Slashdot Mirror
Visualizing the Wikipedia Power Struggle
todd450 pointed us to a nifty
visualization of Wikipedia
and controversial articles in it. The image started with a network of 650,000 articles color coded to indicate activity. The original image is apparently 5' square, but the sample image they have is still pretty neat.
This word is not the word you think it is.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
but the sample image they have is steal pretty neat.When did Speedy Gonzales get a job at OSTG?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I am not sure if this is where the article originates from (or vice versa), but here is another example of visualizing Wikipedia:
/ chromogram.html
http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/visual/projects
/windowslivewritervisualizingthepowerstruggleinwiService Temporarily Unavailable
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Have you been stealing their bandwidth?
We axe y we dont juzt speel foneticly!
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Perhaps we can visualize the power struggle between Wikipedia and the Slashdot stampede?
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So not only is the submitter shamelessly plugging his own site, but it:
A) Crashes before there are 9 comments and B) Doesn't know how to spell "still" Glad to see slashdot's standards are still so high, CmdrTaco. Thanks.
mmm...muffins
So here's a site discussing the Wikipedia edit war. Slashdot has tried to remain a neutral power in the war. A link is posted to the slashdot front page and the server is destroyed. Slashdot has been drawn into the war! A sword-day, a red day, ere the Sun server reboots!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
A new visualization Bruce Herr and I recently completed is being featured in this weeks New Scientist Magazine (thearticleis free online, minus the viz). They did a good job jazzing up the language used to describe the vizpower struggle, bubbling mass, blitzed articlesbut they also dumbed down the technical accomplishments. I guess not everyone gets as excited about algorithms as I do.Before I talk anymore about the viz, though, let me mention its appearing at the NetSci 2007 Conferencethis week, and hopefully a varient will appear at Wikimania later this summer as well. The viz is a huge 5 feet by 5 feet when printed, and I only include a low res, smaller version here. At some point high qualityart prints of it will appear at SciMapsfor sale to fund further visualization research.
Now for the good stuff. Much like my visualization of the netflix prize competition data, we began this piece byrepresenting the dataas a network. In this case the nodes in the network are wikipedia articles and theedges are thelinks between articles. We then (with some help from our friends at Sandia) used an algorithm to lay out all 650,000nodes (wikipedia articles) that had at least one link in such a way that similar articles are near one another. These are the yellow dots,which when viewed at low res give a yellow tint tothe whole picture.
The sizes of the nodes (circles, dots, whatever you want to call them), are based on a model of revision activity. So large circles indicate that an article might be controversial, or the subject of lots of vandalism, or just a topic whose content frequently changes. We labeled only the largest nodes, to keep it readable. Thereis an interactive version of this in the works based on the google maps platform which will change the labels and pictures used as the user zooms in or out. Stay tuned for that.
The image used for each tilewas selected automatically, simply by using the first imagein the most linked to article among all the articles inthat tile.We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the images that appeared.
Our hope for this visualization approach, which we continue to improve on,is that it could be updated in real time to give a macro sense of what is happeing in Wikipedia. I personally hope that some variation of it will end up in high schools as a teaching tool and for generating discussions.
is how many false charges of "sockpuppet" or "troll" are put in by the abusive administrators that run the place.
Whoops. Did I say something less then complimentary about the quantum fucking encyclopedia, where info may or may not be correct based on which second of the day it is, and where you can be assured that the moment someone tries to fix it, they'll be beat down by an army of socially inept retards who have nothing better to do than accumulate hundreds/thousands of edits per day in hopes that they, too, can become administrators and ban anyone they disagree with?
Only 12 comments posted and image is already unavailable... Slashdot just won that power struggle.
Last year, I did a similar indepth analysis of Wikipedia, generating a map describing the major components of the project with their interlinks:
http://www.hallert.net/images/mapofwikipedia.GIF
It probably looks something like this.
