5 ms·

One Easy Way to Make Wikipedia Better

33 points by tokenadult 11y ago

DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
Question: is a source "accessible" if it's on Library Genesis? Should it be considered so or not?
- eumoria 11y ago
  easily to all? nope.
sparkzilla 11y ago
A verifiability meter is a reasonable suggestion, but it won't stop make much of a difference to Wikipedia's deeper problems, most of which come down to the use of the wiki as a content creation tool in the first place. For those interested, I've written an outline of Wikipedia's software problems [1]. None of these problems are going to be fixed any time soon -- the leadership simply isn't there. [1]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/
- noir_lord 11y ago
  It would be a fun project to take the wikidumps, extract the data and put it into something more like what you are talking about in that blog post, be a fairly massive task to do completely though.
- yetanotheracc 11y ago
  Policy wise, this comment is a blatant violation of [[WP:COI]] and [[WP:SPAM]]. Substantially, I am so glad that Wikipedia is governed by the community. Otherwise, it would be a matter of time until some young, bright and dynamic manager decided to implement a subset of the "improvements" you propose - with a disastrous effect.
  - sparkzilla 11y ago
    I'm not saying Wikipedia should make those improvements; I am saying there are better models for content production. Wikipedia can't make those improvements anyway, as its community is extremely conservative, and despite the power it has, it cannot make any changes to the software. The best you can hope for is window dressing.
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    Newslines is the guy's startup, aspiring to compete with Wikipedia.
    - sparkzilla 11y ago
      Actually we are much bigger than just competing with Wikipedia. We combine aspects of Wikipedia, daily news, Youtube, LinkedIn and (coming soon) Facebook.
      - chris_wot 11y ago
        Sounds like a lot of competing interests. Best of luck to you, but I think you'll find this hard to accomplish well.
        sparkzilla 11y ago
        Thanks!
- tmptmp 11y ago
  From the site you linked >>There are the obvious display problems: Wikipedia pages look like a dull grey textbook. Almost every page is an over-long stream of text with hardly any video or even images. Pages about movies don’t even have trailers. This has big implications for kids brought up using visual media like Instagram and YouTube who are not interested in getting information about their favorite movies, musicians and celebrities from a textbook. Wikipedia's aim may not be to become popular by just being an eye-candy. One of their features, what you call there as "dull grey textbook" is what I like very much. It allows the reader to read the thing comfortably and it also helps the pages load faster. >>As the quote goes: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. May be for some people this is true. But many people serious about studying a topic actually may find written material quite important and helpful. Wikipedia is about providing knowledge about topics, so if music is a topic it can provide knowledge about it and knowledge about something is not only that thing. There are many meta properties (outcomes of analysis, comparisons etc) that can be described meaningfully and concisely only in writing and are important. >>Over the past few months Newslines writers have added over 22,000 posts without a single edit war or controversy. If you stick to only some news (e.g. celebrity news) you won't get much controversy. But wikipedia is not for just news topics. It has provided space for many oppressed groups to post their views which are sure to generate controversy. (e.g. see these pages [1],[2],[3]) Your comparison of that site [4] with Wikipedia is therefore not has much foundation. I don't say that there is no need to improve Wikipedia but it requires better and deeper understanding and appreciation of Wikipedia, its readership and its goals. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Marxism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Marxism [4] http://newslines.org/ http://newslines.org/
  - sparkzilla 11y ago
