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Tool Shows the Arguments Behind Wikipedia Entries
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Feb 08, 2009 01:01 AM
from the citation-will-one-day-be-needed dept.
from the citation-will-one-day-be-needed dept.
Al writes "A team of researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center have created a tool that shows how much argument has gone into crafting an entry. Ed Chi, a senior research scientist for augmented social cognition at PARC, obtained access to Wikipedia edit data and used it to build a tool that shows whether users have fought over the accuracy of a page by rapidly re-editing each other's changes. Experiments suggest that the method provides a better measure of 'controversy' than simply having Wikipedia editors add a warning to a suspect page. Their software, called Wikidashboard, serves up a Wikipedia entry, but adds an info-graphic revealing who has been editing it and how often it has been reedited. Of course, this doesn't reveal whether a Wikipedia entry is truly accurate, but it might at least highlight an underlying bias or vested interest."
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Submission: Tool Shows the Arguments Behind Wikipedia Entries by Anonymous Coward
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Other applications (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously popular topics will gather more view points and controversy. A person doing a report on tribal dances in Kenya is not likely to generate a lot of views nor a lot of disagreement.
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I like to argue with randoms about tribal dances in Kenya, you insensitive clod!
It's a du...no wait, it's not (Score:5, Informative)
For a minute I thought it was a dupe of this story [slashdot.org] but it's not (different team, different school, and slightly different goal).
It'd be interesting to compare the two...
--MarkusQ
Re:It's a du...no wait, it's not (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
high degree of false positives (Score:5, Interesting)
Articles that I edit on wikipedia get flagged as being arguments because I usually edit them from both my home and work computers. as a reult when I am in a mood to edit there is rapid fire changes from multiple IP addresses. I see warnings when I log in that it looks like I'm in a dispute and I may be banned if further revisions occur.
Re:high degree of false positives (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:high degree of false positives (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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How ironic is it that the recursion stops here.
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
Good point. Ironic that it comes from an AC!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not expansive enough (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a similar idea, but instead colour the text directly by how long (in terms of edit survival) a piece of text has been around (with a little filter to ignore spelling fixes).
The more recently added text can be made lighter, whereas "more reliable" text can be shaded darker.
Also, with more recently added text, if it replaced something that was there for a while, then add a little mark or something that when you mouse over it the old text is shown (or use the alt-text).
I just don't have the time to build it.
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(with a little filter to ignore spelling fixes).
That idea is very good!
That idea is very goad!
That idea is very toad!
That idea is very tad!
That idea is very bad!
Sorry for the typos, but I think I finally got it :)
The only real solution to the wiki-wars... (Score:5, Insightful)
One could, for instance, easily include or exclude comments and revisions based on attributes of the accounts that made them, produce "frozen" versions of pages believed to have gotten to a stable point, treat different pages differently based on input from a tool like the one in TFA, and so on. This is, obviously, more difficult than just using the default; but it seems a shame to treat wikipedia as just a strategy to get a static encyclopedia, when you could take advantage of all the other data that it preserves.
Re:The only real solution to the wiki-wars... (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, where there is debate, I'd rather see a concise presentation of both sides rather than trawl through a lengthy edit trail or a bunch of metadata. Gathering gobs of information is relatively easy, what's valuable is condensing it into a usable form.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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But if these people are wrong about a source and either falsely omit or falsely include one or more, you are just as screwed. If not even more.
I think on the whole you are no better off using wikipedia, unless you really trust the editors to know their stuff and not to be biased. And the way I know human nature, that's likely not the case for many of them (how many - I don't know).
To me wikipedia is a quick means to gather some info on a subject. If it's a slightly controversial subject I won't rely on it a
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I gather most of the fighting is over a relatively small number of entries that everybody knows to be controversial.
The deletionist / inclusionist argument affects huge swaths of content, most of it completely uncontroversial other than its noteworthiness.
true, but still a pretty small proportion (Score:3, Informative)
The deletionist/inclusionist argument is almost exclusively waged over really, really recent stuff, and most of that related to pop culture. If you're writing about 19th-century history, you have to really try to encounter a deletionist.
It's basically an ongoing process of trying to find a good balance between erroneously/unnecessarily excluding recent and pop-culture stuff that is actually useful in an encyclopedia, and allowing Wikipedia to be used as an advertising platform by everyone with a company, bo
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I agree that's roughly where the line *should* be drawn, but there are deletionists who would remove large amounts of stuff under this line, and inclusionists who would greatly grow the article set.
I've personally had several well-researched, referenced articles that I regularly used for information removed due to people not finding enough hits on the subject on Google or similar sketchy criteria. I doubt my experience is unique.
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I've personally had several well-researched, referenced articles that I regularly used for information removed due to people not finding enough hits on the subject on Google or similar sketchy criteria.
