![]() | This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
The "Stressbusters" was founded by User:Exir Kamalabadi to investigate the cause of wikistress (formerly an Esperanza project at WP:ESP/STRESS). Now an inactive group; but with interesting discussions below relevant to stress assessment and future evaluation of or dealing with same.
Add your name to the list - with so much enthusiasm for it (as shown above), it's hard to keep track of who's involved! HappyCamper's cursory glance...it looks like these are participants:
Searching for WikiStress was a bit more difficult than I thought. I haven't looked into this very much, but one can use Google to search Wikipedia, and restrict the search to a particular site like this:
To search only in English Wikipedia, type in site:en.wikipedia.org <stuff you want to search for>.
Now, I've tried various things like "wikistress", "I'm upset", "I'm sad", plus "October 2005", but these searches are not as refined as I thought they would be. This is most likely because the search is not based on contextual semantics. Anyway, it's a start.
Plus, I didn't even know there was a WikiStress 5! It seems that the people who have this are not actually stressed out, but rather like the picture instead. Or at least, this is my very preliminary interpretation of their current usage. -- HappyCamper 00:31, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
When someone has a high wikistress, all we do is to suddenly rush to their talk pages and posting words of comfort. I don't oppose that. But that shouldn't be the only thing that we do. We should also investigate the cause of wikistress. So I decided to start a project for investigating the cause of wikistress. Anyone intrested in participating?-- Exir Kamalabadi Esperanza 01:26, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
Please...can I be counted in too? (With a small voice) Ban e s 12:17, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
I think this is a great idea. Paul August ☎ 16:43, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
I'm in - as long as I can be "Detective Inspector FireFox" :P Fir e Fo x 17:04, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
Count me in. I'm confused however by the two lists of members above. Why two? -- Cel e stianpower hablamé 20:09, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
Why am I getting stressed out by an Esperanza member? His talk page indicate he is very stress and he harrasses me even while we are under mediation cabal. I read that E members have to be civil, but this user is being very uncivil and harrassing me and even has a link on his user pages to monitor my history. User:Stollery who claims membership of Esperanza has proven himself to be uncivil on several occasion to me and other users. Here is the most recent instance: [1] Here are some past uncivil behavior: Judgmental tone in edit summaries: "...ridiculous assumption" [2] Stollery vandalizes [3] my talk page after I already warned him to use the mediation page for contacting me. I warned him not to vandalize my page and reminded him to use the mediation page and he left another uncivil comment [4] His most recent message at my talk page included general incivility which I have archived: User talk:Nikitchenko/Stollery. -- Nikitchenko 19:18, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
By the way, for those using the coffee image, I've created a template to make it easy: {{ Cafe Esperanza}} -- Essjay · Talk 21:17, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
I'm using terminology in a new context here. For Esperanza's purposes, let's say an "internal stress" is anything which causes a user to appear stressed out due to something happening on Wikipedia. That is to say, the stress is directly caused by something on Wikipedia.
An "external stress" is say, someone coming home from school or work, having a really bad day, and taking it out on Wikipedia/Wikipedians.
I don't know...just an idea...Personally, I think we can do this just by analysing edit counts without looking at the contributions themselves. People who wish to leave tend to decrease their edits in a particular manner. Although this method will not be foolproof. -- HappyCamper 03:37, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
Let's brainstorm here. -- HappyCamper 16:18, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
This needs to be a bit more specific to Wikipedia I think. This list is too general - I mean, if any of these happened to me in real life, I'd feel pretty crummy too. Need more refinements! -- HappyCamper 17:05, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
Heck I felt stressed after I lost my RFA. General Eisenhower 21:39, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
PS. I have a question though... What is being Wikistalked?
