[Hitton]

>For instance, the level of conflict on discussion pages, as assessed by raters, has been shown to negatively correlate with the quality of the corresponding Wikipedia articles.

An alternative explanation is that "toxic comments" protect wikipedia from low quality content, acting as defense mechanism against bad editors. So without better study which tries to analyze if the critique (regardless of toxicity) is justified, it's absolutely useless to make any conclusions from the article.

[shagie]

I wrote about this a couple of years ago as a post titled "Rudeness – the moderation tool of last resort"

Part of that...

> One of those things that comes up time and time again in virtual communites is that of “everyone here is mean.” There is some truth to that.

> Try as we might with “be nice” policies and censoring rude comments that have the possibility of driving newcomers away, rudeness still thrives. While one component of this is John Gabriel’s theory ( https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa... ) and that people are more likely to act out when protected by some veneer of anonymity, it doesn’t handle that on usenet of old and many professional leaning forums where the link between online and real world identity is more tightly coupled for many users.

> Clay Shirky touched on this in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy where he talks about a community oriented BBS (it was the 70s with all the ideals that implies) that was overrun by kids and the community there lacked the tools to be able to moderate or censor them (these tools were never built because it ran counter to those ideals).

> This brings us to Usenet in the 80s and 90s. Usenet was much larger than the BBSs of old and it had some moderation tools with it. There were moderated news groups that restricted posting to only approved posts – this didn’t scale well. There were also cancel messages as part of the control protocls that were part of cancelbot wars against spam. At the personal level, there were was really only one tool available – kill files which caused specific posts, threads, or users to be ignored by you and only you. The reprocussion of this was that in order to have someone get disinvited from a news group, one had to drive them away with social tools. Rudeness.

> Today’s sites are much larger than those BBSs of the 70s and the largest of those contest the volume of data of a full usenet feed at its height. The community moderation tools have simillarly grown in capability as the moderated usnet groups would not scale to thousands of posts per day (Reddit has on the order of 200k posts per day, Quora and Stack Overflow/Exchange have on the order of 10k posts per day).

> The problem of rudeness arises as people run out of the ability to moderate using the tools provided in software. Votes, the ability to push a post into the workflow of “make it dissapear for everyone” and the ability to completely hide a post or person from ever showing up on one’s feed again – when those tools run out or aren’t provided the “social” moderation tools are the ones that remain.

> Thus rudeness and the attempt to drive an individual away because other moderation tools have run out or are ineffective. Rudeness is the moderation tool of last resort. When one sees the umteenth “how do I draw a pyramid with *” in the first week of classes on a programming site – how does one make it go away when the moderation tools have been fully exhausted? Be rude and hope that the next person seeing it won’t post the umteenth+1 one.

[rez9x]

I think your comment is also reinforced by the subjectiveness of the question, "What is toxicity?" While I can see a trend of decreasing respect for others, both online and in-person, the pendulum certainly swings in the other direction. Some individuals seek out any opportunities to play the victim and feel attacked, whether they do so consciously or not, and this seems to lead to those of this mentality calling any critique 'toxic'.

[sgift]

Ah, yes, the age old "I'm not an asshole! I just have high standards!"

High standards can be communicated without being toxic. It's just more effort. If most people had the same high standards for their answers they have on the contributions of others (whether on Wikipedia or in general) things would be far better.

[PurpleRamen]

> High standards can be communicated without being toxic.

Depends on the perception of toxicity. Just not being supportive or pointing out objective flaws is sometimes perceived as toxic by some people, while others take any sh*t and critique and consider it as valuable as long as it's true.

This is especially problematic in an international project, where multiple cultures clash. Though, this is likely only a problem for English Wikipedia.

[ravenstine]

I think there's a few layers to what makes said comments be seen as "toxic." There's definitely some very standoffish individuals in Wikipedia's inner-circle of editors. The decisions of editors also often seems very arbitrary. I've seen many cases where an editor doesn't allow a fact or citation because it's "original research" whilst on other pages the opposite is complained of, which is a big problem when articles are allowed for subjects that are not necessarily going to be written about on CNN/MSNBC/NYT.

And then there are the many talk sections I've seen where a petty editor plays the nuh-uh/yeah-huh game.

I'd contribute to Wikipedia, but I have no energy to bicker with people who are going to play with definitions or semantics just to make articles reflect their world view.