(IANAL)
In the style of Homestar Runner... 503'D!! I wonder how long it'll take for this to get tagged "slashdotted"
I too have given up in helping Wikipedia through creating new articles or editting obviously bad ones. It just doesn't matter. If not for the idiots in some areas its the political slant in others that is just mind boggling. Wiki died the day that intrest groups found it and realized they could sway public opinion by marginalizing a site which supposedly has accurate information.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The visualization technique was intersting, but I found it easier to understand just by reading a simple list of the most vandalized topics. Jesus, Hitler, Britney Spears, Bush, Global Warming, etc... most anything to do with religon or politics.
Topic: "Visualizing the Wikipedia power struggles"
Page, visualizing the power struggle: "Service Temporarily Unavailable
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R.I.P. Wikipedia lost the power struggle...
One thing I learned is there are two sides of Wikipedia. In the upper right hand corner of the main page you can see what are called the "master categories". The categories such as Mathematics and Science highlight what is best about Wikipedia. The categories such as History and Society highlight what is worst about Wikipedia. You do not really have big battles over articles like "Pythagorean theorem", and they usually do a good job of explaining what that is. On the other hand, if you look at the top of an article like "Palestine" you will see that it is semi-protected, meaning new users can not edit the article. You can also see eight pages of discussion which really doesn't get anywhere. The article is garbage. The Wikipedia cabal likes to say things like cooler heads eventually prevail on such articles, but that is just a lot of bullshit. The cabal itself can often be the problem - if you look at the article's originator, it is Ed Poor, who has not only an admin but a bureaucrat at Wikipedia. He is also a Moonie, with some very strange beliefs, not only religious, which I could care less about, but politically. It's typical Wikipedia that he would create the article, and more so that he has held such high level positions.
Actually I antagonize in using the Wikipedia cabal phrase as these people are so paranoid they have replied to messages like this on Slashdot in the past with stuff like "AHA! YOU SAID CABAL! YOU ARE ONE OF 'THEM'! AN ENEMY! ONLY ENEMIES OF WIKIPEDIA USE THAT PHRASE". Or maybe I could say Wikipediareview.com has some good criticisms of Wikipedia, since they're fanatical about that site to where you are not allowed to mention it on the "Criticism of Wikipedia" article.
I spent a bit of time on Wikipedia and used to care more about this due to that time spent etc. Nowadays I just contribute to other wikis I like which I feel are more balanced. I should note that Jimbo Wales ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years, has said "[F. A.] Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project.", and I can give dozens of more examples of where Wales's somewhat far out political biases lay. This political bias starts at the top and works its way down, as one can see with his appointment of people who did not make the cut electorally such as JayJG to Arbcom.
My advice to people is to patronize other wikis - the concept of a wiki encyclopedia is a great idea, but their political views are so far out, that it fragmenting is a certainty.
I got the page to load and all I saw was a badly formatted page with ads before the actual content while content doesn't really seem worth anything. It had lots of dots on pictures representing articles. I couldn't really tell how much an editing war was happening, not anymore then simply seeing a list of recent edits for those pages. Were the pages selected on the fly (I'd take a closer look at the fucking article except its as slow as pushing out a large turd)? If not, how is it anymore "neat" or informative then simply looking at those pages?
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/spoerr i/index.html
This one is less pretty with colours, but way more informative...
http://xkcd.com/c195.html -- Map of the Internets
http://www.xkcd.com/c256.html -- Map of online communities
Despite the power struggles, Slashdot and Wikipedia are steal pretty cool websites. You can still content from them and put it up on your own blog.
Sent from my iPhone
It's a good thing servers can't scream . . . that would be a frightening thing.
-You have been modded appropriately-
http://www.abeautifulwww.com.nyud.net:8080/2007/05 /20/visualizing-the-power-struggle-in-wikipedia/
Mirror including the famed image
"The truth shall make ye fret" -- The Truth, Terry Pratchett
unfunny, offtopic, uninformed
So, at least 3 Wikipedia admin-cultists got mod points today so far. How many more will it be?
Which of those two categories is Britney Spears in?
