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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."
I like tools like this much more than I like the various conflicts over what wikipedia's one true behavior ought to be. With so many people, and so many disparate objectives, you cannot have one wikipedia to satisfy them all. However, since the wiki preserves revision and comment data, and it is all available under a liberal licence, it is possible for parties both inside and outside wikipedia to build view into the wiki that are closer to their desired vision, rather than struggling endlessly over what the wiki will look like.
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.