of actual Slashdot articles.
I've edited Wikipedia a number of times, and most of my contributions were insta-reverted. Until the culture of "n00b-bashing" is eradicated from wikipedia, they could use a little satirical scrutiny.
I think the culture could certainly come under scrutiny.
My boyfriend has decided that I've gone completely insane because I've developed an obsession with editing the Wikipedia page for "blue balls." I've made minor grammatical corrections and within 30 seconds, some unemployed Wikipedia do-gooder usually comes along and reverses my edit. So now I'm doing editing just to fuck with these people. I mean seriously. Who loves the subject of blue balls so much that they find it necessary to be protective and proactive regarding the Wikipedia page on the subject?