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
The Palestine article doesn't seem like garbage to me. It is probably too long, and seem like an example of why a "hide references" would be good.
The article about the Danisg Muhammad Cartppms was also surprisingly good while the event was current. Actually one of the best descriptions of the case you could fidn anywhere on the net at the time.
I agree that the talk pages are often horrible, but surprisingly often that horror doesn't reflect on the main articles.
Maybe you simply are more optimistic than me, I keep getting surprised of how good many articles are. I don't notice the bad articles so much, as that is pretty much my default expectation. It took me ages before I started using (and contributing) to Wikipedia, I was so certain the concept couldn't possible work.
Rather than outright deletion, Wikipedia should allow "unofficial" opinions to exist somewhere. The "citation police" sometimes get carried away.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, that does a pretty good job of describing power struggles at Wikipedia after all. It's kind of like modern art in a way...
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- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
Doesn't that sound better than Wikipedia?
gramatical mistake for mankind. And a thousand hall monitors jump to correct it.
"I should note that Jimbo Wales ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years, has said "[F. A.] Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project.", and I can give dozens of more examples of where Wales's somewhat far out political biases lay."
d 0411b&L=ads-l&P=35139 74/press.html
LOL if you think Hayek is far out you've been living in a very special [1] world. Others [2] evidently disagree with you, oracular tone or not.
[1] http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=in
[2] nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1
--
phunctor
"Useful idiots - gotta love 'em!" V.I Ulianov.
Personally, I'm not really "right" or "left." I just want to live my life as free as possible from government control -- the control constantly sought by both the left and right. I get called a leftist by those on the right, and a rightist by those on the left, so I guess that puts me in the middle somewhere.
Given that, I do see a serious ideological left bent in Wikipedia. I've tried to put hard facts (well-cited, thank you) to give a counter to obviously left-biased articles (or articles where the viewpoint is used to justify government intrusion), only to have them removed or edited to oblivion. It's often a hard fight to keep such facts in Wikipedia. Anti-American sentiment is definitely there, with wild, unsubstantiated rumors that keep popping up again after they're killed, and the editors will not keep them out. In that case the only recourse is to post the facts in opposition to the rumors (and hope they survive), but such things should not have to be done.
Yes, I abhor the pathetic conservapedia even more. Wikipedia's slant is more of an accident, a result of the populace and to some extent those Wales put in charge. But conservapedia was conceived as biased.
"For example, Wikipediareview has made a policy of harassing editors and admins, the users coordinated attacks where they call people at their houses late at night and call their employers to complain about them to get them fired. Do you support that?"
If they use their position to censor speech unnecessarily, then yes I totally support that.
I once made an edit to an article that essentially used the phrase "some professionals" or somesuch. The point was that it was not clear as to how many "some" was, and I said so in talk. After hearing nothing, I removed the sentence, partially because it was too indefinite, and partly because it disagreed with a cited reference later in the article.
This was an article that is VERY closely watched by its partisans. Virtually every edit results in a protracted fight, and mine was no different. After repeated attempts to find a compromise (by me, the partisans wanted nothing to do with any changes) it became clear that accuracy was less important than POV pushing. This was exacerbated by an editor that was overzealous and, frankly, rude, who charged vandalism after my FIRST edit. Every good faith attempt to make the statement more accurate was also charged as vandalism.
In short, I was shouted down by people who were wrong, assisted by and editor who was wrong, for no reason other than I was making tracks in their sandbox.
I find this behavior to be par for the course at Wikipedia, where people claim articles as their personal "turf" and defend their contributions at the expense of clarity and accuracy.
After my experience, I would very much like to see some real world consequences for the people involved, as there are no real controls on Wikipedia. If you don't like being held accountable FOR REAL (as opposed to the stated but totally fake accountability Wiki claims) then stop abusing your position.
Wikitroll clue #1: "your bozo bit has been set." Common phrasing used by admins who are targeting someone (via watch-list and frequent refreshing of their contribution list) for harassment.
