[Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
There is also the article I wrote for the 'Other Place' here http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/05/04/the-sum-of-the-parts , also on the subject of indiscriminate copying and pasting from older reference sources. The point is that any study of Wikipedia article 'reliability' should be careful about the provenance of the article. The Wycliffe is barely more than a copy and paste of an old (and somewhat outdated) source. On 08/05/2014 09:24, edward wrote: The study that Erik refers to here http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-May/071565.html was seriously flawed. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/bal-dont-trust-wikipedia-on-anselm-20120924,0,2521380.story#ixzz316sal7L4 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
[Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 8:12 AM, geni geniice at gmail.com https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l wrote: / On 8 May 2014 01:00, Andreas Kolbe jayen466 at gmail.com https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l wrote: // // As for study design, I'd suggest you begin with a *random* sample of // frequently-viewed Wikipedia articles in a given topic area (e.g. those // within the purview of WikiProject Medicine), have them assessed by an // independent panel of academic experts, and let them publish their // results. // // // No control, no calibration. Without those you can't really be sure what // you've measured. While academic attitudes to Wikipedia may be of some // interest they are not a proxy for quality. // / While academic attitudes to Wikipedia may be of some interest they are not a proxy for quality. I don't understand this. I'm not saying I disagree, I just don't understand. How would an attitude be a 'proxy' for quality? ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 10:08 AM, edward edw...@logicmuseum.com wrote: While academic attitudes to Wikipedia may be of some interest they are not a proxy for quality. I don't understand this. I'm not saying I disagree, I just don't understand. How would an attitude be a 'proxy' for quality? I think what Geni was expressing there was a fear that experts might rate an article badly because they do not like Wikipedia, i.e. that their ratings might reflect prejudice rather than an honest scholarly assessment of the article content. I guess that's a form of AGF. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
Well personal bias is always potentially a problem. The Oxford study tried to avoid this by 'blind' review. They changed the format of the Britannica and the Wikipedia articles so it was not obvious which was which. The problem with the study, however, was that they did not realise one of the articles they had selected was Britannica 1911 clone, so they were comparing a 100 year version of Britannica with a modern Britannica. On a separate note, the fact they found them comparable was worrying (scholarship on the Middle Ages has been completely transformed over the last century, no one from Oxford spotted that?). And there were a separate bunch of errors that they missed entirely. Were the errors I spotted simply my 'bias' (I am not a fan of Wikipedia, true)? I don't think so: I was aiming to pick up simple referencing and factual errors only, nothing fancy. Ed On 08/05/2014 10:14, Andreas Kolbe wrote: On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 10:08 AM, edward edw...@logicmuseum.com wrote: While academic attitudes to Wikipedia may be of some interest they are not a proxy for quality. I don't understand this. I'm not saying I disagree, I just don't understand. How would an attitude be a 'proxy' for quality? I think what Geni was expressing there was a fear that experts might rate an article badly because they do not like Wikipedia, i.e. that their ratings might reflect prejudice rather than an honest scholarly assessment of the article content. I guess that's a form of AGF. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
phoebe ayers Wed May 7 23:22:07 UTC 2014 And those peer review systems have lots and lots of problems as well as upsides. Nothing is perfect. The peer review system is definitely flawed. One flaw, actually, is that it is hard to find good reviewers. Once it took a year and a half. This is an economic problem. There is a strong incentive to publish, because of the status and recognition it brings. There is no comparable reward for review work. I enjoy it, because it exercises my critical powers. But there is little other form of reward. E ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 9:14 AM, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: In highly structured databases, adding properties that may be useful for your research and the work of others would require altering the structure itself, like adding a field, for example. That isn't easy, because the powers that be have to first agree that it is appropriate, worthy, and fits correctly in to the ontology. If there is a type hierarchy, then the sample set would probably have to conform to a sub-tree in the type hierarchy which may not correspond well to the sample set that the researcher is actually interested in. You can create your own instance of Wikibase and decide on the structure, fields, ontology, etc Then you can find the points of intersection with Wikidata concepts and link back to them if you feel like (not necessary, though). More info: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase I'm talking about the exact opposite, actually. Unstructured databases can be easily altered and indexed in much more flexible ways. The indices for these databases wouldn't normally be stored with the data itself; the researchers would get a data dump and create the indices needed for their own studies. Conventions would be enforced if the researchers wish to contribute anything back. So basically like running an instance of CKAN? http://ckan.org/ Most importantly, if I understand correctly, wikidata is a secondary database that doesn't correspond one-to-one with Wikipedia articles yet, and it's not clear to me whether it ever will. While it might be interesting to someone using the data collected in Wikipedia and imported in wikidata for semantic-oriented research like basic AI that would help computers win on Jeopardy, it wouldn't be interesting to someone studying Wikipedia itself. It might help to improve the data accuracy since it will be possible to update all uses of any parameter in any article at once. Some wikipedias use that data to generate text, I guess in those cases you could say that with quality data you will have quality text. Cheers, Micru ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 8:17 AM, Anthony Cole ahcole...