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Can open source wiki/user contributed style tools implement a type of captcha to protect against big corps' influence? I see major entities regularly fiddling w
by soheil 6y ago
Can open source wiki/user contributed style tools implement a type of captcha to protect against big corps' influence? I see major entities regularly fiddling with wikipedia articles to insert bias. Why not turn Google's Recaptcha back on itself?
- mtmail 6y agoThe article isn't about Wikipedia articles but about OpenStreetMap. Unlike articles it's much harder to add bias to data points, e.g. a street or position of a house, that can be verified.
- soheil 6y agoI thought this article was about control over OSM, not sure why it's so difficult to make parallels between this and wikipedia. Selectively adding accurate data points can very much bias a map, e.g. all you see is McDonalds and never a local restaurant
- zaik 6y agoIf McDonalds were to add all its restaurants to OSM what would be the downside? They are not removing other restaurants from the map. I fail to see how adding accurate data points would hurt OSM even if it is done "selectively".
- soheil 6y agoCherrypicking causes biases [0]. A highly non-random distribution of data points is the issue here. No one has to remove other restaurants, it's just that there could be 10x more effort put in to add detailed McDonald data points. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking#In_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking#In_science
- maxerickson 6y agoOSM has lots of other sources of bias, so it isn't really an additional problem. For instance, someone has enthusiastically mapped Coke County, Texas: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=7/32.083/-98.465 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=7/32.083/-98.465 I haven't looked into it, but chances are it is just a result of them living there, and it creates a huge bias in the data in Texas.
- matkoniecz 6y agoTypical failure mode is adding all their places, duplicating what was already mapped. Or low paid contractors damaging unrelated data while doing this. But adding accurate data is highly welcome!
- yborg 6y agoI don't see how that follows at all, it's very easy to make things disappear (a CEO's 3rd vacation home perhaps) and getting ground truth on a whole planet is a hard problem.