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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."
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.
http://www.aaronrogier.net
For a minute I thought it was a dupe of this story but it's not (different team, different school, and slightly different goal).
It'd be interesting to compare the two...
--MarkusQ
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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.
Very nice job on the summary! It explained exactly what the topic was about and summarised the key findings and where to go for more information. :)
No actual need to visit the article
As to the tool, the display looks too complex to provide a simple guide as to edit wars/controversy. Presumably more read bars is bad, or is it? That's really just a slightly graphical form of the edit history itself, when whats needed is a simpler, thermometer style presentation.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
As long as the edits aren't being made by a government or corporate entity and/or their minions, it should be valid.
Lobbying groups for powerful business interests who know they are doing something ethically parasitic to society have a stanard MO of "manufacturing controversy" through thinly disguised think tanks or publications pushing an agenda.
Example: Smoking doesn't actually cause cancer.
Tracking the number of edits only shows whether an interest group is actively trying to revise reality. It does not say which side it is or whether the "controversy" is genuine.
In other words, it's no more dependable than the signs they slap across half of wikipedia because powerful groups of outright looneys shry about it.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
For the band, see Tool (band). For other uses, see For the band, see Tool (disambiguation).
Lest anyone thing you need to be a well-connected researcher to "obtain access to Wikipedia edit data", it's actually all public. Although you will need 100GB+ of hard drive space, and some well thought out algorithms, to parse the full-history dumps that contain every revision of every page.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Unless they have added a new feature, the wikidashboard is old news - as evinced by this Wikipedia signpost article from 2007: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-09-17/In_the_news
The deletionist/inclusionist argument is almost exclusively waged over really, really recent stuff, and most of that related to pop culture. If you're writing about 19th-century history, you have to really try to encounter a deletionist.
It's basically an ongoing process of trying to find a good balance between erroneously/unnecessarily excluding recent and pop-culture stuff that is actually useful in an encyclopedia, and allowing Wikipedia to be used as an advertising platform by everyone with a company, book, academic CV, or piece of software to promote.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I wrote a hackish Greasemonkey script to do something similar last year that just did it on the fly. Also tried to get a simple measure of how much was spam just by searching for simple keywords in the edit records.
I'd like to revisit the idea some time, because I'm sure you can also capture more details about the nature of editing (ie, how often are different parts edited, what keywords get added and removed most frequently, how many people are involved or is it just a revert war between two stubborn editors...) within a useful visualisation.
Instead of just showing such stats for the article in total, this tool would become much more powerful by showing statistics for single sections or paragraphs. How hotly was a particular phrase contested?
Especially if it can also show when a particular sentence was introduced, or what was deleted from the article over time.
I spend a lot of my time on Wikipedia restoring lost text, when vandalism was incompletely fixed and then forgotten about. Occasionally I've found entire paragraphs that were deleted more than a year ago. It's pretty annoying to have to explore the history in a kind of binary search - is the problem older than this? Is it newer than this? Older than this revision? Ah, got it.
You are right that vested interests are being carefully defended. So much so that very little of what is commonly accepted as truth actually is so. This includes your belief in the truth of global warming. The essence of it is simply this: the sun is a rather more dynamic system in terms of energy output than it is being given credit for. Hence periods of global warming and cooling happen. The greenhouse effect has a relatively minor impact.
Of course, some research on your part is required to verify the truth of my claim: sometimes, you just have to dig. This is a good place to start: http://wattsupwiththat.com/. Supposing that what I say is true, it is reasonable for you to wonder why global warming is being sold so vigorously. What do vested interests have to gain by doing so?
Carbon credits is one way they aim to gain. And induced fear of climate disaster makes people accept policies and taxes they otherwise would not. But there is a more subtle gain: using global warming and the "green" world view it is embedded in as a means of selling people on a belief system of scarcity. You see, if people believe that something is scarce, they accept that the corresponding resources are withheld from them or have a high price.
Here is a list of things that are being made to appear scarce, but are not really so, or are artificially induced to be so: land, water, energy, food, oil, diamonds, and even gold.
I've had a few articles deletion-nominated that ended up being kept, which I'd consider not particularly close to being worthy of deletion (and they were even cited!), so the gray area does extend a bit.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
We saw the same sort of argument for years about cigarettes and cancer. Anecdotal evidence strongly supported the idea that cigarettes caused cancer, but tobacco companies did lie, extensively, about the evidence, and funded both outrageous and subtle campaigns to confuse the facts. Unfortunately, global warming attracts even greater levels of political and fiscal interest because of its effects on farming, fuel use, and population growth.
