

Psychologist finds Wikipedians grumpy and closed-minded - razorburn
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16349-psychologist-finds-wikipedians-grumpy-and-closedminded.html

======
CalmQuiet
I think that study ( and the others mentioned in post ) need to consider
carefully their control (comparison) groups.

Yes, posting _anything_ online is an activity that draws more introverts than
extroverts. Hence: more people who are less practiced in their social skills,
perhaps partly because they enjoy less _practicing/developing_ social skills.

Similar findings (not necessarily the "grumpiness" factor") might be
discovered comparing fiction writers and night club entertainers.

As for the scoring lower on "openness" - I'd have to see how that was
operationalized. Were they "less open" to unsubstantiatable claims of UFO
sightings, etc., and insisting on documentation?

One man's closed-mindedness is another's insistence on scientific method.

\--recovering research psychologist

~~~
mechanical_fish
I agree. Where, for example, is the data on writers in general?

Writing, of any sort, is not a social activity. You sit alone and type. Or you
sit alone and read things that you or others have typed. Or you sit and fret
about the things that you're not typing.

It's hard for me to take this study seriously when I can close my eyes and
imagine James Thurber's results. Or Harlan Ellison's. Or Hunter S. Thompson's.

------
prodigal_erik
> Amichai-Hamburger speculates that rather than contributing altruistically,
> Wikipedians take part because they struggle to express themselves in real-
> world social situations.

I've made small contributions to a few public wikis, without really thinking
about why. And that's pretty plausible.

~~~
anigbrowl
Agreed. I look forward to a future paper on the personality characteristics of
academic psychologists, although I suspect I might have to wait a while for
that one.

------
tokenadult
This news report badly needs checking by Peter Norvig's helpful checklist of
what can go wrong in interpreting scientific research findings.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

~~~
wglb
My favorite line there is "Cell phone masts ward off cancer clusters 99.985%
of the time". I have a friend who specializes in RF safety and finds himself
counter to public hysteria on this topic constantly.

------
mgenzel
I would also like to see how exactly they define "grumpiness". It could be
that they view being argumentative, questioning, challenging assertions as
being "grumpy", which would surely describe many of us.

Also, weird how they chose only Israelis to question. Check out this
interesting study: "You Are Where You Edit: Locating Wikipedia Contributors
Through Edit Histories":
[http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/publications/Lieberman_L...](http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/publications/Lieberman_Lin_ICWSM2009.pdf)

------
jbm
The lack of social skills leading one to contribute more often online sounds
about true, in my case anyway. I used to post a lot more on BBSes (the old
dial-up kind) and message boards during high school / pre-college when I
suffered from some minor social awkwardness.

A bit off topic, but the comments on that page are hilarious. They would be
trolls if posted anywhere else.

------
philwelch
I contributed to Wikipedia for years and was fairly involved in it. This is
the main reason I got out. It's permeated the culture too deeply. The worst
part is, that's the only real part of the culture that's stuck, since the
project grew too fast to fully indoctrinate everyone into the culture. Hence
the frequent civil wars on Wikipedia.

------
notaddicted
Maybe they have reason to be grumpy and closed-minded, such as sifting through
joke edits all day.

~~~
xsmasher
Agreed. I worked helpdesk for a few semesters in college. The first semester,
I had a great time showing off, helping people format their floppies add page
numbers to their term papers. The second semester, I got tired of the
repitition and started to want for more challenging questions.

By the third and fourth semesters, I couldn't understand how humanity survives
when everyone is so universally stupid. Nothing about the job had changed, but
I began to realize that there can be no "forward progress" because a new batch
of (understandably) ignorant freshmen appears every term.

I'd imagine the same jaded bitterness creeps into any situation where the
senior users act as a bulwark against a constant stream of newbies. How can
you prevent "Forum fatigue" from setting in?

~~~
mechanical_fish
_How can you prevent "Forum fatigue" from setting in?_

The same way you prevent burnout in any other endeavor. You must learn to
enjoy the process as much as the result.

You take up teaching because you enjoy explaining things to curious but
ignorant people, not because you're hopeful that one day your job will be
finished because everyone will know everything.

A lot of the enjoyment comes from theme-and-variations. How many ways can you
find to explain the same thing? Which way will work best, given the nature of
the questioner in front of you? It's like music: You will play "the same
piece" thousands of times, and yet each playing will be subtly different, and
those differences are what keep it interesting.

------
gojomo
Hence, deletionism.

~~~
chaosmachine
I'd like to see a wikipedia mirror that ignored deletions.

Edit: Already exists, but seems to be missing some articles I know were
deleted.

<http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/>

------
lsc
heh. I find most psychologists to be a bit too open-minded. maybe it's just
me.

------
norimaki
I'd like to see a similar study conducted on frequenters of HN and Reddit. If
the study is correct, there should be a correlation between grumpiness and
higher karma on these sites too.

~~~
zimbabwe
Spoken like a low karma user. /grump