@gmail.com wrote: Regarding expert review, Doc James has just announced that a version of Wikipedia's article Dengue fever has passed peer review and been accepted for publication by the journal Open Medicine. I think this is a special moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:MED#This_conversation_is_notable Anthony Cole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole The article will apparently be listed on PubMed. That's indeed an achievement to be proud of. Well done! There was a discussion earlier in this thread about the likely quality of Wikipedia's medical articles, and the curatorial work of WikiProject Medicine. I note that in the same post in which Doc James announced this on en:WP, he also said: ---o0o--- How good is our content? Having looked at much of it I have an okay idea. We have about 100-200 high or excellent quality medical articles. We have about 20,000 that are short and just starting out. We have a couple thousand that are okay ish. We have another few hundred to maybe few thousand or so that are a complete disaster. So in summary article quality is variable with a randomly selected article likely to be of moderate to low quality. ---o0o--- Given his qualifications and his longstanding work in WikiProject Medicine, James' guess is probably better than most. But it's not something you could cite. On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 3:02 PM, rupert THURNER rupert.thur...@gmail.com wrote: Andreas, you seem to have pre-determined that Wikipedia's medical articles are all terrible and riddled with errors. And I think you are being needlessly defensive. I have an open mind as to what the results might be. What I am sure of is that neither you nor I nor the Foundation really know how reliable they are. Why not make an effort to find out? Anybody interested can do it. Now. Anybody interested can improve it. Now. Why it does not happen? It happened for other domains as well. In my experience there is only one single measure to improve quality: point out the single error which cam be corrected. If you can propose a system, either human or automatic, to do this, feel free. What imo is the bigger problem: many medical articles are written in a language a mortal cannot understand any more. Realistically, they're amongst the most likely to receive professional editing and review - Wikiproject Medicine does a much better job than people are willing to credit them. Yes, and many editors there are sorely concerned about the quality of medical information Wikipedia provides to the public. This is the core value of wikipedia since its beginnings: provide a big enough gap to fill. Incidentally, there was a discussion of the JAOA study in The Atlantic today: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/can-wikipedia-ever-be-a-definitive-medical-text/361822/ A member of WikiProject Medicine is quoted in it, as is the study's author. —o0o— So both sides acknowledge: There are errors in Wikipedia’s health articles. And that’s a problem, because people use them. Internet literacy includes learning beeing sceptical on what you read i guess Wikipedia is not Jesus and never will be, in no domain :) Rupert ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
[Wikimedia-l] Can't we simplify merge proposals?
Can't we create a way that will simplify merge propsals into a simple 1-minute procedure? A template with: Merger [Quercitrin] into [Quercitin], Motivation [bla bla bla] that would automatically display the merge notice on all revelant pages? Best regards, Rui -- _ Rui Correia Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Work Consultant Bridge to Angola - Angola Liaison Consultant Mobile Number in South Africa +27 74 425 4186 Número de Telemóvel na África do Sul +27 74 425 4186 ___ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On 08/05/2014 17:58, geni wrote: So while it is unlikely that a published journal article would be a complete hoax This is because they have a robust review process, which Wikipedia doesn't. Enough said. Please robustly define glaring. Glaring means obvious, in plain view, manifest etc. I gave some examples here http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/02/23/islands-of-sanity/ One example:It can be speculated that one of the first people in Europe who consulted the map was William Vorilong, noted philosopher from England, who was shown the map while travelling with japanese visitor Yoshimitsu Kage. William was French, not English. And he never visited Japan. Please also understand if I don't accept you as an impartial source on the matter rendering your subjective judgements of limited value. They are not subjective judgments, see above. 'Glaring' /= 'subjective'. Why don't you accept me as an impartial source? Because I have written articles critical of Wikipedia? Oh right. Some of these problems can be fixed. But fixing problems means recognising there is a problem, no? Edward ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Can't we simplify merge proposals?
This sounds like a good job for the kind of setup used on Commons, for instance, for deletion requests: a box (Javascript, I believe) shows up in the middle of the screen, with a text entry field, maybe some check-boxes (notify original creator, etc.) and then the script adds the appropriate things to the appropriate pages (on behalf of the user who fills it in -- that is, the edits all show up in her edit history). I think one of the general challenges to the movement these days is how to improve communication among the content-focused Wikimedians who see and understand the need for technical improvements like these, and the tech-focused Wikimedians with the skills to implement them. Some pieces are in place -- Bugzilla, for instance, can be really useful -- but what we don't have is a straightforward and effective collection of practices and technical tools that smoothly support this kind of collaboration. Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]] On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 5:59 AM, Rui Correia correia@gmail.com wrote: Can't we create a way that will simplify merge propsals into a simple 1-minute procedure? A template with: Merger [Quercitrin] into [Quercitin], Motivation [bla bla bla] that would automatically display the merge notice on all revelant pages? Best regards, Rui -- _ Rui Correia Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Work Consultant Bridge to Angola - Angola Liaison Consultant Mobile Number in South Africa +27 74 425 4186 Número de Telemóvel na África do Sul +27 74 425 4186 ___ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
I would like to make a couple of contradictory points... One, WMF and the editing communities should seek more, better *external* reviews with some preference ... What we ourselves find and decide about our content is less valuable than unbiased external reviews. That doesn't mean external reviews will automatically be better quality, but external viewpoints are inherently valuable. WMF sponsored but not influenced external studies may be an acceptable balance point, but that should be carefully thought about. Two, internal studies are also valuable, but should be done carefully. I have not yet had a chance to follow up the internal study links upthread. The advantage here is that if we can establish criteria that are reasonably robust and externally-reviewed-and-supported, then having internal reviewers rank versus those criteria is likely to get a lot more quantity of review results. On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 10:13 AM, edward edw...