I was skeptical of even reading this article, but it actually seems pretty insightful. It also seems more relevant to Wikipedia than I was expecting: "The answer had to be community-wide reform of cultural norms. We had to change how people thought about online society and change their expectations of what was acceptable.... How do you introduce structure and governance into a society that didn’t have one before?"

It has some interesting ideas about using science to change the social dynamics of online communities and leveraging the work of academics who want to work on these problems. Some of the techniques they used remind me of Aaron's revision scoring. I wonder if there's any chance we could talk with them or some of their researchers.

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 3:12 PM, Denny Vrandečić vrandecic@gmail.com wrote:

Very interesting read (via Brandon Harris):

http://recode.net/2015/07/07/doing-something-about-the-impossible-problem-of...

"the vast majority of negative behavior ... did not originate from the persistently negative online citizens; in fact, 87 percent of online toxicity came from the neutral and positive citizens just having a bad day here or there."

"... incidences of homophobia, sexism and racism ... have fallen to a combined 2 percent of all games. Verbal abuse has dropped by more than 40 percent, and 91.6 percent of negative players change their act and never commit another offense after just one reported penalty."

I have plenty of ideas how to apply this to Wikipedia, but I am sure Dario and his team as well :) - and some opportunity for the communities to use such results.

Cheers, Denny

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