
Handful of “highly toxic” Wikipedia editors cause 9% of abuse - blatherard
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/one-third-of-personal-attacks-on-wikipedia-come-from-active-editors/
======
NelsonMinar
This report reminds me of some of Jeffrey Lin (Riot Lyte)'s work on League of
Legends. He found that 1% of players are toxic, frequently acting badly. But
that only accounts for 5% of toxic behavior; 77% of bad behavior comes from
people who are just having a bad day. That echoes this report's finding that
34 Wikipedia folks are responsible for 9% of abuse.

A related finding is Riot found that toxicity in LoL was contagious; people
who played with an abusive player were more likely to be abusive in their next
game. The Wikipedia phenomenon of abuse pile-ons seems similar.

Some links for Lin's work: [http://www.nature.com/news/can-a-video-game-
company-tame-tox...](http://www.nature.com/news/can-a-video-game-company-tame-
toxic-behaviour-1.19647?WT.mc_id=SFB_NNEWS_1508_RHBox)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbYQ0AVVBGU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbYQ0AVVBGU)

~~~
bane
One of the interesting things about high functioning forums (like this one) is
that there's a group of people who have as part of their job function the
ability to enforce civility and reduce abuse. Like any community, HN also has
"power users", in WP they're the run of the mill editors, but the difference
is that here dang or somebody will show up to calm down incivility and point
to the guidelines. In WP those people either don't exist or they're absent in
providing that function.

I contribute here, I don't to WP and this kind of active community hygiene is
exactly the reason why.

~~~
Amezarak
It has a lot to do with the community governance structure.

Wikipedia is something akin to a democracy. Every editor has the potential to
become an Administrator or a Bureaucrat. This means that a lot of editors
engage in metrics-gaming behavior and become involved in the Wikipedia
community, which by its very nature means weighing on on various
controversies, like whether or not to delete an article. There's nominally a
focus on creating a consensus, but in practice, the opinion of the Right
People wins the day. There's a process for everything, and everyone has a
refuge in some guideline or another which leads to lots of rules-lawyering.
It's difficult to get rid of problematic people who are good at rules-
lawyering and garnering support.

On HN, dang and sctb are kings. If you cause problems, you are warned. If you
continue to cause problems, you are banned. There are no higher appeals. Your
interpretation of the guidelines is irrelevant; that of dang and sctb is
irrefragable.

I think it is possible to construct well-run, friendly 'democratic'-type
communities on the Internet, but very difficult. In practice, it's always
seemed to me that dictatorial moderation creates the best communities - of
course, there are communities with bad administrators, but they generally die
out. I've seen some really excellent forums where moderators ban posters
simply for not having sufficiently high-quality content, and the result was
amazing.

Granted, for any reasonably active community, it means that someone is going
to spend a _lot_ of time doing the moderating. I think HN strikes a good
balance with allowing users to downvote and flag, even though I feel that most
people generally downvote for reasons I disagree with (disagreement.)

