Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-02-27/Recent research

Recent research

How editors and readers may be emotionally affected by disasters and terrorist attacks

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

How earthquakes and terrorist attacks may elicit anger and sadness among Wikipedia editors and readers

In a study titled "Emotions in Wikipedia: the role of intended negative events in the expression of sadness and anger in online peer production", four Germany-based researchers (three among them from the field of psychology) argue that while "Wikipedia explicitly strives to provide objective and neutral information in unbiased language [, ...] Wikipedia articles might still contain subtle expressions of emotions from the experiences of their authors."

Specifically, the authors

The automated linguistic analysis method is Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a tool developed in the 1990s by Pennebaker and others. LIWC has been widely used and vetted, but nowadays exists alongside more sophisticated sentiment analysis methods – a fact that the paper's limitations section coyly alludes to. The researchers used LIWC to detect the percentage of an article's words that match "three specific negative emotion categories [...]: sadness (e.g. 'loss', 'sorrow', or 'grief'), anger (e.g. 'offensive', 'brutal', or 'violent'), and anxiety (e.g. 'panic', 'afraid', or 'scared')." They illustrate them with the following examples:

Sadness-related words: "The Haitian art world suffered great losses" (from 2010 Haiti earthquake)
Anger-related words: "He had a history of violence, including an arrest in July 2009 for assaulting his girlfriend" (from Boston Marathon bombing)
Anxiety-related words: "... which sparked fears in the scientific community of massive numbers of fish dying" (from Hurricane Katrina)

To avoid confounds, the text of references and external links was excluded from this analysis. Also, the authors "did not include the word 'attack' within the anger category or the word 'terror' within the anxiety category in all analyses to avoid the possibility that the topic of the articles could be a confounding factor in our analyses". However, they appear to have made no attempt otherwise to distinguish emotions that are expressed directly in the text (in what editors call "Wikipedia voice") from emotions that are merely reported and attributed to others (such as the scientific community's "fears" in the Hurricane Katrina example, or quoted reactions from politicians etc.).

The authors suggest that online peer production systems such as Wikipedia

The paper extends and replicates results from a 2017 publication by the same authors (which had also examined article talk pages, finding that "Surprisingly, Wikipedia articles on those two [types of] events contained more emotional content than related Wikipedia talk pages").

Having "demonstrated that Wikipedia articles on terrorist attacks contained more anger-related content than Wikipedia articles on earthquakes", two of the authors replicate and extend this result by directly measuring the emotional reactions of Wikipedia readers in a more recent study. Specifically,

The researchers conclude

Briefly

See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
The deadline for paper submissions to the "Wiki-M3L" workshop has been extended to March 9. The event is intended to be "a space for the Wikipedia community and the multimodal & multilingual research community to share and support each other."

Other recent publications

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.

"Multilingual Entity Linking System for Wikipedia with a Machine-in-the-Loop Approach"

This paper describe the development of a machine learning model used in the "Add a link" task suggestion feature for new Wikipedia editors (deployed by the Wikimedia Foundation's "Growth" team on several language Wikipedias last year). From the abstract:

Screenshots from the user evaluation of the link recommendation system

"Wikipedia Entities as Rendezvous across Languages: Grounding Multilingual Language Models by Predicting Wikipedia Hyperlinks"

From the paper and abstract:

"Automatic Wikipedia Link Generation Based On Interlanguage Links"

From the abstract:

"Improving Website Hyperlink Structure Using Server Logs"

From the abstract and paper:

References

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27 February 2022 (all comments)

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== Copyediting ==

@HaeB: When I was copyediting it, I started by going over the grammar and punctuation, so I had already had a lot of time to think about that "anger and sadness" paper by the time I got to your analysis of it. I'm fairly pleased that we came up with the exact same caveats -- "they're just going to be measuring what newspapers say in our quotations"! I am glad you took the piss out of it a little, because it doesn't seem like it is producing many interesting results. Now, the other papers, they seem like they could go somewhere. I have often thought it was strange that our hyperlinking process depended entirely on human effort with virtually no ability to augment it with software... jp×g 20:31, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Links not clicked

"simply adding more links does not increase the overall number of clicks taken from a page. Instead, links compete with each other for user attention" Does this take into account popups, that allow the reader to view a summary of the linked article, without opening it? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:59, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Earthquakes and terrorist attacks

It would be possible, for example, to highlight certain emotional passages by the computer system while people are writing a text, so that Wikipedia users are aware of emotional expressions. Other Wikipedia authors, administrators, and bots could flag content that needs correction also with respect to emotional wording. This is just a suggestion of more busy work, I'm afraid, which we do not need more of on Wikipedia. The use of the word "administrators" demonstrates a certain unfamiliarity of the community (admins have no additional power over cleanup tags or content). I don't think this research really has a point. I'm not sure how or why we would rewrite the sentence "He had a history of violence, including an arrest in July 2009 for assaulting his girlfriend" to avoid the words "violence" and "assault". — Bilorv (talk) 20:49, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The premise is wrong. In fact, it's the kind of thing that's been labelled as a symptom of racism and other forms of oppression: if someone expresses appropriate emotions, then they're "irrational" or anti-intellectual or inferior and need to calm down right now, because they and their emotions are the problem – and not, you know, the fact that real people died, which is the kind of thing that humans have emotions about. Humans who are not emotionally crippled feel sadness when they think about sad events, anger when they think about enraging events, and fear when they think about frightening things. Their proposal that Wikipedia should manipulate people's emotions so that readers don't have a congruent mood is an appalling recommendation for self-censorship. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:08, 2 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think the facts unveiled by these researchers may be true (higher use of certain words in certain articles due to editors' emotions). On the other hand, I strongly disagree with their prescriptions.

I was one of those who edited the article Attentats du 13 novembre 2015 en France as the events unfolded. I had lived in Paris earlier in my life and still had friends there. I remember having tears in my eyes as I wrote that the terrorists who had entered the Bataclan Theatre were killing everyone inside. When I quit editing late that night, I was shaken and it took me a while to recover. Did my emotions impact my writing? Maybe. I tried to be as Wikipedia-neutral as possible but I am human. What would have been my reaction to some message making me "aware of emotional expressions"? I would have sent it to hell. --Hispalois (talk) 00:00, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if the researchers would say the same about professional journalists and scholars. We often take our words straight out of the sources we're reading. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:08, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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