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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)