Toxic comments reduce the activity of volunteer editors on Wikipedia

arXiv (Cornell University)

Abstract

Wikipedia is one of the most successful collaborative projects in history. It is the largest encyclopedia ever created, with millions of users worldwide relying on it as the first source of information as well as for fact-checking and in-depth research. As Wikipedia relies solely on the efforts of its volunteer-editors, its success might be particularly affected by toxic speech. In this paper, we analyze all 57 million comments made on user talk pages of 8.5 million editors across the six most active language editions of Wikipedia to study the potential impact of toxicity on editors' behaviour. We find that toxic comments consistently reduce the activity of editors, leading to an estimated loss of 0.5-2 active days per user in the short term. This amounts to multiple human-years of lost productivity when considering the number of active contributors to Wikipedia. The effects of toxic comments are even greater in the long term, as they significantly increase the risk of editors leaving the project altogether. Using an agent-based model, we demonstrate that toxicity attacks on Wikipedia have the potential to impede the progress of the entire project. Our results underscore the importance of mitigating toxic speech on collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia to ensure their continued success.

Authors 3

1. Ivan Smirnov corresponding

   University of Mannheim · Technische Hochschule Mannheim

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Mannheim , L15 , 1-6 , 68161 Mannheim , Germany

   University of Mannheim ;

   University of Mannheim;

2. Camelia Oprea Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University ;

   RWTH Aachen University;

3. Markus Strohmaier

   University of Mannheim · GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences · Complexity Science Hub

   Affiliation as printed

   Complexity Science Hub Vienna

   GESIS -Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences;

   University of Mannheim;