What? Give evidence for your assertion.
In any case, whatever the proportion is it doesn't imply that any article [not] found is controversial in the sense that the viewpoint is contested, just whether the information should be included is controversial.
Given the number of marketing parasites trying to use w
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Actually, I shouldn't have used my past history as an example; I didn't mean to make this a criticism of current practice.
My point was that the debate - including the farthest reaches of both the inclusionist and exclusionist side of things - includes a large range of articles, more than the number that are actually deleted. It'd be interesting to data mine how many are discussed for deletion to quantify that.
yeah, I agree with that (Score:2)
I've had a few articles deletion-nominated that ended up being kept, which I'd consider not particularly close to being worthy of deletion (and they were even cited!), so the gray area does extend a bit.
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It'd be interesting to data mine how many are discussed for deletion to quantify that.
Yes, that would be an interesting statistic. It'd also be worth trying to mine the various reasons why an article should be included/excluded to find out what criteria people are actually using, as distinct from the formal criteria.
---
A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. - Jerome Lawrence
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>>How much of a problem are the "wiki wars," really?
Basically, on any article where people of differing political persuasions would write it differently, there's probably a wiki war going on. I remember editing the NPR article once, and getting dragged into a revision war where people were adding and removing a reference to Fox News being biased. Supporters of the inclusion said it said NPR looked nonbiased by comparison, opposition said the article was not about Fox News and didn't belong. Ended up g
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Actually, the final straw was when I added ISBN numbers to J. Edgar Hoover's wikipedia page -- I noticed they were missing, so I looked them up and put them in. How controversial is that? It got reverted by a wikipedia admin (JayJG) with an ideological axe to grind. Twice.
On the surface, it seems like a silly revert, but what was the context here? Was it an article about the current stimulus package where Democrats accused some Republicans of Hooverism? If so, ISBN numbers may have looked like a different statement: "Hey! Read these books to find out just how much of a bonehead Hoover was!!!!!!!!"
I suppose the larger point is one can find bias in nearly everything. It's just like listening to songs in reverse. Go slowly enough and you're sure to find a naughty word.
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On the other hand, I use wikipedia to get information all the time and it hardly ever seems to be an actual problem.
Of course. The page itself always looks consistent. But if you check back in 5 minutes, you might be surprised.
I just tried the tool.. (Score:3, Interesting)
And it seems "AntiVandalBot" is the most controversial user. Oh wait...
Seriously, in years of casually editing Wikipedia on and off, I've never seen an edit war, but have helped revert vandalism often (in fact, just a moment ago on one of the pages I tested this tool with). Many edits happen on those pages daily.
I've long thought the most useful page isn't the most recent, but the most durable...
Great summary! (Score:2, Insightful)
Very nice job on the summary! It explained exactly what the topic was about and summarised the key findings and where to go for more information. :)
No actual need to visit the article
As to the tool, the display looks too complex to provide a simple guide as to edit wars/controversy. Presumably more read bars is bad, or is it? That's really just a slightly graphical form of the edit history itself, when whats needed is a simpler, thermometer style presentation.
Tool fails to detect "manufactured controversy" (Score:4, Insightful)
Lobbying groups for powerful business interests who know they are doing something ethically parasitic to society have a stanard MO of "manufacturing controversy" through thinly disguised think tanks or publications pushing an agenda.
Example: Smoking doesn't actually cause cancer.
Tracking the number of edits only shows whether an interest group is actively trying to revise reality. It does not say which side it is or whether the "controversy" is genuine.
In other words, it's no more dependable than the signs they slap across half of wikipedia because powerful groups of outright looneys shry about it.
"obtained access"? (Score:5, Informative)
Lest anyone thing you need to be a well-connected researcher to "obtain access to Wikipedia edit data", it's actually all public [wikimedia.org]. Although you will need 100GB+ of hard drive space, and some well thought out algorithms, to parse the full-history dumps that contain every revision of every page.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Frankly the summary presents the research far more pretentiously than I hope PARC would prefer. It's a little like saying
"In order to go to the corner shop for a bottle of milk, we negotiated release of planned security mechanisms on the warm/cool air boundary designed to limit unauthorised perambulation, thus obtaining access to the pedestrian displacement area."
That said, the researchers according to TFA apparently did 'spend much of 2008 getting access to live data' - so apparently they are using somethi
Possibly old news? (Score:3, Informative)
I wrote a GM script to do something similar once (Score:2)
I wrote a hackish Greasemonkey script [wordpress.com] to do something similar last year that just did it on the fly. Also tried to get a simple measure of how much was spam just by searching for simple keywords in the edit records.