One, at least, of you examples is correct. Diamonds are hardly as valuable as jewelers make it seem, since synthetic diamonds are now practical. The cartel in South Africa still manipulate its worldwide price, and interfere with other manufacturers or miners worldwide. But water? _Clean_ water, suitable for drinking, industry, and growing crops? That's a resource that needs to be managed carefully, from harsh experience in places where it's less plentiful.
Yes, water. If you grant, for the moment, that energy is not really scarce, then it is easy to see that water need not be either. Given energy, you can easily create clean water using reverse osmosis anywhere near the sea or where there is brackish ground water. This is actual practice today: Saudi Arabia, the land where energy is cheap, is doing lots of agriculture out in the desert.
And where there is no sea within pipeline range (this excludes the areas of earth where most of the population lives and agriculture takes place), you can, using somewhat more energy, condense out atmospheric water.
Cabal-o-meter. That's a better name for the tool.
I'm looking at http://www.coastal.ca.gov/desalrpt/dchap1.html, which seems a very reasonable report on desalination efforts. It shows the energy cost, for the best plants, as a minimum of 3500 kWh/Af, or 3500 kilowatt-hour/Acre-foot, or 1.26 * 10^12 Joules/1.232590 * 10^9 cc, or roughly 1000 Joules/cc of water. That's pretty expensive. Saudi Arabia's desalination is quite limited, and yes, they're in a place with plenty of energy (irreplaceably used for this process) and where water is expensive. The maintenance costs for the equipment are also quite high: salt water is very corrosive and tends to destroy the best planned facilities long before their expected replacement dates.
The basic booby problem is where you said "where energy is cheap". That cheap energy simply does not scale: it's a locally effective tradeoff between energy and water, but not every country has Arabia's high energy density and low population. And no, this is not the basis of Saudi Arabia's current agricultural growth. They're still draining the underwater reserves, and expending them: it's still not a sustainable agricultural model.
It's a "belief" shared by a large majority of reputable scientists with credentials to comment intelligently on the matter.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
You are missing the point. Yes, energy currently is cheap only in a few places such as Saudi Arabia. But energy should and could be cheap, almost free even, everywhere. The reason that is not is because of artificially induced scarcity.
A bold claim, I know, so let me substantiate it. Oil is the most glaringly obvious example of how energy is being kept scarce. Here is some fun reading you can do: what oil really is, oodles of oil in Prudhoe Bay, ditto for the Bakken Formation, Cuba, and in several other places. Not very surprising given the true oil genesis mechanism.
Of course, there are some intrinsic costs associated with oil: you need to pump it and transport it. So how can energy be almost free? Well, there are at least a dozen implemented and reproduced means to produce energy that go beyond currently accepted physical science. It is too broad a topic to address here, and it is subject to much disinformation, bullshit, and suppression. If you care to dive into it, Google "Free Energy" and click away. Good luck separating the truth from the lies.
Ah, the "defer to authority argument". In a world of lies, that is not going to get you very far when it comes to learning the truth. The fact of the matter is that anthropogenic global warming has been refuted by atmospheric, oceanic, and solar observations. Nature does not care about what people believe or want us to believe.
Again, there is a booby trap in your claims.
> Well, there are at least a dozen implemented and reproduced means to produce energy that go beyond currently accepted physical science
Name one that is "implemented and reproduced" that is "beyond currently accepted physical science". I'm sorry, but I can't be held responsible to do all the research to discredit such broad and ill-founded claims as you are making.
One can even take another example in your post above. While oil supplies are _certainly_ manipulated for economic advantage, unless there is a major renewable source of _cheap_ oil, the current supply is being exhausted at a prodigious rate, used for both fuel and for petrochemicals such as plastics. Chemically, one can use other hydrocarbon sources such as human feces to generate them, but there is a very serious cost of both energy and manufacturing capability currently used elsewhere. It's not _cheap_.
Yes, I have read Atlas Shrugged. An elitist wet dream. I'd be cautious when it comes to her works and the objectivist philosophy they are propounding. Current events do hold similarities to the plot of Atlas Shrugged, but they are fundamentally quite different.
