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Tool Shows the Arguments Behind Wikipedia Entries

Posted by timothy on from the citation-will-one-day-be-needed dept.

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."

24 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Other applications by arogier · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Other applications by b4upoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Obviously popular topics will gather more view points and controversy. A person doing a report on tribal dances in Kenya is not likely to generate a lot of views nor a lot of disagreement.

  2. It's a du...no wait, it's not by MarkusQ · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    1. Re:It's a du...no wait, it's not by Kippesoep · · Score: 4, Funny

      And set up a wiki for that comparison, just to see how much argument is behind it...

  3. high degree of false positives by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:high degree of false positives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well then register!

    2. Re:high degree of false positives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      How ironic that Anonymous Coward is telling a user to register.

    3. Re:high degree of false positives by JoshuaZ · · Score: 2, Informative

      This is a known problem. It is one of the reasons I originally registered. One other way to handle it if one really doesn't want to register is to use the edit summary option to help make clear that there isn't any conflict. But there's really no good reason not to register. Registration provides a variety of different benefits: First, other users have an easy way to contact you if they want to discuss an edit you made. Second, your IP address is hidden providing a measure of privacy. Third registration makes it easier to edit from an IP address that has been blocked for vandalism. Fourth, registration allows you to eventually get certain tools such as rollback which are useful but generally restricted to uses with some minimal amount of experience. Fifth, you can more easily customize your preferences for how articles are displayed such as not including(good for dial-up connections), or changing date formats, or changing justification of articles, or much more). Note that this last benefit applies even if you have no intention to edit at all. Even if one doesn't use Wikipedia often registering an account has many benefits. It takes literally about a minute. There's no good reason not to register other than that editing can be addictive and having a registered account can make the addiction worse.

  4. Not expansive enough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. The only real solution to the wiki-wars... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:The only real solution to the wiki-wars... by timeOday · · Score: 4, Interesting
      How much of a problem are the "wiki wars," really? On the one hand, I'm always hearing about these issues on slashdot and I can certainly see why they occur. On the other hand, I use wikipedia to get information all the time and it hardly ever seems to be an actual problem. I gather most of the fighting is over a relatively small number of entries that everybody knows to be controversial. You can hardly blame wikipedia for not having the final, undisputed truth about conflict in the middle east and other such things.

      In any case, where there is debate, I'd rather see a concise presentation of both sides rather than trawl through a lengthy edit trail or a bunch of metadata. Gathering gobs of information is relatively easy, what's valuable is condensing it into a usable form.

    2. Re:The only real solution to the wiki-wars... by Demonantis · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If a wikipedia article is well done. There will be likes to the articles it cites as sources. This makes wikipedia just as reliable as the rest of the internet as a resource. Maybe even more reliable cause you only see articles other people think are accurate. A keyword search like Google doesn't really do that.

    3. Re:The only real solution to the wiki-wars... by quadrox · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But if these people are wrong about a source and either falsely omit or falsely include one or more, you are just as screwed. If not even more.

      I think on the whole you are no better off using wikipedia, unless you really trust the editors to know their stuff and not to be biased. And the way I know human nature, that's likely not the case for many of them (how many - I don't know).

      To me wikipedia is a quick means to gather some info on a subject. If it's a slightly controversial subject I won't rely on it alone, but if it's trivial stuff, I don't care.

    4. Re:The only real solution to the wiki-wars... by ShakaUVM · · Score: 2, Insightful

      >>How much of a problem are the "wiki wars," really?

      Basically, on any article where people of differing political persuasions would write it differently, there's probably a wiki war going on. I remember editing the NPR article once, and getting dragged into a revision war where people were adding and removing a reference to Fox News being biased. Supporters of the inclusion said it said NPR looked nonbiased by comparison, opposition said the article was not about Fox News and didn't belong. Ended up getting dragged all the way up to the arbitration committee because neither side would compromise on it.

      Stupid? Meaningless? Oh, yes. Very.

      Seeing that happen on three or four articles I made edits to and added to my watchlist, I basically gave up on trying to contribute to Wikipedia. Actually, the final straw was when I added ISBN numbers to J. Edgar Hoover's wikipedia page -- I noticed they were missing, so I looked them up and put them in. How controversial is that? It got reverted by a wikipedia admin (JayJG) with an ideological axe to grind. Twice.

      That was basically it for me. If ISBN numbers aren't politically correct, Wikipedia is nothing more than a ideological cesspool.

    5. Re:The only real solution to the wiki-wars... by Jurily · · Score: 2, Insightful

      On the other hand, I use wikipedia to get information all the time and it hardly ever seems to be an actual problem.

      Of course. The page itself always looks consistent. But if you check back in 5 minutes, you might be surprised.

  6. Tool fails to detect "manufactured controversy" by plasmacutter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!!
  7. Re:Validity by plasmacutter · · Score: 2

    As long as the edits aren't being made by a government or corporate entity and/or their minions, it should be valid.

    Oh, so if the edits are made by the dupes who drink their kool-aid whole it's fine?

    The problem with these entities is they have tremendous power and access to mass media, which is under their umbrella conglomerates, and will therefore never provide real fact checks or challenges to the BS they spew.

    --
    VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
  8. Re:James Maynard Keenan? by declain · · Score: 3, Funny

    For the band, see Tool (band). For other uses, see For the band, see Tool (disambiguation).

  9. "obtained access"? by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
    1. Re:"obtained access"? by kaiidth · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Frankly the summary presents the research far more pretentiously than I hope PARC would prefer. It's a little like saying

      "In order to go to the corner shop for a bottle of milk, we negotiated release of planned security mechanisms on the warm/cool air boundary designed to limit unauthorised perambulation, thus obtaining access to the pedestrian displacement area."

      That said, the researchers according to TFA apparently did 'spend much of 2008 getting access to live data' - so apparently they are using something other than the open access downloads. It makes me wonder why they didn't just use the recent changes facility from each page, but undoubtedly they have their reasons.

      TFA is worth a quick read, and suggests that this Wikidashboard business is an interesting example of the general genre of 'presenting some facet of edit data in a concise and accessible way', along with stuff like WikiScanner, recent change statistics and so on, but it doesn't seem that revolutionary, really.

  10. Possibly old news? by Viridae · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  11. true, but still a pretty small proportion by Trepidity · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
  12. Re:Sometimes, you just have to dig by Eukariote · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You mean extremely low yield results that rely on extremely expensive and very tricky to set up setups of palladium and deuterium?

    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

  13. I just tried the tool.. by RJFerret · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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...