You may contact them directly with your concerns what I guess many did after they published their study.
here is their homepage: http://wwm.phy.bme.hu/ Cheers, Balázs 2013/7/21 MZMcBride <[email protected]> > Anders Wennersten wrote: > >A most interesting study looking at findings from 10 different language > >versions. > > > >Jesus and Middle east are the most controversial articles seen over the > >world, but George Bush on en:wp and Chile on es:wp > > > >http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.5566.pdf > > Thanks for sharing this. > > I had a bit of free time last night waiting for trains and I skimmed > through the study and its findings. Two points stuck out at me: a > seemingly fatally flawed methodology and the age of data used. > > The methodology used in this study seems to be pretty inherently flawed. > According to the paper, controversiality was measured by full page > reverts, which are fairly trivial to identify and study in a database dump > (using cryptographic hashes, as the study did), but I don't think full > reverts give an accurate impression _at all_ of which articles are the > most controversial. > > Pages with many full reverts are indicative of pages that are heavily > vandalized. For example, the "George W. Bush" article is/was heavily > vandalized for years on the English Wikipedia. Does blanking the article > or replacing its contents with the word "penis" mean that it's a very > controversial article? Of course not. Measuring only full reverts (as the > study seems to have done, though it's certainly possible I've overlooked > something) seems to be really misleading and inaccurate. > > In order to measure how controversial an article is, there are a number of > metrics that could be used, though of course no metric is perfect and many > metrics can be very difficult to accurately and rigorously measure: > > * amount of talk page discussion generated for each article; > * number of page watchers; > * number of page views (possibly); > * number of arbitration cases or other dispute resolution procedures > related to the article (perhaps a key metric in determining which articles > are truly most controversial); and > * edit frequency and time between certain edits and partial or full > reverts of those edits. > > There are likely a number of other metrics that could be used as well to > measure controversiality; these were simply off the top of my head. > > The second point that stuck out at me was that the study relied on a > database dump from March 2010. While this may be unavoidable, being over > three years later, this introduces obvious bias into the data and its > findings. Put another way, for the English Wikipedia started in 2001, this > omits a quarter of the project's history(!). Again, given the length of > time needed to draft and prepare a study, this gap may very well be > unavoidable, but it certainly made me raise an eyebrow. > > One final comment I had from briefly reading the study was that in the > past few years we've made good strides in making research like this > easier. Not that computing cryptographic hashes is particularly intensive, > but these days we now store such hashes directly in the database (though > we store SHA-1 hashes, not MD5 hashes as the study used). Storing these > hashes in the database saves researchers the need to compute the hashes > themselves and allows MediaWiki and other software the ability to easily > and quickly detect full reverts. > > MZMcBride > > P.S. Noting that this study is still a draft, I happened to notice a small > typo on page nine: "We tried to a as diverse as possible sample including > West European [...]". Hopefully this can be corrected before formal > publication. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list > [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