Wikitroll clue #2: admits he's an admin-cultist... er cabalist.
Wikitroll clue #3: doesn't ask why the person has an issue, just assumes what it was and drops in a strawman "presumably", and skips over the amazing number of reasons someone could have a problem on wikipedia that have nothing to do with "site policy" and everything to do with abuse by the administrators...
Wikitroll confirmed. Chairboy would be a part of the problem, not part of the solution.
"Bullshit!"
You ought to read this great blog by a former wikipedia admin. He details the powers a wikipedia admin gets and the methods by which admins connected to partisan debates, or just assholes who managed to get an admin bit, abuse people.
They get to be as abusive as they want language-wise, and if anyone chides them on it, the other admin-cultists will back them up.
They get to block anyone, for any reason, at any time, and the "procedures" wikipedia has for an appeal are a joke.
They can block someone indefinitely, lock down the user page and talk page so that filing for an appeal can't even be done, and just walk away. The appeals email list is locked down and non-archived, so nobody can see what they're doing (not that they ever did anything but rubber-stamp abuse by admins anyways).
Wikipedia's admin-cultists exist by trying to control the debate. They control who can speak, and when. They control whether or not a source or fact can even be mentioned in an article. They extend this behavior to mailing lists, to IRC channels; in short, if an admin decides you ought to be "banned", even if the admin is just doing it because they disagree with something that you posted that meets all the other sourcing/NPOV criteria, they WILL do it and they WILL get away with it.
I'm gonna quote him here because he said it better than anyone:
Interestingly enough, the BITE policy has a telling statement: nothing scares potentially valuable contributors away faster than hostility or elitism.
Why is this interesting? Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators. They want, no, need, to drive away anyone new who disagrees with them, because if they did not, then ultimately they bear the risk of enough new users coming in to overturn their bogus "consensus" on the articles they control.
See Also: Essjay, who claimed to be a multiple-doctorate, used that as reason to make the wikipedia article on Catholicism into one of the worst pieces of derogatory shit he could, banned those who tried to counter his lies, and then got found out: turns out that he's a 24 year old dropout with delusions of grandeur and a major hatred for Catholics.
Cleaning up his slander and nastiness will take years - but the Wikicultists are already working on getting him re-adminned under a pseudonym.
See Also: John Siegenthaler and damage done to him.
Wikipedia cultists would have it that everyone who they come up with an excuse to write a biography page on, is personally responsible for sitting around watching it for vandalism and slander - except they're not allowed to edit it themselves, or request that it be permanently deleted and have that request definitively honored and respected as policy.
He's gone back to abusing people on Wikipedia.
If the authors regard their work as a "visualization technique" and if they furthremore view it as "research", then I think it is valid to remark that it always saddens me a little to see "visualizations" that do not seem to provide any additional information apart from providing "nice pictures" (which is, of course, completely subjective). (Information) visualization is about providing clarity by representing something in a visual way; it is not about plotting as many images as possible on a piece of paper / part of the screen with no clear goal in mind as far as clarification by means of visual representation is concerned. This is, IMO, therefore not an example of (information) visualization, but an example - a nice one IMO - of computer generated art.
Good point. I've been with Wikipedia for a while too, although I started to work on Citizendium last year and have moved many of my articles there (I wish they'd get their Wikimedia link working). Luckily, my work isn't very controversial, so I've not suffered as much from the problem you describe. Instead, my main gripes are Wikipedia's default permit policy towards editing, and it's refusal to acknowledge expert opinion. For example, most of the vandalism that occurs could easily be avoided if accounts were required for editors and people were made to wait a while (a day?) before they could start using their new account. The second problem isn't as easy to solve, but it's sometimes sad to see how ignorance and stupidity can win the day with nothing more than a majority vote.
Wikipedia ceased to be relevant the day they began restricting anonymous participation in the name of better quality.
Slashdot, too, for that matter.