This is a small cause of wikistress in comparison to everything listed above, so I don't know if it belongs here, but an overloaded watchlist is easily overwhelming. -- Nataly a 16:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
I've noticed that one or two rude people can really add a lot of stress to someone, if they're persistent. And one or two kind people can take a lot of stress off. Maybe we should look for examples of rudeness, and leave kind notes for people who were on the receiving end? What do you think? Sarah crane 20:20, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
The very existence of wikistress tells us things about the nature of wikipedia itself and some of its users. First about its users, why do certain editors allow themselves to become stressed about something that they can just turn off and walk away from? Second, what kind of a hold does wikipedia hold over those certain editors? I know personally that in the past I have allowed myself to stress over things that weren't worth stressing over. However, before and after those times I have just shrugged it all away. Is it that we hold too much pride over our contributions? (I am a rambler but eventually I may tie all of this together. DOnt worry about my grammar in this particular instance.) The existence of stress may be a good thing! It tells us that people care about wikipedia -- even though they may care about their contributions moreover. Just as a marriage without arguments is abnormal a wikipedia without stress is abnormal. THis is all I have for now more to come Jaberwocky6669 | ☎ 05:54, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
Hmm...more analysis...I think the easiest one to address is "POINT".
Even though the page WP:POINT (P)exists, I don't think it should be used. It should be used for the sake of recognizing that there is such a thing. However, accusing someone of breaking this rule is in my mind, akin to politically accusing someone of having a "hidden agenda". If accused of P, in some sense you are cornerned, or even felt obligated to answer. If no answer is given, it is perceived that the recipient indeed was trying to violate P (which makes it even worse). This is very hard to dissolve away, and I think there are better alternatives than using this. Unfortunately, it is all based on context... -- HappyCamper 19:52, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
I haven't checked to see if this user is a member of Esperanza but nonetheless I found this essay: Falcon Kirtaran's Numerical Representation for WikiStress. Might be usefull for our fight of wikistress! Jaberwocky6669 | ☎ 21:41, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
At this time mine happens to be -1! Please don't be jealous you worry warts! =) Jaberwocky6669 | ☎ 17:01, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
The cause of wikistress is simply the time that things take. Nobody is stressed by a one second vandal fix. Its the POV pusher, the persistent vandal, the person who goes the extra mile to piss people off that causes wikistress.-- Urthogie 13:01, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
I started the stressbusters initiative, but soon I was inactive. Why? Because China banned Wikipedia. Well, now I found a way to waive it. Just thought I should make it clear. So, well... I'm back.-- Exir Kamalabadi 00:03, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
I think the true source of wikistress lies in the stress reciever, not the stress deliverer. Simply put, It is the person who feels stressed out that is the problem. If someone annoys you, why bother with him/her? Just delete every message that she/he sends. If he says something rude about you, don't say something back. Just ignore. -- Exir Kamalabadi<sup><font color = green> Esperanza</font></sup> 00:21, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
Regarding the "You have new messages," yeah that is great isn't it? Although lately I've been thinking it is something I did wrong that somebody is telling me. I kinda get nervous. It always turns out to be something ok. :) My edits. No body really cares about the Science portal. I was enthusiastic at first at being its sole maintainer (as well as a few other sections in other portals), but I feel like nobody cares about the portals at all, and my maintainment has gone down. I really do love the Reference desk now though. The science one most especially. :) I must check it a hundred times a day! I <3 Wikipedia. I would never stop. I can't stop, addicted to the shin dig... la la la... — Mac Davis] ( talk)
One thing that I have found very stressful is when someone is showing an incredibly amount of hypocricy when dealing with you. They start pointing out rules to you, drop terms like "Good Faith" when in reality they are completely ignoring the very things they are trying to rub your nose in. This generates an incredible amount of stress as you do not even have a path of recourse, the other party being in total denial they have done anything wrong.
