I would be interested to see how much of the offence and how many of the attacks are in Wikipedias known and usually obvious stress areas.
Wikipedia tries to neutrally cover every topic that would be considered controversial in real life, and it also brings together people from diverse parts of the globe who may not previously have encountered people of each other's views. It also has whole areas of contention itself, in particular the deletion process. Many organisations that aim for a civil discourse discourage or ban discussion of contentious topics such as politics and religion. If anything we do the reverse. I'm not suggesting that we amend that, but it would be good to know whether the tactic of avoiding contentious topics is an effective way of avoiding toxic behaviours. There's also the issue of collateral damage - snarkiness between editors might be based on previous encounters on a more contentious topic, or even on perceptions of one editor based on their interactions with others who they have clashed with in a contentious area. If so we'd expect relatively few incidents where regulars are toxic to newbies who haven't stumbled into a heated discussion about abortion, alternative medicine, the Armenian genocide etc. Truly difficult to comment on this study without being able to see the attacks that they found. But one area I can evidence, Wikipedia is big, especially behind the scenes. Most user pages are very low audience, and an isolated attack on an individual editor in their user space might not be noticed or acted on by anyone. Tools that help manage and find that would be useful. I have in the past trawled user space and deleted swathes of attack pages. Some of it is venting by editors who have just had their article deleted, and it is unlikely that anyone but themselves actually reads what they write on their own talkpages - I very much doubt the tagger who dropped a deletion template on their talkpage will go back and read their response. Regards WereSpielChequers > On 24 Jun 2017, at 10:49, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raym...@gmail.com> wrote: > > No right to be offended? To say to someone "you don't have the right to be > offended" seems pretty offensive in itself. It seems to imply that their > cultural norms are somehow inferior or unacceptable. > > With the global reach of Wikipedia, there are obviously many points of view > on what is or isn't offensive in what circumstances. Offence may not be > intended at first, but, if after a person is told their behaviour is > offensive and they persist with that behaviour, I think it is reasonable to > assume that they intend to offend. Which is why the data showing there is a > group of experienced users involved in numerous personal attacks demands some > human investigation of their behaviour. > > Similarly for a person offended, if there is a genuinely innocent > interpretation to something they found offensive and that is explained to > them (perhaps by third parties), I think they need to be accepting that no > offence was intended on that occasion. Obviously we need a bit of give and > take. But I think there have to be limits on the repeated behaviour (either > in giving the offence or taking the offence). > > Kerry > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
