Tool Shows the Arguments Behind Wikipedia Entries 115
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."
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.
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.
Re:The only real solution to the wiki-wars... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 alone, but if it's trivial stuff, I don't care.
Re:Other applications (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.
Re:"obtained access"? (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 something other than the open access downloads. It makes me wonder why they didn't just use the recent changes facility from each page, but undoubtedly they have their reasons.
TFA is worth a quick read, and suggests that this Wikidashboard business is an interesting example of the general genre of 'presenting some facet of edit data in a concise and accessible way', along with stuff like WikiScanner, recent change statistics and so on, but it doesn't seem that revolutionary, really.
Re:The only real solution to the wiki-wars... (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 getting dragged all the way up to the arbitration committee because neither side would compromise on it.
Stupid? Meaningless? Oh, yes. Very.
Seeing that happen on three or four articles I made edits to and added to my watchlist, I basically gave up on trying to contribute to Wikipedia. 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.
That was basically it for me. If ISBN numbers aren't politically correct, Wikipedia is nothing more than a ideological cesspool.
Re:The only real solution to the wiki-wars... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.