Guardian: Wikipedia approaches its limits

This is a well-written article with lots of good analysis in it.

As Somey defined it, this it the "maintenance phase".

The "struggle" between "inclusionists" and "deletionists" is irrelevant to the more serious struggle between all the pitched camps of ideologues in Wikipedia. Both "inclusionist" and "deletionist" are reasonable philosophical attitudes that one can take toward the activity of editing an encyclopedia. However, the ideologues are neither, because they're in favor of including content that favors their personal agendas, and in favor of deleting content that opposes that agenda.

Sadly, the author of this article fails to recognize that Wikipedia's use as a ideological battleground is the perhaps the single largest problem Wikipedia faces, nor does he recognize that the protected status that the elite enjoy tends to further this problem as many of the elites are actively engaged in ideologically-driven editing. And it's the infighting between these groups that is creating the friction and the exclusiveness, not the dispute over inclusionism and deletionism.

did someone fix the newsfeed bot?

I fixed and trimmed the link (in my surviving role as emergency media forums thread mover) because these links appear unrefined and sprawl over the page, making the thread difficult to read.


Indeed. The "inclusionist vs deletionist" debate is one long yawn, and doesn't say much about WP. Occasionally it can shed some light, during BLP issues for example, but otherwise it's an inevitable and wholly predictable offshoot of creating a reference work.

It's also the phase where the process known as The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons is liable to occur.

The defense against the tragedy of the unmanaged commons is a functional governance mechanism, so as to avoid descending into the vicious cycle that depletes the scarce resource.

Notwithstanding the leadership of a few crusaders against corruption, I think it's a dicey proposition for WP to level up to a functional governance model.

Hear, hear. It's long since time that we ditched NPOV and started treating WP like any library, since it's as big as one. And we let kids loose in libraries, even if they want to snigger at the medical books. We might lock up the porn section of a university library, or even omit it (zOMG) but kids can find that elsewhere on the net, just as they can BLP and your social security number.

As an aside, how big is the print part of mainspace WP, minus the edit history? I wish somebody would tell me directly, if it's known. But you have to figure out how to subtract the photos, which have to take many times the info/storage space content of the print.

The three million articles have a long tail of stubs (as you will see using special:random) but about 10% of them (at a guess, from using this feature), say 300,000 articles, are more than 10 K. Minus photos may I guess that WP is at least 6 GB. You could put it all on a thumb drive, and if you want to serve the disadvantaged kid in the out-of-the-way place, perhaps you should JUST THAT (of course, you'd need minimally flagged/checked versions of each article). Thumb drives are getting cheap and so are readers-- the web 2.0 smart cell phone isn't the only model to knowledge, it's just the latest one.

6 MB = 3 million text pages = roughly 100,000 volumes. Perhaps half that, or twice that. Most kids in most of the world cannot get access to a library that large, except occasionally.

But the net is no better. When I was last in micronesia I kept asking about net access, and the answer was always the same: it was on main islands at school sites, and that was it. There were not villiages where every household had a computer and the net. Throughout South America, most net access is at internet cafes, and it's expensive (barely affordable even for tourists-- we're talking 50 cents US a minute, minimum.). The locals use it rarely, and they don't have it at home, at all (though they may have computers of a generation or so back). In Belize the whole country is victimized by a semi-private Beli-Tel system which keeps phone prices high and ignorance, too. Wikipedia isn't coming to the population that way, soon. But if you remember that most kids don't need to edit till they get enough money to do so, then you will remember that computers are much more widespread. With a cheap CD-ROM or even cheap 8 GB flashdrive (not quite here yet, but coming in a year or two; that's about the expensive high end now), you can have WP.

Once we have a flagged and stable version, if WMF is really intereted in doing something for the third world, they'll distribute something non-interactive like this. Don't hold your breath.

The OLPC computers were supposed to go out with a "stable subset" of Wikipedia on them. However, nobody was able to agree on what pages were appropriate for inclusion, and OLPC has had its share of difficulties as well; as far as I know, no version of the OLPC standard load has featured static Wikipedia content, as was promised to us with great vigor and excitement by Sam Klein at Wikimania 2006.