One other key factor I've found in community civility actually seems a little
strange at first. In my experience, it is very important for no communication
backchannels to exist - for example, no IRC channels. Those effectively breed
the creation of cabals and all sorts of strategic interventions in
discussions, or in the case of Wikipedia, talk pages and votes. That's been a
major problem on Wikipedia. It is _nominally_ community-run, but "community"
really refers to the insiders who frequent the right IRC channels and are
friends with the right people - connections you have no way of seeing simply
by looking at Wikipedia talk pages. On top of that, people who are friends
with the right people outside of Wikipedia always, simply by human nature, get
much more leeway when engaging in abusive behavior than do people who aren't.

~~~
jacobolus
The much bigger difference is that Wikipedia conversations/disputes are long-
running and relate to the state of permanent artifacts.

The technology of Hacker News makes it literally impossible to carry on a
long-running conversation or collaborate on serious permanent artifacts.
There’s no point in going back to last week’s discussion and vandalizing it
with troll comments, because nobody is ever going to read it. There’s no need
to invent complicated rules for productive collaboration, because there’s no
work to collaborate on in the first place.

------
yongjik
From my brief experience with (English and Korean) Wikipedia editing many
years ago, the problem was not "toxic" editors but more with entrenched ones.
They never resorted to personal attacks, but instead used their vast knowledge
of WP:this and WP:that to provoke other people until either they left or get
banned.

E.g., for a long time, the article title in the Korean wikipedia for Japanese
Empire was 대일본제국, literally, Great Empire of Japan. Well, this being Korean
wikipedia, you could see how some people took offense at it. The sensible
thing would be just to drop the "Great" part: everybody knows which Empire
we're talking about, nobody thinks the Empire was particularly Great anyway,
and then we could move on to actually talking about the article's content.

But no, some editors would object, because we have to use Official Names(TM)
for everything. (For some reason, nobody bothered to change Bangkok's name to
the official "Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya
Mahadilokphop Noppharatratchathaniburirom Udomratchaniwetmahasathan
Amonphimanawatansathit Sakkathattiyawitsanukamprasit", but if anybody did that
I'm sure it would be quickly reverted, citing WP:(You can't make an edit just
to prove a point) or something like that.) To this day, I suspect some
editors' criterion for "Official Names" and other similar policy was maximal
likelihood for alienating potential contributors. Classic power game move.

~~~
milesrout
Changing titles to avoid offending people is exactly the wrong thing to do.

~~~
Nomentatus
But changing the current title "Coeliac disease" to celiac disease in
Wikipedia might reduce confusion, and since celiac death rates are quite high
if undiagnosed, over millions of users, save some lives.

(Against this, search engines are now very good at matching synonyms.)

I know, you didn't like the hint of political correctness in the particular
Korean example. That's a judgement call, I might agree with you in general,
but with such an emotional topic (comfort women, atrocities, etc) I wouldn't
resent the change.

~~~
milesrout
It's not called Celiac disease, it's called Coeliac disease. And 'Celiac
disease' redirects to 'Coeliac disease'.

~~~
grzm
Therein lies a difference: "it's called" vs "it's proper name".

For a point of comparison, we can look at Google Trends to determine relative
popularity. This would give us an idea as to what "it's called".

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0h1pq,coeliac...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0h1pq,coeliac%20disease)

"Celiac disease" is consistently between 15 and 20 times more popular than
"coeliac disease".

Also, the Wikipedia article opens with "Coeliac disease, also spelled celiac
disease,…"

Given the widespread use of "celiac", not only among the public, but also in
the literature, one might reasonably argue at this point that "celiac" is the
proper name.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeliac_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeliac_disease)

~~~
milesrout
>"Celiac disease" is consistently between 15 and 20 times more popular than
"coeliac disease".

