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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.
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.
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They'll be that meek, lives in grandma's basement, bookish skinny kid.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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
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
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.
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.
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Actually the few that have ended up revealed were all fourty-something massively overweight living-in-mother's-basement types.
Something about a complete and utter lack of success or achievement leads some people to resent success and achievement in others, especially women, and thus hound them online with a great deal of trolling. For some reason, making successful people feel bad makes them feel less bad.
99% of trolling is extreme insecurity.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
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.