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A joint study carried out by researchers from Alphabet's Jigsaw and the Wikimedia Foundation has analyzed all user comments left on Wikipedia in 2015 in order to identify how and why users launch in personal attacks, one of the many faces of online abuse. To analyze the gigantic trove of sample comments, researchers developed a machine learning algorithm that was able to identify and distinguish different forms of online abuse and personal attacks. In order for the algorithm to work, it had to be trained beforehand. For this, researchers used human users to classify a small batch of 100,000 comments, with each of the test comments passing through the hands of ten different humans. The resulted data classification allowed the algorithm to accurately distinguish between direct personal attacks (statements like "You suck!"), third-party personal attacks (statements like "Bob sucks!"), and indirect personal attacks (statements like "Henry said Bob sucks").
After training the algorithm and unleashing it on all Wikipedia 2015 user comments, researchers were able to identify personal attacks, and then collect data on the users that launched them. Their findings reveal that around 43% of all comments left on Wikipedia came from anonymous users, but most of these were one-time commenters, and the number of comments they left was 20 times smaller than comments left by registered users. Despite this, researchers discovered that anonymous users were six times more active in posting personal attacks, but in the end, they contributed to less than half of personal attacks, meaning a large number of personal attacks came from users with a registered identity on the site.
Of all personal attacks, researchers noted that about a tenth came from extremely active users, who had an activity level of 20+, the highest on the site. A closer look at the data revealed that 34 "highly toxic users" from this 20+ category were responsible for almost 9% of all personal attacks on the site. "By comparing these figures, we see that almost 80% of attacks come from the over 9000 users who have made fewer than 5 attacking comments," the research team noted, something that's somewhat normal, as everybody tends to get mad at one point or another. "However, the 34 users with a toxicity level of more than 20 are responsible for almost 9% of attacks," researchers noted.
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(Score: 5, Informative) by nitehawk214 on Monday February 13 2017, @03:41PM
Just because a user has a high activity level does not mean they are providing useful content to the site. But Wikipedia has driven itself to this culture with internal wars and are now reaping what they sow.
I quit being an occasional editor when I stumbled into someone's domain when I tried improving an article. No abuse or flame wars, just all of my edits were reverted, then a bunch of unrelated edits in another part of the site were also reverted.
Yep, fuck that, not worth my trouble. And not worth my dollars to donate.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nobuddy on Monday February 13 2017, @11:58PM
And god help you if you edit someone's personal pet-peeve playground. I added a game that was in development to a specific page about games in that topic. One guy completely lost his shit over it. Ranting and raging, locking down the page and reverting it all.
The game finished and went to release, still no entry about it on that page. Because that dickhole got mad someone beat him to entering it.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday February 14 2017, @07:13AM
Yep, fuck that, not worth my trouble.
Maybe you were the jerk? Just saying. I could be that your edits were stupid, ignorant, inflammatory, and not nice at all! Did you ever think of that, you self-righteous editor type person? Huh?
(Score: 2, Troll) by aristarchus on Tuesday February 14 2017, @07:19AM
But Wikipedia has driven itself to this culture with internal wars and are now reaping what they sow.
That is "reefing what they sew", you ignorant authoritarian! You don't like when people with more knowledge than you correct your sorry ass? No wonder you dropped out of college! Why don't you go join jmorris and khallow in the corner. They will be the ones wearing the cones on their heads. We call those "dunce caps", after Duns Scotus, who was way smarter than anyone in his era. Not to suggest that just wearing the cap makes that true. But it does signify that those wearing the cap think it is true.