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.

翻译：维基百科是历史上最成功的协作项目之一，它是有史以来规模最大的百科全书，全球数百万用户将其作为信息查询、事实核查和深度研究的首要来源。由于维基百科完全依赖志愿编辑者的贡献，其成功可能尤其受到有毒言论的影响。本文分析了维基百科六个最活跃语言版本中850万编辑者的用户讨论页上的5700万条评论，以研究有毒言论对编辑者行为的潜在影响。研究发现，有毒评论始终会降低编辑者的活跃度，在短期内估计导致每位用户减少0.5-2个活跃日。考虑到维基百科活跃贡献者的数量，这相当于多年的人力生产力损失。从长期来看，有毒评论的影响更为严重，因为它们显著增加了编辑者完全退出项目的风险。通过基于智能体的模型，我们论证了针对维基百科的有毒攻击可能阻碍整个项目的进展。我们的研究结果强调了在维基百科等协作平台上减少有毒言论对于确保其持续成功的重要性。