Because Americans don't know how to spell. The fact is that it's called
'Coeliac disease' by sane people and 'Celiac disease' by non-medical
Americans. Medical Americans know how it's actually spelt, as do all non-
Americans.

~~~
grzm
_Because Americans don 't know how to spell. The fact is that it's called
'Coeliac disease' by sane people and 'Celiac disease' by non-medical
Americans. Medical Americans know how it's actually spelt, as do all non-
Americans_

Attacks like this are unwarranted.

Reviewing the references for the coeliac disease article shows plenty of
"Medical Americans" and international papers referring to "celiac disease".

\- "Celiac Disease" [https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-
disea...](https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-
diseases/celiac-disease)

\- "Subclinical celiac disease and gluten sensitivity"
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4017418/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4017418/)

\- Tonutti E, Bizzaro N (2014). "Diagnosis and classification of celiac
disease and gluten sensitivity". Autoimmun Rev (Review)

\- Ciccocioppo R, Kruzliak P, Cangemi GC, Pohanka M, Betti E, Lauret E,
Rodrigo L (Oct 22, 2015). "The Spectrum of Differences between Childhood and
Adulthood Celiac Disease". Nutrients (Review).

That's four from the first six references.

Of the first 25 references for the Wikipedia article, 13 spell it "celiac", 8
spell it "coeliac", 1 spells it "cœliac", and 3 don't mention the disease
specifically. To my eye (granted, quickly scanned), they all look like solid
references, mostly journal articles. To me, especially given the dipthong œ
used in one case, this looks like a clear case of a word that has legitimate
spelling variants, just as you used "spelt", where others would spell it
"spelled".

------
gwern
Not terribly surprising. But looks like the system manages to handle them
pretty well - the paper shows that the probability of getting blocked is up to
~80% after 5 personal attacks.

I've never worried too much about that kind of incivility or 'abuse' \- I've
always been far more worried about the 'abuse' which takes the form of
deleting contributions, which, because it can be justified and rules-lawyered
and is not as clearcut as 'you suck', the system does not handle well and
culturally encourages.

------
notadoc
An impressive amount of information on Wikipedia is just outright wrong,
misleading, clearly biased, or astroturfed. At the rate in which I encounter
inaccurate data on Wikipedia that I can identify, it makes me suspicious of
nearly everything on the site. It's an interesting experiment to allow the
masses to create and edit their own facts and it can provide a broad (albeit
often inaccurate) overview of some topics, but it's hardly a substitution for
a legitimate source let alone encyclopedia.

Nonetheless, I know plenty of people who take it as legitimate and cite it as
if it's an authority.

~~~
kyled
Curious, what areas do you find are usually flat out wrong?

The math sections seem to be pretty good. A friend found a flaw in a crypto
algorithm though.

~~~
simonsarris
Really? I find many math topics to be covered extremely poorly, and presume a
lot of prior knowledge without linking to that knowledge.

Plenty of philosophy articles are also very poor. For example the page on
Deconstruction, though its better than it was ~4 years ago.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction)

~~~
noobermin
>Really? I find many math topics to be covered extremely poorly, and presume a
lot of prior knowledge without linking to that knowledge.

At what level, an ELI5 level or the level of people who are actually going to
look that stuff up?

~~~
Larrikin
I think all articles should be at formers level since people with a deeper
knowledge will be using sites, books, etc where that deeper knowledge is
assumed. If they aren't already they can get started by reading reading the
sources in the article

~~~
noobermin
It is an encyclopedia, not a collection of tutorials. That seems more
appropriate for something like wikibooks. Otherwise, every single article
would be in inordinately long with a lot of redundancy. I like it better in
which pre-requisites are often linked to other pages, so you can brush up on
the pre-req's if you don't understand them.

------
ChuckMcM
I suspect the sentence "A handful of 'highly toxic' <members> cause <overly
large> amounts of abuse." is true for all groups.

~~~
wallace_f
Well, of course, because the terms 'handful,' and 'overly large' are
undefined. In the article's case, it refers to 1% causing 9%.
Disproportionate, but far from a majority.

Contrast with threads about the '80/20' rule. In those, people start saying
something not much different, like:

> I suspect the sentence "80% of <effects> come from 20% of <causes>," is true
> for all groups.

We'll always have a distribution of a range of behaviours, and we'll always
have cognitive bias; these in combination will lead to any number of
reasonable 'x of y' rules about populations.

------
brwnll
"Almost immediately, they found that they could debunk the time-worn idea that
anonymity leads to abuse. Although anonymous comments are "six times more
likely to be an attack,"

Hmm, that actually DOES seem to support the idea the anonymity fosters
abuse...

~~~
hyperpape
I think the net of it is: anonymity encourages some people to be abusive, but
enough people are abusive under their real names that you can't say anonymity
is the primary factor behind abuse.