@logicmuseum.com wrote: On 08/05/2014 17:58, geni wrote: So while it is unlikely that a published journal article would be a complete hoax This is because they have a robust review process, which Wikipedia doesn't. Enough said. Please robustly define glaring. Glaring means obvious, in plain view, manifest etc. I gave some examples here http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/02/23/islands-of-sanity/ One example:It can be speculated that one of the first people in Europe who consulted the map was William Vorilong, noted philosopher from England, who was shown the map while travelling with japanese visitor Yoshimitsu Kage. William was French, not English. And he never visited Japan. Please also understand if I don't accept you as an impartial source on the matter rendering your subjective judgements of limited value. They are not subjective judgments, see above. 'Glaring' /= 'subjective'. Why don't you accept me as an impartial source? Because I have written articles critical of Wikipedia? Oh right. Some of these problems can be fixed. But fixing problems means recognising there is a problem, no? Edward ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 10:13 AM, edward edw...@logicmuseum.com wrote: On 08/05/2014 17:58, geni wrote: So while it is unlikely that a published journal article would be a complete hoax This is because they have a robust review process, which Wikipedia doesn't. Enough said. Geni did say unlikely, not it never happens: http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763 By which I which I don't mean to say most literature is useless or a fraud: it's not! But it's also not a 100% black or white picture. -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at gmail.com * ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
By which I which I don't mean to say most literature is useless or a fraud: it's not! But it's also not a 100% black or white picture. -- phoebe The 'not perfect ' fallacy. Peer reviewed literature is not perfect Wikipedia is not perfect Ergo, Wikipedia is equally good as peer reviewed literature You can see that's not valid, right? All I can say is that from my experience of my limited area of expertise, Wikipedia articles on the subject fall far short of what you would find elsewhere (e.g. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). E ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
As Phoebe and (I think) Anne point out, there are many relevant aspects of quality. Readability, pertinence, neutrality, concision and comprehensiveness are all important factors but, when it comes to safety and efficacy claims in our medical articles, for me they pale into insignificance beside that other element of quality: veracity. I agree with those above who highlight the flaws in the current scholarly peer-review process. If enWikipedia is to embrace scholarly review (and we should) we need to confront and address the well-known problems with peer review in today's scholarship. Whether we use scholars to assess the veracity, pertinence, comprehensiveness and neutrality of our articles as part of a self-assessment process, or as a service to our readers, I believe the quality of our scholarly review must be beyond reproach. Above I mention the journal Open Medicine has peer-reviewed a version of Wikipedia's Dengue fever thanks to the tireless efforts of Doc James and others (not me). I see this as a significant threshold. Once that article is published in the journal, James will be adding a clickable icon to the top of the current Wikipedia version, linking the reader to the PubMed abstract (or PubMed Central full version - I'm not sure which). I know nothing about Open Medicine's editorial or review processes, though. As a start - to break this new ground - I am delighted to have this go forward as it is. But can we bend our minds now - or soon - to the question of whose reviewed versions should we be linking to. If the Journal of the New Zealand Acupuncture Society reviews and publishes a version of our Acupuncture article, do we link to it at the top of the article? If the Lancet - publishers of Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent MMR vaccine-autism-collitis paper overcomes its issues with CC-BY-SA and reviews and publishes a version of Cancer, do we link to it? I have a lot more to say on this issue but would like to hear some civil, thoughtful responses to the above before ploughing ahead. Let me say again, to be very clear, I support linking to the reviewed version of Dengue fever. It is after all virtually identical to Wikipedia's current version, and any differences in the current version have not had the added filter of expert eyse from the scholarly-review process. But it is time for us to start thinking carefully and talking amongst ourselves about the question of scholarly review. Anthony Cole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole Anthony Cole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 1:56 AM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 10:13 AM, edward edw...@logicmuseum.com wrote: On 08/05/2014 17:58, geni wrote: So while it is unlikely that a published journal article would be a complete hoax This is because they have a robust review process, which Wikipedia doesn't. Enough said. Geni did say unlikely, not it never happens: http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763 By which I which I don't mean to say most literature is useless or a fraud: it's not! But it's also not a 100% black or white picture. -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at gmail.com * ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On 8 May 2014 17:42, edward edw...@logicmuseum.com wrote: Geni: You seem to think its straightforward. If you think that you should be able to propose a study design. It is straightforward in my field. I have already studied most of the Wikipedia articles in that area, and they all contain glaring errors. Your area is philosophy, and an obscure area at that. The thread is talking about medicine. - d. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On 8 May 2014 19:27, Anthony Cole ahcole...@gmail.com wrote: I agree with those above who highlight the flaws in the current scholarly peer-review process. If enWikipedia is to embrace scholarly review (and we should) we need to confront and address the well-known problems with peer review in today's scholarship. While acknowledging the likely truth of the flaws in scientific knowledge production as it stands (single studies in medicine being literally useless, as 80% are actually wrong) ... I think you'll have a bit of an uphill battle attempting to enforce stronger standards in Wikipedia than exist in the field itself. We could go to requiring all medical sourced to be Cochrane-level studies of studies of studies, but then you need to convince everyone else to delete the entirety of the long tail of articles that won't yet have those. - d. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
Maybe the name of the thread should be changed, then. ,Wil On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 12:11 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 8 May 2014 17:42, edward edw...@logicmuseum.com wrote: Geni: You seem to think its straightforward. If you think that you should be able to propose a study design. It is straightforward in my field. I have already studied most of the Wikipedia articles in that area, and they all contain glaring errors. Your area is philosophy, and an obscure area at that. The thread is talking about medicine. - d. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