    >Wikipedia's aim may not be to become popular by just being an eye-candy. One of their features, what you call there as "dull grey textbook" is what I like very much. It allows the reader to read the thing comfortably and it also helps the pages load faster. The format may suit you, but text, especially text in the long-form articles that are standard for Wikipedia is a poor format for the news-based articles that are the most popular on Wikipedia. >If you stick to only some news (e.g. celebrity news) you won't get much controversy. But wikipedia is not for just news topics. It has provided space for many oppressed groups to post their views which are sure to generate controversy. Wikipedia is a very expensive (time and energy) way to get information out to the public. Sending a video to Twitter and Facebook are easier and more shareable. >I don't say that there is no need to improve Wikipedia but it requires better and deeper understanding and appreciation of Wikipedia, its readership and its goals. Even with this, good luck getting any meaningful change from the Wikimedia Foundation.
UniZero 11y ago
This would certainly have upfront advantages, like increasing the amount of information deemed "credible". However, there's a problem: how do you trust an actor controlling a system like that? i.e. - If I wanted the power to discredit almost anything online, I would propose such a system because it can only serve its purpose under the operation of a private entity. It wouldn't function properly on an open platform because that information would evidently be just as non-credible.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  I'd make sure the system allows full transparency on how the metric is formed - for instance it shows that vactruth.com has a low reliability weighting, but a high verifiability weighting; but that the Journal of Comparitive Neuroscience has a high reliability score but a low verifiability score (it costs about US$32,000 a year for a 24 issue subscription). I'd then let people tweak their own metrics and have the ability to share them with others.
takno 11y ago
Surely it would be trivial to get a nice reassuringly high reading on the meter by including lots of references which were irrelevant but easy to access. If you were careful to heavily reference uncontroversial statements they wouldn't even need to be inaccurate
- chris_wot 11y ago
  If the source for the citation is irrelevant, then that would have to be considered inaccurate. I don't think an automated metric could ever check the accuracy of a source, only its verifiability and reliability. Any system that relies on metrics can be gamed. Wikipedia has had to deal with an immense amount of gamesmanship over the years, and experienced editors can spot it normally very quickly by now.
davidgerard 11y ago
Wikimedia Research list writeup: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2016/February#Test_of_300k_citations:_how_verifiable_is_.22verifiable.22_in_practice.3F https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2016/Feb... Discussion on Wikipedia signpost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-03-02/Recent_research#Test_of_300k_citations:_how_verifiable_is_.22verifiable.22_in_practice.3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signp... tl;dr it's not an intrinsically terrible idea, but you'll be unsurprised to know there is not in fact one weird trick.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
kingmanaz 11y ago
Ban hasbara editors.
vilhelm_s 11y ago
> “The point is, basically, that Wikiepdia is not bad,” Evans added, “But it needs to meet its own standard for verifiability.” But published books and journal articles do meet the Wikipedia verifiability criterion, even if they are not accessible online at no cost. To make those books get a low "verifiability score" seems like a bad idea to me. For quite a a few topics, it is still the case that the information you can find by just googling a topic is a lot worse than what is published on paper. (I know this from trying to track down online sources for various things I read about on Wikipedia...)
- chris_wot 11y ago
  There's a difference between verifiability and reliability. A bad actor could claim a reliable source that is hard to access says something it does not. That doesn't make the source any less reliable, only it does make it hard to verify that what is written is indeed what the source actually says.
  - vilhelm_s 11y ago
