\csq@thequote@oinit\csq@thequote@oopenDid I Say Something Wrong?\csq@thequote@ocloseA Word-Level Analysis of Wikipedia Articles for Deletion Discussions
Table 1: The table shows how commonly a term appears in disruptive or constructive posts. A bold font indicates that the term appears more frequently in that class.
['[BOLD] term', '[BOLD] share of words from disruptive posts (‰)', '[BOLD] share of words from constructive posts (‰)']
All 3,467,402 posts have been considered for these values. Common swear words like “fucking”, “fuck” and “shit” are hardly used in disruptive posts. With only 6.39‰ of disruptive posts containing any of the three swear words, the few posts that do, contain the terms multiple times. However, when they are used, they are quite expressive. For example, the term “shit” is 9.43 times likelier to appear in a disruptive than in a constructive post. In sum, with these swear words alone, a small recall but a high precision could potentially be achieved. Hence, a collection of swear words would be unlikely to suffice for identifying many disruptive posts. The use of “I”- and “You”-messages can also be investigated without using a classifier. As initially stated, correctly detecting these messages is out of the scope of this thesis. Instead, terms indicative of “I”- and “You”-messages can be counted like “I”, “you” but also “myself”, “yourself” and others. However, they are a lot more frequently used: 36.60% of all disruptive and 26.89% of all constructive posts contain at least one of the terms “I” and “you”. Additionally considering the terms “me”, “my”, “your”, “myself” and “yourself” increases this to 40.13% and 29.37% respectively. 43.93% of all disruptive and 32.11% of all constructive posts contain at least two of the terms. Therefore, if these terms and especially “I” and “you” were strong indicators for constructiveness or disruptiveness, they would improve the recall noticeably.