Whether curbing anonymity is a necessary component of fighting abuse and/or
worth it becomes a further question.

~~~
_red
It may in fact be self-selecting.

Out of the total corpus of people, there are some who would be abusive if
anonymous, however they have enough 'social awareness' to not behave that way
when real names are used.

However, there are another subset of this group who lacks the social awareness
to curb their abusive behavior even though they are using their real names.

By enforcing a "no anonymity" policy, you filter out the first group
effectively but wind up increasing the percentage make-up that the second
group has in the overall community.

------
camdenlock
I expend a lot of effort to avoid Wikipedia as a bona dude source of truth,
and man is it difficult. The desire for a single easy-to-access repository of
knowledge is incredibly strong, but over the years, I've been stung repeatedly
by this particular one.

As it turns out, the "Neutral Point of View" rule that Wikipedians so proudly
tout is quite strongly biased toward a specific world-view: that of the so-
called "progressive" mindset.

It doesn't matter how much value a system of ideals has; if it transforms a
purportedly neutral source of information into a dogmatic one, then the source
loses all credibility and usefulness.

This seems to be happening on Wikipedia at an alarming rate, which is a real
bummer. It's not as ridiculous and blatant as (e.g.) Conservapedia, but...
well, frankly, that makes it all the more concerning. Zealotry is way harder
to call out when it's cloaked, as Wikipedia tends increasingly to be, in the
sly guise of unassailable moral high ground.

~~~
BuuQu9hu
Former WP editor, left because I was tired of abuse after the Esperanza
project disbanded.

There is always the distinct possibility that progressivism is part of the
correct way to interpret the universe. It seems to pop up in many places.

Consider Pirsig's argument: "The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all
energy systems run down like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not
only 'runs up,' converting low energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-
energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that
keep 'running up' faster and faster. Why, for example, should a group of
simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for
billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's
the motive? If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long
enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon,
oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other
minerals. It's a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor
we use and no matter what process we use we can't turn these compounds back
into a chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of
predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun's
heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That's
a scientific fact. The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process?
What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn't the
sun's energy. We just saw what the sun's energy did. It has to be something
else. What is it?"

~~~
Armisael16
That quote is wrong in so many ways - the man clearly didn't understand
thermodynamics. Life doesn't reduce universal entropy, and inorganic compounds
will spontaneously form more more energetic and complex compounds given a
little input energy.

------
ykler
"Depressingly, the study also found that very few personal attacks are
moderated. Only 17.9% of personal attacks lead to a warning or ban." I'm not
sure, but it seems like 17.9% is probably close to the right rate for
moderation, not "depressing" or "abysmal". Especially if there are calm
comments from experienced users disapproving of the abusive behavior in many
of the other cases.

~~~
kordless
I find it encouraging we have some AI to throw at this. I've hypothesized for
a while that people make blaming statements using biased arguments because it
is cheap, effective, and presents the gain of an upper hand without too much
risk.

------
bjourne
This is very interesting! So if anonymitiy isn't correlated with abuse, then
what is? I believe the answer is community standing. Anonymous and low-ranking
users know they will suffer the consequences for foul language therefore they
moderate themselves. Users with thousands of edits to their name, knows they
will get away with it.

About ten years ago when I edited Wikipedia, there was one particularily nasty
user who accused everyone who didn't agree with exactly everything he wrote. I
belive this person was mentally ill, but he spent a lot of time on Wikipedia
and wrote a lot of content.

Several people brought complaints about him and his toxic behaviour, but he
always had the backing of Jimmy Wales (the leader of the project), who would
make excuses for him. If the community intervened against this person by for
example temporarily banning him, Wales would intervene and undo the ban.

So this person kept being nasty because there were no repercussion. Eventually
I believe he got tired of the Wikipedia project and left on his own violiton.

