Tool Shows the Arguments Behind Wikipedia Entries

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."

It's a du...no wait, it's not

[MarkusQ]

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

"obtained access"?

[Trepidity]

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.

Possibly old news?

[Viridae]

Unless they have added a new feature, the wikidashboard is old news - as evinced by this Wikipedia signpost article from 2007: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-09-17/In_the_news [wikipedia.org]

true, but still a pretty small proportion

[Trepidity]

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, book, academic CV, or piece of software to promote.

Re:high degree of false positives

[JoshuaZ]

This is a known problem. It is one of the reasons I originally registered. One other way to handle it if one really doesn't want to register is to use the edit summary option to help make clear that there isn't any conflict. But there's really no good reason not to register. Registration provides a variety of different benefits: First, other users have an easy way to contact you if they want to discuss an edit you made. Second, your IP address is hidden providing a measure of privacy. Third registration makes it easier to edit from an IP address that has been blocked for vandalism. Fourth, registration allows you to eventually get certain tools such as rollback which are useful but generally restricted to uses with some minimal amount of experience. Fifth, you can more easily customize your preferences for how articles are displayed such as not including(good for dial-up connections), or changing date formats, or changing justification of articles, or much more). Note that this last benefit applies even if you have no intention to edit at all. Even if one doesn't use Wikipedia often registering an account has many benefits. It takes literally about a minute. There's no good reason not to register other than that editing can be addictive and having a registered account can make the addiction worse.