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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 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
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
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'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
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.
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...
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.
There's rules against that :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's a good rule.
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.