------
sparkzilla
Abuse and harassment on Wikipedia does not belong to a handful of editors,
it's endemic, because the only way to succeed on Wikipedia _is to be an
asshole_. But it's important to note that bad behaviour on Wikipedia is a
symptom of poor software design. The software that Wikipedia is built
encourages conflict, and uses hundreds of rules combined with poorly-trained
admins to try to patch things up. The boundaries between conflict and abuse
are wide, arbitrarily defined, and patrolled by people who have neither
training, nor consistency. A better designed system would install systems to
minimize conflict, and would give clearer rules and standards to it's
moderators.

------
HarryHirsch
So - how do you rate partisan editors in geopolitical conflicts? The Irish
Troubles, Russian Federation and especially Israel-Palestine come to mind.
Especially the Israeli side was very successful in casting a very favourable
light on its position, and it took great effort to rein them in a little.
Would the pro-Israel faction be called abusive under the present metrics?

~~~
sndean
This became really obvious to me in June 2014. For whatever reason I became
really interested in ISIS taking over northern Iraq and spent ~10 hours / day
editing pages (to the detriment of my PhD).

There were so many sides, a lot of fake news (before that was a thing), and
abusive editors. After getting multiple 24-hour bans I realized I was also
becoming an abusive editor for reverting edits that seemed "obviously wrong"
within seconds. It's pretty easy to emotionally pick a side. Luckily I deleted
my account.

------
cooper12
Why do threads like these talking about a specific aspect of something always
devolve into hatejerks about the subject? I've noticed the same thing on
threads about Apple as well. It's talking specifically about personal attacks
yet people are somehow relating that to the reliability of the site. It's not
wrong to criticize Wikipedia, but then you should focus on the topic of the
toxic atmosphere instead like how that might compromise neutrality by keeping
out editors who are more conflict-averse. (or actually back up how you think
the site is unreliable, considering a study in _Nature_ found Wikipedia to be
just as reliable as _Brittanica_ )

~~~
DanBC
People can't fix the reliability of the site because of the fucking arseholes
on WP that make personal attacks.

Your comments ("Have you tried to correct these errors?") are answered by the
submitted article. People don't try to fix errors because of the toxic culture
at WP.

------
WikipediasBad
Ah..Wikipedia. Nice to know my HN Username is relevant for this thread.

Jokes aside, Wikipedia has a ton of flaws and the abuse is definitely one of
them regardless of what percentage of people do it, but there are just no
other realistic substitutes that are actually large enough to matter. The
largest and most respectable competitors are Everipedia (only one that doesn't
reuse mediawiki software), RationalWiki, InfoGalactic, and some other rolled
mediawiki crap. And none of those alternatives are even Alexa top 1,000 let
alone Alexa top 100 traffic.

~~~
projektir
Online encyclopedias suffer from the network effect like everything else.

------
BrailleHunting
One has to wonder about the logic of unemployed lute players (people like most
armchair anchor "journalists" without a shred of topical understanding) given
power to referee edits on highly-scientic topics or judging vital
concepts/details "irrelevant" because they don't understand historical context
or subject matter.

------
guscost
This is an example of what Jo Freeman famously called "The Tyranny of
Structurelessness":
[http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

------
dredmorbius
Somewhat tangential, for those who think Wikipedia's ideologically-driven
revert wars are anything new, a 19th century instance I ran across some months
back involving Chamber's Encyclopaedia:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chambers_encyclopaedia_editorial_statement/)

------
anigbrowl
Good article, but I wish she'd reached out to Wikipedia or the community of
editors to solicit some answer on what they intend to do about it. Once one is
aware of such an issue, failure to wield the banhammer is treated as an
implicit endorsement.

------
Fej
If you want to see for yourself the seedy underbelly of Wikipedia, check out
[http://wikipediocracy.com/](http://wikipediocracy.com/)

~~~
sparkzilla
Wikipediocracy is so over. All the cool kids have already moved on to
[http://wikipediasucks.boards.net/](http://wikipediasucks.boards.net/)

~~~
DanBC
Was that link dead when you posted it?

~~~
makomk
At a guess: certain people behind Wikipediocracy apparently really like to use
legal threats to try and shut up people who disagree with them.

