The term "algorithm" has picked up new meanings in popular culture, making it's meaning unclear without sufficient context.
What do you mean by "algorithm" in your email? On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 10:14 AM Daren Welsh <[email protected]> wrote: > > As research for a potential presentation topic at EMWCon 2020 [0], I'm > polling the community. > > What algorithms do you program into your wikis? I'm curious to learn about > technical methods, policies, and criteria for measuring "success". I'm > interested in this concept because of how algorithms are used in social > media tools and many have been called out for being "bad". So I wonder if > wikis are any better. And don't just limit the analogy to social media. > There's things like Amazon's suggested purchases or the stack exchange > voting system selecting a "correct" answer by election. For example, the > extension Watch Analytics recommends which pages need review based on how > many people have reviewed each changed page. I think there are > voting/rating systems for wikis. I wonder how those influence decisions. At > one time I was working on an extension that built on the idea of > contribution score, but I feared it would incentivize the "wrong" > behavior. > > I'm looking for how algorithms influence content presented to users, but > also if algorithms are used to make decisions. > > Here are some other examples of what I would consider algorithms in wikis: > > - Human driven voting systems like stack overflow > - Category and Property driven - Using Wikibase, Cargo, or SMW to > determine a priority or to identify a missing value > - Machine-learning - Antivandalism/spam tools > - Suggestions for which wiki pages to watch based on links between wiki > pages > - Suggestions for which wiki pages to review based on watchlists and how > many people have seen the page since it was last edited > - Suggestions for which users to collaborate with based on pages each > person has edited > - Contribution scores drive users to make more edits and to edit more > pages. Is this what we really want? > - Other? > > Of the algorithms you use in your wikis, how do you measure success? What > does it mean to say that your algorithm is "working" or "succeeding"? > > How do you know your algorithm is not inducing bias in a bad way? > > If you'd like to share any info on how you use algorithms and how you > measure success in using them, please reply directly to me (unless you want > to share with the list). I'd appreciate screenshots and other ways to help > me understand how your algorithm works and is used, so I can properly > represent it in my presentation. I hope to get enough responses to showcase > the flexibility of MediaWiki in how it can be used to drive decisions based > on knowledge. > > Daren > > [0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/EMWCon_Spring_2020 > > > __________________ > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Darenwelsh > http://mixcloud.com/darenwelsh > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