The most well-known and well-corroborated example goes by the name of "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions" (formerly known as "Cold Fusion"). In spite of all the efforts to repress and ridicule it, the diligent and mostly unfunded efforts of thousands of scientists in hundreds of labs have, over the past twenty years, established the reality of it beyond a shadow of a doubt. The following site provides and overview: http://www.lenr-canr.org/
http://skepdic.com/pseudosymmetry.html
Cold fusion was a hoax. Get over it.
(founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera)
You are ignorant. Fleischman and Pons believed in the reality of their findings. So it was obviously not a hoax. And many others have corroborated their findings through a variety of experiments: excess heat, neutron emission, tritium/helium production, non-natural-abundance isotope ratios, elemental transmutation, and on the list goes. A large number of these results were obtained using experimental techniques, such as mass spectrometry, that leave no room for ambiguity. I suggest you read some research articles before commenting further.
What has changed, though, is that people no longer adhere to the interpretation that the excess heat is the result of a classic (D+D->He or otherwise) fusion reaction. That is why the label "cold fusion" is no longer in fashion. Nuclear reactions are being enabled, but the mechanism is enigmatic. Many tentative theories trying to explain it have been forwarded.
You mean extremely low yield results that rely on extremely expensive and very tricky to set up setups of palladium and deuterium? Oh, yes, that's bound to represent an economic source of abundant energy.
CF was a hoax spread by the science illiterate and greedy media.
Pons & Fleischman were deluded. Scientists were unimpressed then. They still are.
LENR-CANR? Research articles? Yawn. Wake me up when a real journal publishes anything on "LENR."
http://www.amazon.com/Voodoo-Science-Road-Foolishness-Fraud/dp/0195147103/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234120041&sr=8-1
(founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera)
You sure do your handle "assert(0)" justice: you make assertions with zero basis.
Nature has spoken loud and clear, low energy nuclear reactions are happening. If you do not accept the data, much of it published in established peer-reviewed journals, then go and do your own experimental reproduction. Some kinds of experiment, such as the Mizuno type experiment, are sufficiently cheap and easy that anyone with a modicum of tinkering ability can have a go: http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/index.htm
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
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...
Really? Go read the papers. Relying on a high school science fair expo to validate your results is bad enough, but in another paper cited there, on of the authors, Mr. Kowalksi wrote this at http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/ppclkrs/index.htm
> "Our container is an ordinary two-liters beaker."
In other words, the beaker was a beaker, not a Dewar flask. That's amazingly stupid for an experiment to measure thermal production: you would need to measure the actual heat transfer, and you _cannot_ do so reliably with a container that's uninsulated _on the bottom_, even if you have confidence in your actmospheric convection by keeping it in a sealed chamber. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy work.
This kind of sloppy work is amazingly typical of the papers I've seen making cold fusion claims, and they _are_ cold fusion claims. Renaming Pons & Fleishman's admittedly fascinating original work and claims is like renaming "Palladium" as "Trusted Computing". It sounds better, but it's the same beast.
Ah yes, pick out one or two things, lump everything together and call it all bad. The low energy nuclear reaction field has grown remarkably diverse in terms of methods and results and cannot be dismissed that easily. The basic reality of such nuclear reactions it most utterly and undeniably obvious from the experiments that show the creation of new isotopes and elements where there were previously none. See these papers for some examples: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MileyGHnucleartra.pdf, http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/ArapiAexperiment.pdf, http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/DashJmicroanaly.pdf
As to energy production, there are actually plasma experiments with kilowatts of excess energy. But I suggest you read some of more papers first.
Sorry, but you're just plain wrong on the matter, and probably a troll.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
No, point out gaping holes in the most recent papers on the website _you cite_, and assume the others are similarly bad. The cold fusion research is _rife_ with contradictory and conflated claims: you are, in fact, citing several papers with admittedly fascinating results on transmutation for palladium based cold fusion to support the potentially very flawed results of two much more recent papers that use a different technology.
Citing the presence of isotopes does not help the fundamental flaws in the procedure, even if it's working. The palladium, and the deuterium, are far, far, far too expensive to justify their use for energy production of such low yields. 20% energy gain as heat, from hideously expensive deuterium that cost 1000% of that basic energy cost to refine? _THEN WHO CARES IF IT WORKS?_ All of your energy gains are lost in the deuterium refinement!
And don't try to use the palladium experiements, which from reading them are much better papers, to claim that the much sloppier non-palladium papers have validity and therefore you don't need the very expensive palladium and deuterium. It's not a valid conclusion.