    Sure, I'm just saying that this is considered in the existing wikipedia standards. For a claim to be "verifiable" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability) it must be supported by a citation to a source which is "reliable", which includes being "accessible" enough that someone can check it. But print and paywalled sources are still considered to meet the accessibility criterion. ("Do not reject sources just because they are hard or costly to access. If you have trouble accessing a source, others may be able to do so on your behalf.", "The costs or difficulties of verifying a source do not impact its reliability, so long as it is possible for someone to verify it within a reasonable time.")
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      Maybe that needs clarifying then. A source that comes up with information that can't be verified isn't terribly reliable, and thus not really verifiable. Every single anti-vaccination site does this. Here's an example: http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2012/02/18/the-deadly-impossibility-of-herd-immunity-through-vaccination-by-dr-russell-blaylock/ http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2012/02/18/the-deadly-impo... "The Deadly Impossibility of Herd Immunity". There are claims in there such as "as the literature shows" with no reference to the literature itself. It makes a lot of claims and refers to some sort of group that it doesn't even identify to characterise claims by vaccination specialists, and gets a lot of facts wrong about herd immunity. Thus, as a source it is unreliable in that it doesn't clearly state its own sources, so I'd have to call it unverifiable.
chris_wot 11y ago
I have a few thoughts on this: 1. When I created [citation needed] I never cared that people would source unreliable information. At that point I wanted to see the sources that were being used, and if they were unreliable then say so and under NPOV either make the fact or view less prominent, or remove it entirely. After all, when balancing neutrality with accuracy you shouldn't need to give equal weight to every crackpot theory. However, access to material was a different issue. I tried a brief experiment called "bookcasing" where everyone could list the sources they physically owned, with the idea that if you needed to have material verified you could reach out to those people and have them check the material for you. Sort of like a crowd sourced fact checker. It looks to me like Sci-Hub might now be the best way for Wikipedia to verify sources. There are many editors who don't have access to university where these things are freely available. The fact that information is not freely available to verify for Wikipedia highlights the fact that corporate interests slow down research and actively cause false and misleading information to be propagated! 2. The article asserts that it would be too expensive to make journals free. That's not exactly correct - a good portion of scientific work and research is government funded. As has been pointed out time and again, the journals don't pay for the research, they only pay to vet and publish the research. They are making profits of 30% and leveraging the research dollars paid by the general public. In fact, I think that if they want to publish work, then I'd like to see them be forced to pay for 25% of the costs of the research. I'm pretty certain at this point you would see them squeal that it's too expensive - at which point we can point out that they aren't the ones who do the bulk of the work that allows them to publish in the first place! 3. There is nothing stopping third parties from creating a plugin themselves that verifies the transparency and availability of sources. I can see a number of metrics I'd be interested in. * a score that works out a weighting for reliability of journals. So in other words, it would penalise the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine for not making clear how they judge the manuscripts they publish * another might utilise an impact score * others might look at the weight that an article gives to a particular viewpoint to give insights into its neutrality. It would be nice to be able to do this in Wikimedia and to be able to data analysis with the working clearly shown on how the metrics are derived. It's workable, and I think it would be insightful!
- douche 11y ago
brightball 11y ago
Or to actively display sources that are edited out multiple times.