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...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
From the Top 20 Most Hotly Revised Articles (in the article):
1. Jesus
4. Nintendo revolution
10. Playstation 3
So Sony Playstations and Nintendo systems inspire almost as much evangelism as Jesus? Seems to me that both atheists and Christians ought to have a problem with that false idol worshipping.
Slashdot invaded by wikicultists; film at 11.
Anything said that isn't 100% complimentary to Wikipedia, gets a mysterious 'troll' listing by a wikicultist who got mod points.
Some wiki-cultist's really having fun with mod points today.
Jesus H Fuckin christ - How the hell does it get modded down that far? Those are great links, and it shows a side of Wikipedia not a lot of people notice.
I think OP is right, there's a lot of wikipedia partisans who are just trying to bury it so nobody sees the criticisms of their out of control project and their out of control behavior... which is really funny since it's their out of control behavior that they're continuing on Slashdot by shamelessly abusing mod points.
and therefore, one distinct advantage it has over traditional encylopedias is in its ability to reflect changing beliefs and controversies
personally i'm tired of "either or" type thinking, in fact, I use each and every resource
Words to men, as air to birds.
Prime example - nothing "trollish" here, but the wikicultists just have to try to mod down anything that's not complimentary to their beloved trash heap.
Prime example - nothing "trollish" here, but the wikicultists just have to try to mod down anything that's not complimentary to their beloved trash heap. But that's to be expected. After all, if you can't control the flow of information, you can't indoctrinate the populace.
RED dots? I understand the yellow ones - they are explained in the article - as are the pictures behind the yellow dots. The RED dot have no explaination. Anyone?
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
I hate to say it, but that image appears to be utterly and completely useless as a resource for learning anything about Wikipedia. Add to that the fact that Wikipedia is itself pretty useless...
Wouldn't really surprise me to learn it, either.
"The categories such as Mathematics and Science highlight what is best about Wikipedia. The categories such as History and Society highlight what is worst about Wikipedia. You do not really have big battles over articles like "Pythagorean theorem", and they usually do a good job of explaining what that is. On the other hand, if you look at the top of an article like "Palestine" you will see that it is semi-protected, meaning new users can not edit the article. You can also see eight pages of discussion which really doesn't get anywhere."
Only eight pages of discussion for a hugely divisive major world crisis with 2,000 years of backstory?
Yes, that sounds pretty much like the fault lines you'd find in a university faculty staffroom or the world headline section in a newspaper. Only without guns.
Seems like Wikipedia is doing a fine job of representing the real world's production of knowledge - or at least our shared articulation of the questions. Remember, some issues *don't have* neat, tidy, one-page, incontrovertible answers. That's why they're issues.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Your comment was modded down because it was rude, not because it said something bad about Wikipedia. There are plenty of ways to politely state your opinion. Use them. I would have modded your comment down had I modpoints (and I almost never visit Wikipedia).
Look, since you seem to label anyone who doesn't agree with your irrational hatred and fear of all things wikipedian as a "wikicultist", I'm not at all surprised that you have decided that I'm one.
But, you know, for someone who bashes other people for simply labelling people who disagree with them as "trolls" or similar, you sure seem to be free with tossing out "wikicultist" or "wikitroll" anytime someone says something about wikipedia that you don't agree with, or mods a post that discusses wikipedia in a way you don't agree with.
more than I trust someone like you.
You're well known for abuse of power, Gwern.
You need to look up what "criminal harassment" is and learn the difference between that and what is really happening.
But you're far too stupid to do that, you'll just go on spouting "CRIMINAL HARASSMENT!" like the Barney Fife you are.
Pull the other one.
Just like you and your buddies haven't been organizing to abuse mod points on this discussion (don't lie now, I have the record of it from your IRC channel).
Chairboy cannot ban anyone here.
But going by the "-1" which appears next to most of your comments, other Slashdotters appear to agree with him, not you. Please tell us, what exactly is your beef with Wikipedia? What edits of yours have been reverted, which made you so disappointed with the system? I'm sure there is a rational explanation for it, but if you don't tell us what the problem is, it is a bit hard to explain.
- Chuq