What part if *GUFFAW!* wasn't clear?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I find it interesting how, when pointing obvious truths out to people, more often than not they retrench behind their belief system. I submit to you the hypothesis that this is not because people because of their intrinsic nature lack an open mind, but rather because of careful indoctrination through education and the media.
I pointed you towards the Naudin website because it shows you how to do a replication yourself, easily. Not because of any papers on there. For that I suggest the peer-reviewed literature and conference proceedings.
You keep on coming back to the palladium experiments. From the perspective of energy production, they have not been of interest for a long time. Other much less expensive and scaled up systems have been validated. Read up on the state of the art before passing judgment. While doing so, take a bit broader perspective. There are pure plasma phenomena that are likely to be based on the same physical mechanisms underlying the LENR work. To read up on some of that, and get a good feel for how this class of research is being treated, see here: http://www.newenergytimes.com/BubbleTrouble/BubblegatePortal.htm
Mind you, the electrolytic LENR work can be safely ignored when viewing it as a candidate for economic energy production. Much cheaper methods have been developed and validated. I chose the LENR work as an example because it is well-known and well-corroborated. You see, the main challenge people face, when confronted with something that does not fit their belief system, is to move beyond their preconceptions. Good luck with that.
Very true. Which is why, rather than go to all the trouble of putting up page after page of peer-reviewed evidence, only to have it "refuted" by non-refereed publications, tabloid articles, and lists of alleged skeptics (many of whom have had requests that their names be removed ignored), I simply point out that an overwhelming majority of reputable scientists with good research records accept that global warming is happening, and humans have a significant role in it, and let it go at that.
I've done this dance far too many times before, and have no intention of doing it again here.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
You have a bit too much confidence in institutional science. Science could have set humanity free. That is why it had to be, and has become, controlled. Today's reality is one of censorship, destroyed careers, and revoked funding for research that risks upsetting the status quo.
Yes, the Bush administration had a well-documented record of threatening scientists who publicized evidence about global warming, and even had junior PR hacks re-write the work of scientists under their direct control. They didn't want any real science upsetting the rosy picture they were painting, especially just prior to the last-but-one election.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Then stop doing a bait and switch with your claims. Since the nuclear reaction claims seem founded in palladium experiments, you _should not_ make claims about them for other technologies. You are consistently citing interesting, but incomplete research with wild-eyed excitement and expecting us to extrapolate them to wish-fulfilling promises for future energy. I'm apparently far, far more skeptical than you about these approaches because far too often, reality fails to fill those missing gaps.
Or simply put, cite the research you actually think works: don't waste my time on LENR when you, yourself, say it can be "safely ignored", and "much cheaper methods have been developed". You are claiming such technologies exist for energy production: name them. I'm not here to fill in the gaps in your claims for you.
When it comes to global warming, the situation is complex since some vested interests have been trying to deny the evidence for global warming, as you have rightly noted, while other vested interests have been trying to sell it. Both, in the end, serve the same overall interest: keeping control. It is just that the narrow agenda that the former grouping is serving is a less informed and more greedy one.
To state the obvious: by denying anthropogenic global warming you are basically saying that burning oil, gas, and coal is not that bad, and as such you help keep up demand. However, the price of energy (if you factor out the short-term manipulation in the futures market) is determined by the equilibrium between supply and demand. If you can manipulate the price to be ten times too high, by squeezing the supply and nurturing the perception that energy is intrinsically scarce (peak oil, and all that bullshit), you can fleece the sheep for much more than by increasing demand a bit.
This is where the green world view comes into play. It is about selling the people on a belief in scarcity and the undesirability of population growth. By making people believe that something is scarce, they are made willing to have that resource be withheld from them, or to pay way too much for it. Instilling a belief in overpopulation supports the belief in scarcity (when there are too many people, will there be enough left for me?), but also makes room for measures to reduce population. Not because Earth cannot support more people, but rather because fewer people are easier to control.
Well, if you don't want your time to be wasted, then there is no point in pointing out what works either: you see, you are not allowed to use these technologies and as such will have no access to them.
One technology that is being kept under wraps by http://www.blacklightpower.com/. Lots of experimental corroboration, also from other labs. But they are throwing up a large smoke screen by selling a bullshit theory. The underlying physical mechanism is closely related to the cold fusion phenomena. However, in all the time they have been developing their technology, no energy product has been released into the market place. It will only be once it is allowed.
When will that be? Well, a hopeful indicator is that electric cars are finally being allowed onto the market place. Looks like oil demand is no longer being protected. So maybe the rest of the energy scam will be unwound soon thereafter.