33 points by tokenadult 11y ago

DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago

Question: is a source "accessible" if it's on Library Genesis? Should it be considered so or not?

eumoria 11y ago
easily to all? nope.

sparkzilla 11y ago

A verifiability meter is a reasonable suggestion, but it won't stop make much of a difference to Wikipedia's deeper problems, most of which come down to the use of the wiki as a content creation tool in the first place. For those interested, I've written an outline of Wikipedia's software problems [1]. None of these problems are going to be fixed any time soon -- the leadership simply isn't there. [1]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/

noir_lord 11y ago
It would be a fun project to take the wikidumps, extract the data and put it into something more like what you are talking about in that blog post, be a fairly massive task to do completely though.
yetanotheracc 11y ago
Policy wise, this comment is a blatant violation of [[WP:COI]] and [[WP:SPAM]]. Substantially, I am so glad that Wikipedia is governed by the community. Otherwise, it would be a matter of time until some young, bright and dynamic manager decided to implement a subset of the "improvements" you propose - with a disastrous effect.
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  I'm not saying Wikipedia should make those improvements; I am saying there are better models for content production. Wikipedia can't make those improvements anyway, as its community is extremely conservative, and despite the power it has, it cannot make any changes to the software. The best you can hope for is window dressing.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  Newslines is the guy's startup, aspiring to compete with Wikipedia.
  - sparkzilla 11y ago
    Actually we are much bigger than just competing with Wikipedia. We combine aspects of Wikipedia, daily news, Youtube, LinkedIn and (coming soon) Facebook.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      Sounds like a lot of competing interests. Best of luck to you, but I think you'll find this hard to accomplish well.
      - sparkzilla 11y ago
        Thanks!
tmptmp 11y ago
From the site you linked >>There are the obvious display problems: Wikipedia pages look like a dull grey textbook. Almost every page is an over-long stream of text with hardly any video or even images. Pages about movies don’t even have trailers. This has big implications for kids brought up using visual media like Instagram and YouTube who are not interested in getting information about their favorite movies, musicians and celebrities from a textbook. Wikipedia's aim may not be to become popular by just being an eye-candy. One of their features, what you call there as "dull grey textbook" is what I like very much. It allows the reader to read the thing comfortably and it also helps the pages load faster. >>As the quote goes: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. May be for some people this is true. But many people serious about studying a topic actually may find written material quite important and helpful. Wikipedia is about providing knowledge about topics, so if music is a topic it can provide knowledge about it and knowledge about something is not only that thing. There are many meta properties (outcomes of analysis, comparisons etc) that can be described meaningfully and concisely only in writing and are important. >>Over the past few months Newslines writers have added over 22,000 posts without a single edit war or controversy. If you stick to only some news (e.g. celebrity news) you won't get much controversy. But wikipedia is not for just news topics. It has provided space for many oppressed groups to post their views which are sure to generate controversy. (e.g. see these pages [1],[2],[3]) Your comparison of that site [4] with Wikipedia is therefore not has much foundation. I don't say that there is no need to improve Wikipedia but it requires better and deeper understanding and appreciation of Wikipedia, its readership and its goals. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Marxism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Marxism [4] http://newslines.org/ http://newslines.org/
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  >Wikipedia's aim may not be to become popular by just being an eye-candy. One of their features, what you call there as "dull grey textbook" is what I like very much. It allows the reader to read the thing comfortably and it also helps the pages load faster. The format may suit you, but text, especially text in the long-form articles that are standard for Wikipedia is a poor format for the news-based articles that are the most popular on Wikipedia. >If you stick to only some news (e.g. celebrity news) you won't get much controversy. But wikipedia is not for just news topics. It has provided space for many oppressed groups to post their views which are sure to generate controversy. Wikipedia is a very expensive (time and energy) way to get information out to the public. Sending a video to Twitter and Facebook are easier and more shareable. >I don't say that there is no need to improve Wikipedia but it requires better and deeper understanding and appreciation of Wikipedia, its readership and its goals. Even with this, good luck getting any meaningful change from the Wikimedia Foundation.

UniZero 11y ago

This would certainly have upfront advantages, like increasing the amount of information deemed "credible". However, there's a problem: how do you trust an actor controlling a system like that? i.e. - If I wanted the power to discredit almost anything online, I would propose such a system because it can only serve its purpose under the operation of a private entity. It wouldn't function properly on an open platform because that information would evidently be just as non-credible.

chris_wot 11y ago
I'd make sure the system allows full transparency on how the metric is formed - for instance it shows that vactruth.com has a low reliability weighting, but a high verifiability weighting; but that the Journal of Comparitive Neuroscience has a high reliability score but a low verifiability score (it costs about US$32,000 a year for a 24 issue subscription). I'd then let people tweak their own metrics and have the ability to share them with others.

takno 11y ago

Surely it would be trivial to get a nice reassuringly high reading on the meter by including lots of references which were irrelevant but easy to access. If you were careful to heavily reference uncontroversial statements they wouldn't even need to be inaccurate

chris_wot 11y ago
If the source for the citation is irrelevant, then that would have to be considered inaccurate. I don't think an automated metric could ever check the accuracy of a source, only its verifiability and reliability. Any system that relies on metrics can be gamed. Wikipedia has had to deal with an immense amount of gamesmanship over the years, and experienced editors can spot it normally very quickly by now.

davidgerard 11y ago

Wikimedia Research list writeup: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2016/February#Test_of_300k_citations:_how_verifiable_is_.22verifiable.22_in_practice.3F https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2016/Feb... Discussion on Wikipedia signpost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-03-02/Recent_research#Test_of_300k_citations:_how_verifiable_is_.22verifiable.22_in_practice.3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signp... tl;dr it's not an intrinsically terrible idea, but you'll be unsurprised to know there is not in fact one weird trick.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

kingmanaz 11y ago

Ban hasbara editors.