Thus I believe nothing creates more stress than someone claiming a higher moral ground, throwing terms around and claiming you have broken rules and then believing themselves totally beyond all such transgressions themselves. Enigmatical 23:48, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Cool User:Zpb52 looks like he's in need of some Wikilove. :) He sounds stressed out from something that happened on Wikipedia, and he blanked his user page, replacing it with something like "Fuck it all, I'll make edits where I want, its just a fucking website." — Mac Davis] ( talk)
Although I haven't experienced one, it seems RfA's are one of the main reasons why probably tens of thousands of Wikipedians have been leaving. An example of this would be Funnybunny's reason of leaving. This guy looked like he was dissapointed; his RfA failed with a final 14 Supports, 25 oppositions, and 3 neutral - which forced him/her to withdraw before (s)he faces another few days of humiliation. Although I wasn't around during the time of Funnybunny, but his perspective of RfA's as being evil may seem to make new users think that RfA's are reviews from cold-hearted people who seem to watch every single move you make (Wikistalking). Although he made a withdrawal speech about how he would stick around, he hasn't edited anything since August 13th (his real last edit was on September 1st, but that was a dummy edit.) I'm not really sure if RfA is a good idea about appointing faithful users - I suggest abolishing RfAs and just let other administrators review an admin-canditdate's history, then let the bureaucrats appoint him/her. That way, we could avoid stress from humiliating processes and keep useful editors - I mean if an adminsitrator simply rejects you and leaves kind comments on your talk page about how to improve (instead of CRITICIZING), then the editor will keep trying and finally succeed! Whereas, if you get reviewed by several different people you haven't even met in your wikilife, it could get VERY stressful - especially when those people either don't know what they're saying, or they want to criticize instead of leaving a kind note on how to improve when they vote oppose S GF F( @) 23:10, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
(see Speedy deleletion patrol)
The purpose of Special:newpages is not to look for articles to Speedy Delete. However, that's just about why I often go there: as a newpage patroller. This task is useful. However, the whole deletion thing is slightly depressing because a conflict may become nascent at any moment and because it's a bit morbid being an executioner. In addition, I could spend 8 hours there and have my contribution page unchanged at the end. Finally, if a new page is funny (either intentionally or especially unintentionally) laughing about it may add to the guilty conscious that may be part of wikistress.
Special:recentchanges is usually not as associated with wikistress. A lot of people are obsessed with it, and usually reverting vandalism is helpful. This is usually only bad because of the following:
Another thing that results from both of the above is classifying users. This may add to wikistress, or may not. With RC patrol, I often have to stop myself from assuming bad faith about an IP address. With newpages, there is a strong tendency to classify users based upon "Having userpages" and "Not having userpages". Especially vanity pages like
This could lead to faster growth of wikistress, even if it does not contribute directly.
The above has occured to me in solely trace amounts. But there may be others who suffer from these potential symptoms. Gracenotes T § 21:41, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
![]() | This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
The "Stressbusters" was founded by User:Exir Kamalabadi to investigate the cause of wikistress (formerly an Esperanza project at WP:ESP/STRESS). Now an inactive group; but with interesting discussions below relevant to stress assessment and future evaluation of or dealing with same.
Add your name to the list - with so much enthusiasm for it (as shown above), it's hard to keep track of who's involved! HappyCamper's cursory glance...it looks like these are participants:
Searching for WikiStress was a bit more difficult than I thought. I haven't looked into this very much, but one can use Google to search Wikipedia, and restrict the search to a particular site like this:
To search only in English Wikipedia, type in site:en.wikipedia.org <stuff you want to search for>.
Now, I've tried various things like "wikistress", "I'm upset", "I'm sad", plus "October 2005", but these searches are not as refined as I thought they would be. This is most likely because the search is not based on contextual semantics. Anyway, it's a start.
Plus, I didn't even know there was a WikiStress 5! It seems that the people who have this are not actually stressed out, but rather like the picture instead. Or at least, this is my very preliminary interpretation of their current usage. -- HappyCamper 00:31, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
When someone has a high wikistress, all we do is to suddenly rush to their talk pages and posting words of comfort. I don't oppose that. But that shouldn't be the only thing that we do. We should also investigate the cause of wikistress. So I decided to start a project for investigating the cause of wikistress. Anyone intrested in participating?-- Exir Kamalabadi Esperanza 01:26, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
Please...can I be counted in too? (With a small voice) Ban e s 12:17, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
I think this is a great idea. Paul August ☎ 16:43, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
I'm in - as long as I can be "Detective Inspector FireFox" :P Fir e Fo x 17:04, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
Count me in. I'm confused however by the two lists of members above. Why two? -- Cel e stianpower hablamé 20:09, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
Why am I getting stressed out by an Esperanza member? His talk page indicate he is very stress and he harrasses me even while we are under mediation cabal. I read that E members have to be civil, but this user is being very uncivil and harrassing me and even has a link on his user pages to monitor my history. User:Stollery who claims membership of Esperanza has proven himself to be uncivil on several occasion to me and other users. Here is the most recent instance: [1] Here are some past uncivil behavior: Judgmental tone in edit summaries: "...ridiculous assumption" [2] Stollery vandalizes [3] my talk page after I already warned him to use the mediation page for contacting me. I warned him not to vandalize my page and reminded him to use the mediation page and he left another uncivil comment [4] His most recent message at my talk page included general incivility which I have archived: User talk:Nikitchenko/Stollery. -- Nikitchenko 19:18, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
By the way, for those using the coffee image, I've created a template to make it easy: {{ Cafe Esperanza}} -- Essjay · Talk 21:17, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
I'm using terminology in a new context here. For Esperanza's purposes, let's say an "internal stress" is anything which causes a user to appear stressed out due to something happening on Wikipedia. That is to say, the stress is directly caused by something on Wikipedia.
An "external stress" is say, someone coming home from school or work, having a really bad day, and taking it out on Wikipedia/Wikipedians.
I don't know...just an idea...Personally, I think we can do this just by analysing edit counts without looking at the contributions themselves. People who wish to leave tend to decrease their edits in a particular manner. Although this method will not be foolproof. -- HappyCamper 03:37, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
Let's brainstorm here. -- HappyCamper 16:18, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
This needs to be a bit more specific to Wikipedia I think. This list is too general - I mean, if any of these happened to me in real life, I'd feel pretty crummy too. Need more refinements! -- HappyCamper 17:05, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
Heck I felt stressed after I lost my RFA. General Eisenhower 21:39, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
PS. I have a question though... What is being Wikistalked?
This is a small cause of wikistress in comparison to everything listed above, so I don't know if it belongs here, but an overloaded watchlist is easily overwhelming. -- Nataly a 16:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
I've noticed that one or two rude people can really add a lot of stress to someone, if they're persistent. And one or two kind people can take a lot of stress off. Maybe we should look for examples of rudeness, and leave kind notes for people who were on the receiving end? What do you think? Sarah crane 20:20, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
The very existence of wikistress tells us things about the nature of wikipedia itself and some of its users. First about its users, why do certain editors allow themselves to become stressed about something that they can just turn off and walk away from? Second, what kind of a hold does wikipedia hold over those certain editors? I know personally that in the past I have allowed myself to stress over things that weren't worth stressing over. However, before and after those times I have just shrugged it all away. Is it that we hold too much pride over our contributions? (I am a rambler but eventually I may tie all of this together. DOnt worry about my grammar in this particular instance.) The existence of stress may be a good thing! It tells us that people care about wikipedia -- even though they may care about their contributions moreover. Just as a marriage without arguments is abnormal a wikipedia without stress is abnormal. THis is all I have for now more to come Jaberwocky6669 | ☎ 05:54, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
Hmm...more analysis...I think the easiest one to address is "POINT".
Even though the page WP:POINT (P)exists, I don't think it should be used. It should be used for the sake of recognizing that there is such a thing. However, accusing someone of breaking this rule is in my mind, akin to politically accusing someone of having a "hidden agenda". If accused of P, in some sense you are cornerned, or even felt obligated to answer. If no answer is given, it is perceived that the recipient indeed was trying to violate P (which makes it even worse). This is very hard to dissolve away, and I think there are better alternatives than using this. Unfortunately, it is all based on context... -- HappyCamper 19:52, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
I haven't checked to see if this user is a member of Esperanza but nonetheless I found this essay: Falcon Kirtaran's Numerical Representation for WikiStress. Might be usefull for our fight of wikistress! Jaberwocky6669 | ☎ 21:41, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
At this time mine happens to be -1! Please don't be jealous you worry warts! =) Jaberwocky6669 | ☎ 17:01, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
The cause of wikistress is simply the time that things take. Nobody is stressed by a one second vandal fix. Its the POV pusher, the persistent vandal, the person who goes the extra mile to piss people off that causes wikistress.-- Urthogie 13:01, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
I started the stressbusters initiative, but soon I was inactive. Why? Because China banned Wikipedia. Well, now I found a way to waive it. Just thought I should make it clear. So, well... I'm back.-- Exir Kamalabadi 00:03, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
I think the true source of wikistress lies in the stress reciever, not the stress deliverer. Simply put, It is the person who feels stressed out that is the problem. If someone annoys you, why bother with him/her? Just delete every message that she/he sends. If he says something rude about you, don't say something back. Just ignore. -- Exir Kamalabadi<sup><font color = green> Esperanza</font></sup> 00:21, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
Regarding the "You have new messages," yeah that is great isn't it? Although lately I've been thinking it is something I did wrong that somebody is telling me. I kinda get nervous. It always turns out to be something ok. :) My edits. No body really cares about the Science portal. I was enthusiastic at first at being its sole maintainer (as well as a few other sections in other portals), but I feel like nobody cares about the portals at all, and my maintainment has gone down. I really do love the Reference desk now though. The science one most especially. :) I must check it a hundred times a day! I <3 Wikipedia. I would never stop. I can't stop, addicted to the shin dig... la la la... — Mac Davis] ( talk)
One thing that I have found very stressful is when someone is showing an incredibly amount of hypocricy when dealing with you. They start pointing out rules to you, drop terms like "Good Faith" when in reality they are completely ignoring the very things they are trying to rub your nose in. This generates an incredible amount of stress as you do not even have a path of recourse, the other party being in total denial they have done anything wrong.
Thus I believe nothing creates more stress than someone claiming a higher moral ground, throwing terms around and claiming you have broken rules and then believing themselves totally beyond all such transgressions themselves. Enigmatical 23:48, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Cool User:Zpb52 looks like he's in need of some Wikilove. :) He sounds stressed out from something that happened on Wikipedia, and he blanked his user page, replacing it with something like "Fuck it all, I'll make edits where I want, its just a fucking website." — Mac Davis] ( talk)
Although I haven't experienced one, it seems RfA's are one of the main reasons why probably tens of thousands of Wikipedians have been leaving. An example of this would be Funnybunny's reason of leaving. This guy looked like he was dissapointed; his RfA failed with a final 14 Supports, 25 oppositions, and 3 neutral - which forced him/her to withdraw before (s)he faces another few days of humiliation. Although I wasn't around during the time of Funnybunny, but his perspective of RfA's as being evil may seem to make new users think that RfA's are reviews from cold-hearted people who seem to watch every single move you make (Wikistalking). Although he made a withdrawal speech about how he would stick around, he hasn't edited anything since August 13th (his real last edit was on September 1st, but that was a dummy edit.) I'm not really sure if RfA is a good idea about appointing faithful users - I suggest abolishing RfAs and just let other administrators review an admin-canditdate's history, then let the bureaucrats appoint him/her. That way, we could avoid stress from humiliating processes and keep useful editors - I mean if an adminsitrator simply rejects you and leaves kind comments on your talk page about how to improve (instead of CRITICIZING), then the editor will keep trying and finally succeed! Whereas, if you get reviewed by several different people you haven't even met in your wikilife, it could get VERY stressful - especially when those people either don't know what they're saying, or they want to criticize instead of leaving a kind note on how to improve when they vote oppose S GF F( @) 23:10, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
(see Speedy deleletion patrol)
The purpose of Special:newpages is not to look for articles to Speedy Delete. However, that's just about why I often go there: as a newpage patroller. This task is useful. However, the whole deletion thing is slightly depressing because a conflict may become nascent at any moment and because it's a bit morbid being an executioner. In addition, I could spend 8 hours there and have my contribution page unchanged at the end. Finally, if a new page is funny (either intentionally or especially unintentionally) laughing about it may add to the guilty conscious that may be part of wikistress.
Special:recentchanges is usually not as associated with wikistress. A lot of people are obsessed with it, and usually reverting vandalism is helpful. This is usually only bad because of the following:
Another thing that results from both of the above is classifying users. This may add to wikistress, or may not. With RC patrol, I often have to stop myself from assuming bad faith about an IP address. With newpages, there is a strong tendency to classify users based upon "Having userpages" and "Not having userpages". Especially vanity pages like
This could lead to faster growth of wikistress, even if it does not contribute directly.
The above has occured to me in solely trace amounts. But there may be others who suffer from these potential symptoms. Gracenotes T § 21:41, 3 November 2006 (UTC)