This is completely true, but reporting on the subject is hampered by a lack of objective evidence. You, I, or anyone can look at articles on Israel (T-H-L-K-D)/Palestine (T-H-L-K-D), Scientology (T-H-L-K-D), Evolution (T-H-L-K-D), or any number of other subjects and find skew, slant, demagoguery, and outright lies. However, these are all anecdotes. The cornerstones of modern journalism are (dare I say it) the "expert source", in this case, the PARC guy with the data, and the "human source", in this case some random editor.

If someone could figure out how to measure the POV-pushing and ownership of various articles, that would go a long way toward highlighting the inherent unreliability of Wikipedia over a multitude of subjects. But measuring POV is problematic. The first step, I venture would be to simple compile a list of biased and/or battleground articles, from Armenia (T-H-L-K-D) to Ireland (T-H-L-K-D) and from Evolution (T-H-L-K-D) to PETA (T-H-L-K-D). Some statistics on those articles and their owners might be illuminating.

Even so, this analysis might miss much. I came across an amusing ideological poke the other day on List of birds of Palestine (T-H-L-K-D), where well-known anti-Islamic editor (and former Jayjg (T-C-L-K-R-D) crony) IronDuke (T-C-L-K-R-D) passive-aggressively asks "can you say what is meant by "Palestine" in "Birds of Palestine"?" I had to laugh.

Not sure if it's possible to accurately measure POV. One solution is to simple publish a list of problems inherent to articles, listing biases etc. It would be something like Rational wiki's articles such as one the on Citizendium, but perhaps a lot more detailed then what they skim over:

http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Citizendium#Crank_magnet

I've no idea where you've been going for your net access, but throughout Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Brasil it's not expensive - the opposite, in fact - a couple of dollars an hour, max.

It's completely impossible to measure POV in any reasonably objective way. While it is easy enough to find qualified experts to check the accuracy of an article, it's nearly impossible to find anyone who would be universally considered a qualified expert to check the neutrality of an article. With a few notable exceptions, the articles that are the subject of the most POV-pushing on Wikipedia are the subject of the most POV-pushing in the real world. Beyond that, measuring bias is an inherently subjective task.

On the other hand, "ownership of various articles" could be measured with a method similar to the PARC study. Just take a sample of articles, and see how likely an edit made by someone who is not a major contributor to the article is to be reverted and you already have a fair measure for ownership.

Now this is an interesting idea. However, I'm not sure how to define "major contributor".

It might be interesting to have a metric that related the number of editors making nonreverted contributions to an article to the number of editors reverting contributions to the same article. It seems to me that an "owned" article will have a relatively small number of editors making nonreverted contributions. Contrariwise, an "unowned" article would have a larger number of editors making nonreverted contributions. The overlap between the set of nonreverted contributors and reverters would also be interesting.

I really should download a history dump sometime and play with it; problem is that I don't really have enough disk space, or processing power for that matter.

Interesting idea, but I'm not sure it works without adjusting for some other variables, especially the profile of an article's subject. For most of the articles I work on, I'm the only person even attempting to add substantive comment; pretty well all other edits are either automated typo correction/category replacement/formatting fixes, which when unreverted hardly demonstrate that the article is unowned, or vandalism, which when reverted hardly demonstrates that the article is owned.

I think it's important to look at how many people are doing the reverting; if a small number of people do all the reverting, then that might tend to suggest ownership. Not sure how to quantify this, though.

I am reminded of Colin M. Turnbull's seminal book, 'The Mountain People' (on the Ik people of Uganda). A study of what happens to a tribe when resources are reduced to subsistence and below. A sadly intelligent comment which will mean nothing to those who have not read widely.

"The Ik were forced into extreme individualistic practices in order to survive. Turnbull raised questions concerning basic human nature and made constant reference to how "goodness" and "virtue" are cast aside when there is nothing left but a need to survive ... drawing parallels to the individualism of 'civilized' society."

A bit like the Victorian "End of Science" predictions, "Death of the Wikipedia" reports have to be exaggerated ... BUT ... if it depends on, what, $ 6,000,000 a year, I could see that as becoming a problem to sustain. The Entropy Strikes Back.

I am sure that the Pee-dia, and its social and intellectual effluence, will be with us for a long time yet. Which is why it needs to be dealt and have it governance and management changed.