-- Forwarded message -- From: David Gerard dger...@gmail.com Date: Thu, May 8, 2014 at 12:15 PM Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org On 8 May 2014 19:27, Anthony Cole ahcole...@gmail.com wrote: I agree with those above who highlight the flaws in the current scholarly peer-review process. If enWikipedia is to embrace scholarly review (and we should) we need to confront and address the well-known problems with peer review in today's scholarship. While acknowledging the likely truth of the flaws in scientific knowledge production as it stands (single studies in medicine being literally useless, as 80% are actually wrong) ... I think you'll have a bit of an uphill battle attempting to enforce stronger standards in Wikipedia than exist in the field itself. We could go to requiring all medical sourced to be Cochrane-level studies of studies of studies, That actually is the current best practice for medical articles in English, I believe, and I think it's a good one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MEDRS Sourcing to reviews when possible is particularly relevant for a field (like medicine) that has a well-established tradition of conducting and publishing systematic reviews -- but I find it a useful practice in lots of areas, on the theory that reviews are generally more helpful for someone trying to find out more about a topic. Anthony: I hear you about veracity being particularly important in medical articles; and I don't mean to get us too far in the weeds about what quality means -- there's lots to do on lots of articles that I think would be pretty obvious quality improvement, including straight-up fact-checking. -- phoebe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On 08/05/2014 20:11, David Gerard wrote: Your area is philosophy, and an obscure area at that. My specialism covers the intellectual history of Western Europe from 400 CE to 1400 CE roughly. In the history of logic, right up to the late nineteenth century. If you remember, I wrote the first version (mostly unchanged today) of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo_set_theory . It's probably obscure relative to Pokemon studies and TV shows, sorry about that. The thread is talking about medicine. The thread is called Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles, and it opens Could someone please point me to all the studies the WMF have conducted into the reliability of Wikipedia's content? I'm particularly interested in the medical content, **but would also like to look over the others too**. Erik mentioned the flawed Oxford study, which was in my area. With every kind wish. Edward ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On 8 May 2014 01:56, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: (However, this study does not seem to have been based on a random sample – at least I cannot find any mention of the sample selection method in the study's write-up. The selection of a random sample is key to any such effort, and the method used to select the sample should be described in detail in any resulting report.) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EPIC_Oxford_report.pdf Section 3.3 of the report covers article selection. They went about it backwards (at least, backwards to the way you might expect) - recruiting reviewers and then manually identifying relevant articles, as the original goal was to use relevant topics for individual specialists. Even this selective method didn't work as well as might be hoped, because the mechanism of the study required a minimum level of content - the articles had to be substantial enough to be useful for a comparison, and of sufficient length and comparable scope in both sets of sources - which ruled out many of the initial selections. (This is a key point to remember: the study effectively assesses the quality of a subset of developed articles in Wikipedia, rather than the presumably less-good fragmentary ones. It's a valid question to ask, but not always the one people think it's answering...) Thus the selection of articles was constrained by two important factors: one, the need to find topics appropriate for the academics whom we were able to recruit to the project; secondly, that articles from different online encyclopaedias were of comparable substance and focus. (Such factors would need to be taken carefully into account when embarking on a future large-scale study, where the demands of finding large numbers of comparable articles are likely to be considerable.) You'd need to adopt a fairly different methodology if you wanted a random sampling; I suppose you could prefilter a sample by likely to be suitable metrics (eg minimum size, article title matching a title list from the other reference works) and randomly select from within *those*, but of course you would still have the fundamental issue that you're essentially reviewing a selected portion of the project. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
I will just add that I agree [content] Quality is a strategic goal we have made little systematic progress on (much progress was made in sheer coverage, of course, e.g. via funding and support for content-centered initiatives such as writing and photo competitions). In the Grantmaking department, we are definitely interested in ideas and proposals to improve (and measure) quality of content on the projects, and not just of outside assessors, but also internal approaches to assessing quality (serving different purposes, to be sure). I encourage those with concrete ideas to propose something, perhaps in the IdeaLab[1], for further development and refinement. Asaf [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab -- Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation http://www.wikimediafoundation.org Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! https://donate.wikimedia.org ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On 08/05/2014 22:29, Andrew Gray wrote: Section 3.3 of the report covers article selection. They went about it backwards (at least, backwards to the way you might expect) - recruiting reviewers and then manually identifying relevant articles, as the original goal was to use relevant topics for individual specialists. Even this selective method didn't work as well as might be hoped, because the mechanism of the study required a minimum level of content - the articles had to be substantial enough to be useful for a comparison, and of sufficient length and comparable scope in both sets of sources - which ruled out many of the initial selections. After it was published I emailed both the epic and the Oxford team to understand why they chose the articles they did. I was unable to get a satisfactory answer. The method of selecting the most notable philosopher-theologians from a certain period is a good one. There is no reason it has to be random, so long as there is a clearly defined selection method. However, they were unable to explain why of the most notable subjects, they chose Aquinas and Anselm. I suspect there was a selection bias, as those were the articles which 'looked' the best. (The ones on Ockham and Scotus were so obviously vandalised that even a novice would have spotted the problem). Even then, as I have already pointed out above, they missed the fact that the Anselm article was plagiarised from Britannica 1911, so that instead of comparing Britannica to Wikiepedia, they were comparing Britannica 2011 with Britannica 1911. And they missed some bad errors that had been introduced by Wikipedia editors when they attempted to modernise the old Britannica prose. To give a simple example that even Geni will have to concede is not 'subjectively wrong', the Wikipedia article on Anselm said Anselm wrote many proofs within Monologion and Proslogion. In the first proof, Anselm relies on the ordinary grounds of realism, which coincide to some extent with the theory of Augustine. This is a mangled version of the B1911 which reads This demonstration is the substance of the Monologion and Proslogion. In the first of these the proof rests on the ordinary grounds of realism You see what went wrong? 'first of these' should refer to the first book, namely Monologion. But one editor removed This demonstration is the substance of the Monologion and Proslogion as being too difficult for ordinary readers, leaving 'first of these'. Another editor came along and thought it referred to the first proof. This is quite incorrect. I am still amazed the Oxford team didn't spot this. Even if you don't know the article was lifted from B1911, the oddity of the assertion should have rung alarm bells. There are about 9 other mistakes of differing severity. On 08/05/2014 22:29, Andrew Gray wrote: On 8 May 2014 01:56, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: (However, this study does not seem to have been based on a random sample – at least I cannot find any mention of the sample selection method in the study's write-up. The selection of a random sample is key to any such effort, and the method used to select the sample should be described in detail in any resulting report.) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EPIC_Oxford_report.pdf Section 3.3 of the report covers article selection. They went about it backwards (at least, backwards to the way you might expect) - recruiting reviewers and then manually identifying relevant articles, as the original goal was to use relevant topics for individual specialists. Even this selective method didn't work as well as might be hoped, because the mechanism of the study required a minimum level of content - the articles had to be substantial enough to be useful for a comparison, and of sufficient length and comparable scope in both sets of sources - which ruled out many of the initial selections. (This is a key point to remember: the study effectively assesses the quality of a subset of developed articles in Wikipedia, rather than the presumably less-good fragmentary ones. It's a valid question to ask, but not always the one people think it's answering...) Thus the selection of articles was constrained by two important factors: one, the need to find topics appropriate for the academics whom we were able to recruit to the project; secondly, that articles from different online encyclopaedias were of comparable substance and focus. (Such factors would need to be taken carefully into account when embarking on a future large-scale study, where the demands of finding large numbers of comparable articles are likely to be considerable.) You'd need to adopt a fairly different methodology if you wanted a random sampling; I suppose you could prefilter a sample by likely to be suitable metrics (eg minimum size, article title matching a title list from the other reference works) and randomly select from within *those*, but of course you would
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Sponsorship/donations to other organizations
Hello, I began to write a new thread about spam control, then remembered this recent one on a similar topic. Integrating spam control more deeply into all of our tools and services - including particularly MediaWiki - is important for many audiences. Is there an overview of current anti-spam tech (for MW in particular, but related: for our preferred Ticket-handling and Mailing-list toolchains), and projected roadmaps? Comparisons with the best known proprietary tools, to see what remains to be built? This strikes me as something that we and the FSF and other groups could collaborate on. Sam On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 3:26 PM, Tilman Bayer tba...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi Cristian, On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Cristian Consonni kikkocrist...@gmail.com wrote: 2014-04-18 0:46 GMT+02:00 Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org: * There is a specific need, a conference we could support, a developer event or something we could help out with. There is a clear goal, and it is one-time. We have a clear benefit. For example: helping OTRS to become less messy. [OT] As a Wikimedia list moderator (just a couple, the Wiki Loves Monuments ones) I am ready to pay gold for anything that would reduce the amount of spam in the queues be it a better spam filter, a system to delete spam from multiple lists at once, magic or whatever! Cristian p.s.: pay gold is a figure of speech, but I would definitely personally support such a project! yeah, as moderator on some other lists, I share your feelings about spam. Note though that SpamAssassin is already running in our Mailman installation [...] The current blocker is that it is generating some false positives, i.e. someone would need to spend time to tweak and test the settings: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56525 So it looks we have to some of our own homework first here. But if it turns out that there are limitations in SpamAssassin which we could help them overcome to make it more effective for our purposes, that might be a very good use of donor money. (As an example concerning your suggestion for a system to delete spam from multiple lists at once: I'm not sure if SpamAssassin is currently integrated with Mailman in a way that enables it to learn from list moderator actions immediately. See e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpamAssassin#Bayesian_filtering http://www.jamesh.id.au/articles/mailman-spamassassin/ -- The Future ) ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
[Wikimedia-l] FDC staff proposal assessments for 2013-2014 Round 2 are posted
Greetings, all: Staff proposal assessments have been posted on Meta for three proposals that were submitted in 2013-2014 Round 2. At the FDC's request, FDC staff have not published an assessment for the WMF proposal; however, an assessment of the WMF proposal has been published by WMDE. The proposal assessments are each linked to from the Proposals page for this round: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/FDC_portal/Proposals/2013-2014_round2http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Proposals/2013-2014_round2 . You may also visit an overview of the financial information presented in these proposals, which includes information for all proposals in this round: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/Financial_overview . The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) makes recommendations about how to allocate Wikimedia movement funds to support an organization’s overall annual plan to achieve mission objectives. We encourage you to visit the portal if you would like more information about the FDC process, or would like to discuss the process: http://meta.wikimedia .org/wiki/Grants:APG/FDC_portal. Staff proposal assessments are but one of many inputs into the FDC process. With this round's assessments we (FDC staff) have included a more detailed explanation of our methodology. The assessments reflect the work of FDC staff who read the proposals, review past and current reports, receive internal input from WMF Finance, Programs, Legal, and Grantmaking, and consider a portfolio view across all proposals in this round. They do not reflect the analysis or views of the FDC or any of its individual members. The FDC will meet in late may to deliberate on these proposals, and will consider these staff proposal assessments along with many other inputs into the FDC process. For more information about the purpose of these assessments and how they fit into the FDC process overall, please visit: http://meta. wikimedia .org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Framework_for_the_Creation_and_Initial_Operation_of_the_FDC#Process_overview . We welcome discussion about individual assessments on the discussion page of each assessment, or discussion about the process overall on the FDC portal: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Comments https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Comments*. Best regards from FDC staff! Winifred -- Winifred Olliff FDC Support Team Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Integrating spam control
Samuel Klein wrote: Integrating spam control more deeply into all of our tools and services - including particularly MediaWiki - is important for many audiences. Many MediaWiki system administrators complain about the levels of spam that their small wikis receive. Any help in this area would almost certainly be appreciated. The ever-helpful wm-bot in #mediawiki offers two links: wm-bot For information about combating and handling spam in MediaWiki, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-spam_features. Is there an overview of current anti-spam tech (for MW in particular, but related: for our preferred Ticket-handling and Mailing-list toolchains), and projected roadmaps? I don't think any of this exists directly, but it'd probably be nice to have. For mailman (mailing lists), I believe we use SpamAssassin and mailman's built-in list moderation. OTRS (ticket handling) receives a lot of spam, but I think a good portion of it gets appropriately filtered. Rjd0060 or another OTRS admin could speak to this more precisely. MediaWiki (the Wikimedia wikis) have anti-spam bots, global and local link blacklists, global and local AbuseFilter filters, a few dedicated MediaWiki extensions, and probably a dozen or more other tools that I can't remember right now. Spam prevention often quickly gets into a discussion of CAPTCHAs, which I can briefly and vaguely recap. We have a refresh button on the CAPTCHA displayed on Wikimedia wikis now. Due to how easy they can be broken, I'm not sure we'll ever have audio CAPTCHAs, though there's continued demand. Foreign language CAPTCHAs could maybe be coming soon, if we can figure out how to not make them impossibly hard due to accented characters. And there's perennial discussion of tying in Wikisource and its manual optical character recognition (OCR) work with a CAPTCHA system, as reCAPTCHA, now owned by Google, continues to remain a non-starter. In terms of integrating spam control, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. It's largely a cat-and-mouse game involving pattern detection and recognition. I don't imagine there's any one size fits all solution here, though as said, I imagine any help we can give or receive in the area of spam mitigation would be welcome. It also occurs to me that you may be interested in pages such as https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FLOSS-Exchange as well. Hope that helps. If you have more specific questions, please ask. :-) MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
[Wikimedia-l] Commons' frontpage probably shouldn't prominently feature a decontextualised stack of corpses.
Hi all - This is a slightly unusual email for me, in that I'm wearing more hats than I usually do. I'm writing as a community member, but also as someone currently employed by one of the best public universities in the world in a department that is, at least in decent part, aimed at ensuring that injustices of the past do not go forgotten. This email represents my own opinions alone, mostly because I don't want to go through the process of getting approval for any sort of formal statement, and also don't view doing so as necessary, but it does highlight my views as someone actively employed by a major university, and not just as an editor. Today, Common's front page highlighted a video taken shortly after the liberation of Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps to operate on German soil during the second world war, where more than 50,000 people lost their lives. (Since Commons apparently uses UTC, it's already changed to a different piece of media.) For reasons that baffle me a bit, the video screenshot displayed on Commons' frontpage is that of a stack of corpses, taken from a five minute long video (that is primarily not stacks of corpses.) To make things worse: because Commons only supports open video formats, an overwhelming majority of people who look at the Commons frontpage in any one day are not using a browser that can view the actual video - so they would've only been able to see a photo of stacked up corpses, with no accompanying video (and no accompanying explanation if they didn't speak english or one of four other languages.) The caption of the video does hyperlink to the English Wikipedia's article about Buchenwald, but displays only after the graphic image and video link. I want to be clear: I'm not objecting in any way whatsoever to the fact that the Wikimedia Commons contains a video of Buchenwald. I would be disturbed if we /didn't/ have a video like this on Commons. It is of great historical significance, and it's a video that absolutely needs to be on Commons. In fact, it's a video that I think should probably have appeared on Commons frontpage sooner or later... just not like this. The same video is played in multiple classes at UC Berkeley, after the context behind the video is given and people are warned about the nature of what they're about to see. Even in that setting, I've pretty regularly seen people burst into tears upon watching the video that Commons links today. Such video evidence of the atrocities committed by Hitler's regime plays an incredibly important role in understanding the past, but what differentiates an effort to understand the past and a shock site can pretty much be summed up as contextualisation. A video with explanation of its context and some degree of warning before a pile of corpses is displayed is a large part of the difference between a shock site and documenting