Platonides wrote: > Gregory Maxwell wrote: >> >> It's not reasonable by any human (or legal) standard to continue to >> misattribute in a case like that, yet addressing that case with some >> automatically generated report is not easy. > > There could be an override for some articles for outsiders, just to stop > misattribution in the time being, but it can't be treated as a solution. > If it attricutes a bot, the algorith is wrong and shall be fixed.
This particular case should be easy to fix, but only because we're fairly meticulous about flagging bot accounts. Essentially, we'd be falling back to a human saying "that account is a bot, don't attribute anything to it". Which, I suppose, is a fairly straightforward and objective decision to make, but it's still a human decision made according to someone's personal point of view. Certainly such a fix won't easily generalize to more controversial cases. > Add it to the tests and improve the algorithm. > One very important point of having an automated way of dealing with this > is precisely that it allows us to be completely neutral. > The "author reviewer" doesn't have a POV, it doesn't care that the > contributor is named "Willy on wheels" or "Gmaxwell". Sort of reminds me about the story somewhere in the Jargon File about closing one's eyes so that the room would be empty. Deciding who are the "major contributors" to an article is ultimately a subjective issue; it can be algorithmically approximated, given a suitable weighting function (such as "number of words contributed"), but ultimately the choice of the weighting function itself is to an extent a matter of personal opinion. Trying to achieve neutrality by focusing solely on purely objective metrics is likely to produce results that are neutral only in the sense that everyone can agree that they suck. > The hard part is obviously how to get that magic attribution tool. If at > least there would have been some convention on summary syntax to be used > when attributing someone else... Such a convention (or, better yet, a separate field for attributing edits to someone else) would help a lot. Of course, it would only be as reliable as the users entering the data, and wouldn't help with legacy edits. A particularly common and tricky use case would be text copied from one article to another (possibly across different wikis). Either the blame tool would have to chase such references (which seems impractical at least in cross-wiki cases) or it would have to rely on the users making the copy to correctly determine the actual author(s) of the copied text (a process which is highly error prone, even with computer assistance, and likely to lead to errors accumulating as text misattributed once is further copied using the incorrect attribution). Also, there would obviously have to be some way to correct attribution errors after the fact. Which, of course, leads to the question of who should be authorized to make such corrections, and how this would be any less subjective than revising the author list directly. -- Ilmari Karonen _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
