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."

Comments

In further news

[Anonymous Coward]

In further news, it was discovered that all 34 of the "toxic users" were Administrators or Wikipedia employees.

Re:How many

[AmiMoJo]

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.

So what are the stats on /.?

[mykepredko]

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.

Re:So what are the stats on /.?

[swillden]

You do realize that is just an ad homonym attack, right?

1. It's hominem, as in person.

ACs are "same nym" users, i.e. "homo nyms". It's actually kind of clever.

Self proclaimed experts.

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Re:Self proclaimed experts.

[Oswald McWeany]

Wikipedia is really pretty amazing. Of course, we all know that; but, it's worth reflecting that, on a public platform, that most people can edit to a degree- it's not more chaos than it is. Maybe I've just not been to the right (or wrong) pages, but there is way less graffiti than one would have expected.

If you had told me in the 80's that something like Wikipedia would exist and be as good as it is, I would have laughed in your face and called you a pee-pee face. (I was a kid in the 80's).

It rises to the top

[jbmartin6]

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.

Re:It rises to the top

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:It rises to the top

[Solandri]

It's not just fringe political movements. Need I point out that the over-representation of the left online and in the media during the last election gave everyone the sense that Hillary had it in the bag. Their toxic attacks on anyone who openly supported Trump drove his supporters into hiding so they wouldn't admit to pollsters (or even their friends) that they were voting for Trump, leading to the polls also making it appear that Hillary had it in the bag. A lot of people on the left were probably complacent because of this and didn't bother to vote. And Trump ended up winning.

(And before anyone brings up that Clinton won the popular vote, she only won if you disenfranchise anyone who didn't vote for Trump or Clinton. If you include the votes for all the third party candidates, conservative candidates won 49.9% of the popular vote vs 49.2% for liberal candidates. Liberals were the majority online, but they were the minority among those who voted. So for better or for worse, Trump is probably the correct winner for this election. And no I didn't vote for Trump.)

Re:How many

[Mashiki]

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.

Re:funny or flame? Hard to tell-- some posts are b

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

In an odd way it's inspiring.

[hey!]

It shows that a small group of people can make a difference.