history. Common's front page today leans a lot more towards the shock site aspect than the documenting history one. This isn't the first time that Commons frontpage has featured content that, while often appropriate material to be hosted by Commons, has been framed in an inappropriate way likely to cause dismay, upset, or scandal to the average Wikimedia Commons viewer. It flies in the face of the WMF-board endorsed principle of least astonishment - [1] - no one expects to click on Commons homepage to see a still image of a stack of corpses at Buchenwald. This is not the first time that Commons administrators and bureaucrats have drastically abrogated the principle of least astonishment, and the continued tendency of those in charge of Commons to ignore such a principle makes me hesitate to recommend the Wikimedia Commons to my students or my colleagues. In fact - if there was an easy way to completely bypass Commons - at this point I would suggest to my students and colleagues that they do so. I don't want to (and given another option will not) recommend using Wikimedia Commons to professional edu or GLAM colleagues knowing that when they show up at it's front page they may happen upon bad anime porn or a completely uncontextualised stack of corpses. I can think of absolutely no legitimate reason why anyone thought it was a good idea to highlight a video of Buchenwald on Common's main page by using a freezeframe of a stack of corpses from a broader video. If we want to gain truly mainstream acceptance in the education and GLAM world (and thus greatly improve our acceptance among the general public as a side effect,) Commons cannot keep doing stuff like this. I know that project content decisions are normally left up to the individual project, but as Commons is a project that by its nature effects all other projects, I don't think discussion of this issue should be limited to those who frequent commons. Because of that, and because I'm not sure that meaningful change cannot come from the current Commons administration without outside pressure, I'm starting a
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons' frontpage probably shouldn't prominently feature a decontextualised stack of corpses.
Have you discussed this on commons, or just trying to bypass them? On Friday, May 9, 2014, Kevin Gorman kgor...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all - This is a slightly unusual email for me, in that I'm wearing more hats than I usually do. I'm writing as a community member, but also as someone currently employed by one of the best public universities in the world in a department that is, at least in decent part, aimed at ensuring that injustices of the past do not go forgotten. This email represents my own opinions alone, mostly because I don't want to go through the process of getting approval for any sort of formal statement, and also don't view doing so as necessary, but it does highlight my views as someone actively employed by a major university, and not just as an editor. Today, Common's front page highlighted a video taken shortly after the liberation of Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps to operate on German soil during the second world war, where more than 50,000 people lost their lives. (Since Commons apparently uses UTC, it's already changed to a different piece of media.) For reasons that baffle me a bit, the video screenshot displayed on Commons' frontpage is that of a stack of corpses, taken from a five minute long video (that is primarily not stacks of corpses.) To make things worse: because Commons only supports open video formats, an overwhelming majority of people who look at the Commons frontpage in any one day are not using a browser that can view the actual video - so they would've only been able to see a photo of stacked up corpses, with no accompanying video (and no accompanying explanation if they didn't speak english or one of four other languages.) The caption of the video does hyperlink to the English Wikipedia's article about Buchenwald, but displays only after the graphic image and video link. I want to be clear: I'm not objecting in any way whatsoever to the fact that the Wikimedia Commons contains a video of Buchenwald. I would be disturbed if we /didn't/ have a video like this on Commons. It is of great historical significance, and it's a video that absolutely needs to be on Commons. In fact, it's a video that I think should probably have appeared on Commons frontpage sooner or later... just not like this. The same video is played in multiple classes at UC Berkeley, after the context behind the video is given and people are warned about the nature of what they're about to see. Even in that setting, I've pretty regularly seen people burst into tears upon watching the video that Commons links today. Such video evidence of the atrocities committed by Hitler's regime plays an incredibly important role in understanding the past, but what differentiates an effort to understand the past and a shock site can pretty much be summed up as contextualisation. A video with explanation of its context and some degree of warning before a pile of corpses is displayed is a large part of the difference between a shock site and documenting history. Common's front page today leans a lot more towards the shock site aspect than the documenting history one. This isn't the first time that Commons frontpage has featured content that, while often appropriate material to be hosted by Commons, has been framed in an inappropriate way likely to cause dismay, upset, or scandal to the average Wikimedia Commons viewer. It flies in the face of the WMF-board endorsed principle of least astonishment - [1] - no one expects to click on Commons homepage to see a still image of a stack of corpses at Buchenwald. This is not the first time that Commons administrators and bureaucrats have drastically abrogated the principle of least astonishment, and the continued tendency of those in charge of Commons to ignore such a principle makes me hesitate to recommend the Wikimedia Commons to my students or my colleagues. In fact - if there was an easy way to completely bypass Commons - at this point I would suggest to my students and colleagues that they do so. I don't want to (and given another option will not) recommend using Wikimedia Commons to professional edu or GLAM colleagues knowing that when they show up at it's front page they may happen upon bad anime porn or a completely uncontextualised stack of corpses. I can think of absolutely no legitimate reason why anyone thought it was a good idea to highlight a video of Buchenwald on Common's main page by using a freezeframe of a stack of corpses from a broader video. If we want to gain truly mainstream acceptance in the education and GLAM world (and thus greatly improve our acceptance among the general public as a side effect,) Commons cannot keep doing stuff like this. I know that project content decisions are normally left up to the individual project, but as Commons is a project that by its nature effects all other projects, I don't think discussion of this issue should be
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons' frontpage probably shouldn't prominently feature a decontextualised stack of corpses.
