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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."
The best way to upset them is by being a rule-lawyer. The ultimate troll is to make an argument based on an ambiguity in Wikipedia law, which then causes the other lawyers to turn on each other.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The best way to upset them is by being a rule-lawyer. The ultimate troll is to make an argument based on an ambiguity in Wikipedia law, which then causes the other lawyers to turn on each other.
Might have been true a decade ago, but it's not now. Not only are editors(along with power editors) fully broken, but so is the administration to the point where they'll allow power editors unrestrained abuse as long as they're promoting what the administration allows. And they'll allow that until it reaches the point where people complain and threaten to withhold donations, then shitcan or temp ban the power editor who will then use a meat puppet to continue their work. The best examples I can think of off the top of my head are Ryulong Gamaliel and Mark Bernstein.
Om, nomnomnom...
Yes, and that's a huge problem. As we have seen recently, it makes fringe political movements seem more popular than they are, giving them undue credibility. Look at how Spicer is surprised that far right shock jocks are less mainstream than he thought.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC