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Critical issues presentations/Wikipedia Addiction and its Comorbidities - what role does mental health play in a community that wants to create an encyclopedia?

From Wikimania 2016 • Esino Lario, Italy
Video
Slides
Submission no. 82
Title of the submission

Wikipedia Addiction and its Comorbidities - what role does mental health play in a community that wants to create an encyclopedia?

Author of the submission
Country of origin

Germany

Topics

other

Keywords
  • Communication
  • Communtiy Health
  • Wikipedia Addiction
Abstract

Communication within the Wikipedia communities is an often discussed topic. Inside and outside the projects there is a lot of critical voices and nobody doubts that there is room for improvement. One main problem seems to be, that sometimes people edit in mental states that are not really suited for contributing to an encyclopedia. The often heard advice "Take some time off. Do not react to everything, somebody with a different oppinion writes" is seldom heeded. Why ist that so?

Internet addiction is a known mental problem - usually it is associated with games like World of Warcraft, Internet sexrooms or Social Media. But possibly there is also a still unresearched variety of it: Wikipedia-addiction.

Modern Psychology and Psychiatry describe more and more mental problems as being often correlated with each other. People with Borderline often have an addtional Diagnosis of PTBS, Eating disorders often appear in combination with depression and so on. So how about the Wikipedia addiction? What kind of mental problems occur most often in combination with it?

The Presentation will give an overview of the prevalences of the most common mental problems and hyopthesize about the correlations with certain typical online behaviour in the wikimedia projects. It will also give a first idea, how looking at trolls and difficult editors this way could help create a healthier and more stable community with less communication problems.

Result

Accepted

Interested attendees and comments