There are multiple comments on Common's mainpage talk about this, as well as one at their administrator's noticeboard. As I mentioned in my first post, since Commons is a project that by its nature effects all other projects, I don't think discussion of this issue should be limited to those who frequent talk pages on commons. Additionally, I'm not sure that meaningful change can come from the current Commons administration without outside pressure, so I've started a discussion here. As said in my OP, I've explicitly mentioned this thread on Common's mainpage talk so that interested commonites who desire to comment can do so here or there. -- Kevin Gorman Wikipedian-in-Residence American Cultures Program UC Berkeley On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 8:15 PM, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote: Have you discussed this on commons, or just trying to bypass them? On Friday, May 9, 2014, Kevin Gorman kgor...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all - This is a slightly unusual email for me, in that I'm wearing more hats than I usually do. I'm writing as a community member, but also as someone currently employed by one of the best public universities in the world in a department that is, at least in decent part, aimed at ensuring that injustices of the past do not go forgotten. This email represents my own opinions alone, mostly because I don't want to go through the process of getting approval for any sort of formal statement, and also don't view doing so as necessary, but it does highlight my views as someone actively employed by a major university, and not just as an editor. Today, Common's front page highlighted a video taken shortly after the liberation of Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps to operate on German soil during the second world war, where more than 50,000 people lost their lives. (Since Commons apparently uses UTC, it's already changed to a different piece of media.) For reasons that baffle me a bit, the video screenshot displayed on Commons' frontpage is that of a stack of corpses, taken from a five minute long video (that is primarily not stacks of corpses.) To make things worse: because Commons only supports open video formats, an overwhelming majority of people who look at the Commons frontpage in any one day are not using a browser that can view the actual video - so they would've only been able to see a photo of stacked up corpses, with no accompanying video (and no accompanying explanation if they didn't speak english or one of four other languages.) The caption of the video does hyperlink to the English Wikipedia's article about Buchenwald, but displays only after the graphic image and video link. I want to be clear: I'm not objecting in any way whatsoever to the fact that the Wikimedia Commons contains a video of Buchenwald. I would be disturbed if we /didn't/ have a video like this on Commons. It is of great historical significance, and it's a video that absolutely needs to be on Commons. In fact, it's a video that I think should probably have appeared on Commons frontpage sooner or later... just not like this. The same video is played in multiple classes at UC Berkeley, after the context behind the video is given and people are warned about the nature of what they're about to see. Even in that setting, I've pretty regularly seen people burst into tears upon watching the video that Commons links today. Such video evidence of the atrocities committed by Hitler's regime plays an incredibly important role in understanding the past, but what differentiates an effort to understand the past and a shock site can pretty much be summed up as contextualisation. A video with explanation of its context and some degree of warning before a pile of corpses is displayed is a large part of the difference between a shock site and documenting history. Common's front page today leans a lot more towards the shock site aspect than the documenting history one. This isn't the first time that Commons frontpage has featured content that, while often appropriate material to be hosted by Commons, has been framed in an inappropriate way likely to cause dismay, upset, or scandal to the average Wikimedia Commons viewer. It flies in the face of the WMF-board endorsed principle of least astonishment - [1] - no one expects to click on Commons homepage to see a still image of a stack of corpses at Buchenwald. This is not the first time that Commons administrators and bureaucrats have drastically abrogated the principle of least astonishment, and the continued tendency of those in charge of Commons to ignore such a principle makes me hesitate to recommend the Wikimedia Commons to my students or my colleagues. In fact - if there was an easy way to completely bypass Commons - at this point I would suggest to my students and colleagues that they do so. I don't want to
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons' frontpage probably shouldn't prominently feature a decontextualised stack of corpses.
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 10:10 PM, Kevin Gorman kgor...@gmail.com wrote: Can anyone articulate a valid reason why the freezeframe from the video posted on the frontpage was just about the most graphic still possible from the video? Presumably the person who set up the templates thought that was the best frame to use.[1] You should ask him what his reasoning was. It looks like a single person is handling Commons' MOTD rotation,[2][3] so I would guess that very few people actually saw what the thumb would be beforehand. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Motd/2014-05-08_thumbtimeaction=history [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Media_of_the_day/Archive_1#Nomination:_File:SFP_186_-_Buchenwald.webm [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Pristurusoldid=113169491#Regarding_featured_videos ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons' frontpage probably shouldn't prominently feature a decontextualised stack of corpses.
Maybe a simple solution to this is just having more process for which still frame to use for any MOTD video. Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 12:00 AM, Benjamin Lees emufarm...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 10:10 PM, Kevin Gorman kgor...@gmail.com wrote: Can anyone articulate a valid reason why the freezeframe from the video posted on the frontpage was just about the most graphic still possible from the video? Presumably the person who set up the templates thought that was the best frame to use.[1] You should ask him what his reasoning was. It looks like a single person is handling Commons' MOTD rotation,[2][3] so I would guess that very few people actually saw what the thumb would be beforehand. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Motd/2014-05-08_thumbtimeaction=history [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Media_of_the_day/Archive_1#Nomination:_File:SFP_186_-_Buchenwald.webm [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Pristurusoldid=113169491#Regarding_featured_videos ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
