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."

Other applications

[arogier]

If this technology could be applied to counting and characterizing forum yelling, we could measure how little we really have to say in so many words on other internet venues as well.

high degree of false positives

[goombah99]

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.

Not expansive enough

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The only real solution to the wiki-wars...

[timeOday]

How much of a problem are the "wiki wars," really? On the one hand, I'm always hearing about these issues on slashdot and I can certainly see why they occur. On the other hand, I use wikipedia to get information all the time and it hardly ever seems to be an actual problem. I gather most of the fighting is over a relatively small number of entries that everybody knows to be controversial. You can hardly blame wikipedia for not having the final, undisputed truth about conflict in the middle east and other such things.

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.

Re:The only real solution to the wiki-wars...

[Demonantis]

If a wikipedia article is well done. There will be likes to the articles it cites as sources. This makes wikipedia just as reliable as the rest of the internet as a resource. Maybe even more reliable cause you only see articles other people think are accurate. A keyword search like Google doesn't really do that.

Re:Sometimes, you just have to dig

[Eukariote]

You mean extremely low yield results that rely on extremely expensive and very tricky to set up setups of palladium and deuterium?

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]

I just tried the tool..

[RJFerret]

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...