I'd like to revisit the idea some time, because I'm sure you can also capture more details about the nature of editing (ie, how often are different parts edited, what keywords get added and removed most frequently, how many people are involved or is it just a revert war between two stubborn edito
Needs more granularity (Score:2)
Instead of just showing such stats for the article in total, this tool would become much more powerful by showing statistics for single sections or paragraphs. How hotly was a particular phrase contested?
Especially if it can also show when a particular sentence was introduced, or what was deleted from the article over time.
I spend a lot of my time on Wikipedia restoring lost text, when vandalism was incompletely fixed and then forgotten about. Occasionally I've found entire paragraphs that were deleted more
wikidashboard (Score:2)
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As long as the edits aren't being made by a government or corporate entity and/or their minions, it should be valid.
Oh, so if the edits are made by the dupes who drink their kool-aid whole it's fine?
The problem with these entities is they have tremendous power and access to mass media, which is under their umbrella conglomerates, and will therefore never provide real fact checks or challenges to the BS they spew.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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You are right that vested interests are being carefully defended. So much so that very little of what is commonly accepted as truth actually is so. This includes your belief in the truth of global warming. The essence of it is simply this: the sun is a rather more dynamic system in terms of energy output than it is being given credit for. Hence periods of global warming and cooling happen. The greenhouse effect has a relatively minor impact.
Of course, some research on your part is required to verify the tru
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We saw the same sort of argument for years about cigarettes and cancer. Anecdotal evidence strongly supported the idea that cigarettes caused cancer, but tobacco companies did lie, extensively, about the evidence, and funded both outrageous and subtle campaigns to confuse the facts. Unfortunately, global warming attracts even greater levels of political and fiscal interest because of its effects on farming, fuel use, and population growth.
One, at least, of you examples is correct. Diamonds are hardly as val
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Yes, water. If you grant, for the moment, that energy is not really scarce, then it is easy to see that water need not be either. Given energy, you can easily create clean water using reverse osmosis anywhere near the sea or where there is brackish ground water. This is actual practice today: Saudi Arabia, the land where energy is cheap, is doing lots of agriculture out in the desert.
And where there is no sea within pipeline range
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I'm looking at http://www.coastal.ca.gov/desalrpt/dchap1.html [ca.gov], which seems a very reasonable report on desalination efforts. It shows the energy cost, for the best plants, as a minimum of 3500 kWh/Af, or 3500 kilowatt-hour/Acre-foot, or 1.26 * 10^12 Joules/1.232590 * 10^9 cc, or roughly 1000 Joules/cc of water. That's pretty expensive. Saudi Arabia's desalination is quite limited, and yes, they're in a place with plenty of energy (irreplaceably used for this process) and where water is expensive. The mainte
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You are missing the point. Yes, energy currently is cheap only in a few places such as Saudi Arabia. But energy should and could be cheap, almost free even, everywhere. The reason that is not is because of artificially induced scarcity.
A bold claim, I know, so let me substantiate it. Oil is the most glaringly obvious example of how energy is being kept scarce. Here is some fun reading you can do: what oil really is [gasresources.net], oodles of oil in Prudhoe Bay [sweetliberty.org], ditto for the Bakken Formation [snopes.com], Cuba [globalresearch.ca], and in several other pla
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Again, there is a booby trap in your claims.
> Well, there are at least a dozen implemented and reproduced means to produce energy that go beyond currently accepted physical science
Name one that is "implemented and reproduced" that is "beyond currently accepted physical science". I'm sorry, but I can't be held responsible to do all the research to discredit such broad and ill-founded claims as you are making.
One can even take another example in your post above. While oil supplies are _certainly_ manipulat
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The most well-known and well-corroborated example goes by the name of "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions" (formerly known as "Cold Fusion"). In spite of all the efforts to repress and ridicule it, the diligent and mostly unfunded efforts of thousands of scientists in hundreds of labs have, over the past twenty years, established the reality of it beyond a shadow of a doubt. The following site provides and overview:
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Nope. Cold fusion has come a long way in twenty years. The initial interpretation has fallen by the wayside, and many experimental configurations showing more pronounced effects and energy output have been developed. For a fun one that you can easily reproduce yourself, see this page: http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/index.htm [online.fr]
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It's a "belief" shared by a large majority of reputable scientists with credentials to comment intelligently on the matter.
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Ah, the "defer to authority argument". In a world of lies, that is not going to get you very far when it comes to learning the truth. The fact of the matter is that anthropogenic global warming has been refuted by atmospheric, oceanic, and solar observations. Nature does not care about what people believe or want us to believe.
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Yes, I have read Atlas Shrugged. An elitist wet dream. I'd be cautious when it comes to her works and the objectivist philosophy they are propounding. Current events do hold similarities to the plot of Atlas Shrugged, but they are fundamentally quite different.