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Handful of “highly toxic” Wikipedia editors cause 9% of abuse on the site

https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... e-editors/



Who is launching personal attacks?

The researchers unleashed their algorithm on Wikipedia comments made during 2015, constantly checking results for accuracy. 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," they represent less than half of all attacks on Wikipedia. "Similarly, less than half of attacks come from users with little prior participation," the researchers write in their paper. "Perhaps surprisingly, approximately 30% of attacks come from registered users with over a 100 contributions." In other words, a third of all personal attacks come from regular Wikipedia editors who contribute several edits per month. Personal attacks seem to be baked into Wikipedia culture.

The researchers also found that an outsized percentage of attacks come from a very small number of "highly toxic" Wikipedia contributors. A whopping 9% of attacks in 2015 came from just 34 users who had made 20 or more personal attacks during the year. "Significant progress could be made by moderating a relatively small number of frequent attackers," the researchers note. This finding bolsters the idea that problems in online communities often come from a small minority of highly vocal users.

The algorithm was also able to identify a phenomenon often called the "pile-on." They found that attacking comments are 22 times more likely to occur close to another attacking comment. "Personal attacks cluster together in time," the researchers write. "Perhaps because one personal attack triggers another." Though this shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has ever taken a peek at Twitter, being able to quantify this behavior is a boon for machine learning. It means that an algorithm might be able to identify a pile-on before it really blows up, and moderators could come in to de-escalate before things get really ugly.

Depressingly, the study also found that very few personal attacks are moderated. Only 17.9% of personal attacks lead to a warning or ban. Attackers are more likely to be moderated if they have launched a number of attacks or have been moderated before. But still, this is an abysmal rate of moderation for the most obvious and blatant form of abuse that can happen in a community.

Such behaviour found on Wikipedia is classic of Statist and Pseudo-Skeptic behaviour;
they are essentially like biological-robots who are part of an inter-universal greater-conspiracy...

Don't forget to of course load up this video in a new tab in order to be able to read the comments section.

Biological robots, I had not thought of that. They do seem to follow a program.

The last US election has convinced me that some people will believe anything if it makes them feel better. I always knew that, but I never knew there millions of them.

"Inter Universal conspiracy"?