vilhelm_s 11y ago

> “The point is, basically, that Wikiepdia is not bad,” Evans added, “But it needs to meet its own standard for verifiability.” But published books and journal articles do meet the Wikipedia verifiability criterion, even if they are not accessible online at no cost. To make those books get a low "verifiability score" seems like a bad idea to me. For quite a a few topics, it is still the case that the information you can find by just googling a topic is a lot worse than what is published on paper. (I know this from trying to track down online sources for various things I read about on Wikipedia...)

chris_wot 11y ago
There's a difference between verifiability and reliability. A bad actor could claim a reliable source that is hard to access says something it does not. That doesn't make the source any less reliable, only it does make it hard to verify that what is written is indeed what the source actually says.
- vilhelm_s 11y ago
  Sure, I'm just saying that this is considered in the existing wikipedia standards. For a claim to be "verifiable" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability) it must be supported by a citation to a source which is "reliable", which includes being "accessible" enough that someone can check it. But print and paywalled sources are still considered to meet the accessibility criterion. ("Do not reject sources just because they are hard or costly to access. If you have trouble accessing a source, others may be able to do so on your behalf.", "The costs or difficulties of verifying a source do not impact its reliability, so long as it is possible for someone to verify it within a reasonable time.")
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Maybe that needs clarifying then. A source that comes up with information that can't be verified isn't terribly reliable, and thus not really verifiable. Every single anti-vaccination site does this. Here's an example: http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2012/02/18/the-deadly-impossibility-of-herd-immunity-through-vaccination-by-dr-russell-blaylock/ http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2012/02/18/the-deadly-impo... "The Deadly Impossibility of Herd Immunity". There are claims in there such as "as the literature shows" with no reference to the literature itself. It makes a lot of claims and refers to some sort of group that it doesn't even identify to characterise claims by vaccination specialists, and gets a lot of facts wrong about herd immunity. Thus, as a source it is unreliable in that it doesn't clearly state its own sources, so I'd have to call it unverifiable.

chris_wot 11y ago

I have a few thoughts on this: 1. When I created [citation needed] I never cared that people would source unreliable information. At that point I wanted to see the sources that were being used, and if they were unreliable then say so and under NPOV either make the fact or view less prominent, or remove it entirely. After all, when balancing neutrality with accuracy you shouldn't need to give equal weight to every crackpot theory. However, access to material was a different issue. I tried a brief experiment called "bookcasing" where everyone could list the sources they physically owned, with the idea that if you needed to have material verified you could reach out to those people and have them check the material for you. Sort of like a crowd sourced fact checker. It looks to me like Sci-Hub might now be the best way for Wikipedia to verify sources. There are many editors who don't have access to university where these things are freely available. The fact that information is not freely available to verify for Wikipedia highlights the fact that corporate interests slow down research and actively cause false and misleading information to be propagated! 2. The article asserts that it would be too expensive to make journals free. That's not exactly correct - a good portion of scientific work and research is government funded. As has been pointed out time and again, the journals don't pay for the research, they only pay to vet and publish the research. They are making profits of 30% and leveraging the research dollars paid by the general public. In fact, I think that if they want to publish work, then I'd like to see them be forced to pay for 25% of the costs of the research. I'm pretty certain at this point you would see them squeal that it's too expensive - at which point we can point out that they aren't the ones who do the bulk of the work that allows them to publish in the first place! 3. There is nothing stopping third parties from creating a plugin themselves that verifies the transparency and availability of sources. I can see a number of metrics I'd be interested in. * a score that works out a weighting for reliability of journals. So in other words, it would penalise the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine for not making clear how they judge the manuscripts they publish * another might utilise an impact score * others might look at the weight that an article gives to a particular viewpoint to give insights into its neutrality. It would be nice to be able to do this in Wikimedia and to be able to data analysis with the working clearly shown on how the metrics are derived. It's workable, and I think it would be insightful!

douche 11y ago

brightball 11y ago

Or to actively display sources that are edited out multiple times.