This is a good reminder Milton. I am sure that most of us were, at some point, touched and inspired by such a thought of doing our bit to help give "All the World's Knowledge" away. A 'mobile phone' applications on an SD memory stick is much more likely to reach out to those areas as technology improves and individuals adopt to it more quickly. The PC is much over-rated and by no means a universal necessity. Books in those conditions are much better.

However, I would not wish the current crap on anyone. Never mind not being spelt or capitalized properly and all the racism, can you imagine how the 'white man's ejaculation' animation and all the shaved vaginas would go down in Muslim states? Or perhaps its an "Encyclopedia for the Rest of Us ... except Muslims".

Perhaps some editorial team will come forward for a fraction of the sum it takes to sustain the Wiki-Drama, weed out all the crap and deliver such a device? And what of the 'One Laptop per Child' projects?

How to wind the whole thing down and move the MMORPG crowd off to their own closed, password protected virtual world?

You missed the part about what happens if you put all of WP on an 8 GB flashdrive. All the photos have to go. That's not such a bad thing, as such porn as is in "word form" on Wikipedia is rather de-fanged and clinical.

Racism on WP? Same thing. What remains is little more than ethnocentrism. I doubt it's going to destroy any young minds.

I did rather enjoy Cla68's explanation about how the US backed Japan "into a corner" in 1940 by cutting off their oil. Poor things. They'd lose so much face by having to back out of China after killing all those millions of people! Obviously they had no other choice but to bomb Pearl Harbor. We just didn't leave them with any alternative.*

In any case, before putting articles on the proposed flashdrive (to be read by PC not phone) you can have somebody vet the 3 million articles just by glancing at first page and title. Decision time to remove most of the ridiculous stuff by voting yea or nay: about a second. Realistically, this is a couple of person-years of work, at most, hitting one of two keys. Maybe as little as a person-year. That's another porn and stupid-stub filter. You could even automatically pre-remove stubs less than a certain length, and probably halve the work or even more than half. SO we're down to a some person-months. Put a few extra workers on it (secretarial types) and it's a month. Totally do-able without depending on a community of Shankbones to vet your articles for you.

Get to work, Wikipedia. Turn out something that's actually usable without the internet.

MR


*Except there are always alternatives. Germany had a pretty good synfuels program and the Japanese could have done some of that, and also traded for the rest. There were people in Indonesia and the South Pacific willing to sell oil, so long as the Japanese weren't interested in simply stealing by force. Had Japan withdrawn from China, no doubt that would have been easier. But if you are convinced that your own emperor have been given a mandate from the gods to rule the world, and that other races are inferior to you, then it's easy to convince yourself that you can bomb anybody you like, even the US, and they'll simply knuckle under, out of pure cowardice. When your view of the world is this screwed up, there's no reasoning with you. Yet in short order Japan had ample evidence of what kind of warriors the US Navy had, 5 months after Pearl when Japan was bombed by Dolittle, and 7 months after Pearl, when, in a roughly even battle, the US destroyed the entire attacking carrier force that had struck Pearl. Any reasonable government would have realized at that point that they had completely miscalculated and would lose. But even then, the Japanese warlords could not face reality. A three year struggle with what should be been understood to be inevitable by mid 1942 cost them more than 2 million dead, and all for nothing.

Milton,

Skipping over all the 'off topic' WWII patriot crap (yawn) ... because it is never a position I have actually argued or taken ... can I just underline, your concerns relate to some other point of view, not me or mine.

Please, if you want to knee jerk, find the right person to do it. Thank you.

Presumably you could just delete by category, e.g. porn, male anuses etc ... and 'joys of joys' (talking about male anuses) all the photos-by-david-shankbone.jpg would go in a blink!

I do not know about your travels but in mine I can certainly witness to the fact that mobile phones are spreading much faster. SD or MicroSD prices are way. Mobile chips are way beyond what is necessary to push around and read a couple of Gigs of text files around.

In terms of time, you are right though. And its a job perfectly capable of being outsourced to Bangalore etc where non-Freeculture sensibilities are certain to make better sense of it all.

But, realistically, how long will it take to correct all the typos, bad grammar and generally bad English?

Can we get the credit though ... "Inspired by Wikipediareview.com" and assure this forum is the port of call for millions of first time Pee-dians?

Someone fill a grant application to one of the big funding trusts, quick.



I could not agree with you more, Kid ... funny how they used to portray Japanese as being nearly Black in their propaganda.