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Follow Wikipediocracy on Twitter!After investigating whether Wikipedia works in theory, Kingsindian looks at whether Wikipedia works in practice.
…continue reading What can fact checkers learn from Wikipedia — how not to do things, perhaps? (Part 2)
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By Hersch As the Twenty-First Century drags on, more and more aspects of our daily lives are dominated by digital gizmos, and more and more common tasks are automated. So, then, why not Wikipedia? In recent years, automated programs, also known as robots or “bots,” have demonstrated that they can sign comments left on talk pages, revert vandalism, check for copyright violations on new pages, add or remove protection templates, and archive talk pages more expeditiously, with fewer errors, and with more civility and less drama than the human editors. Should we be looking forward to the day when Wikipedia will be fully automated, where bots will trawl the net for news sources and automatically include every last tidbit of gossipy trivia about celebrities or fictional television characters, rendering Wikipedia’s human editors entirely unnecessary? Ah, but I can hear the objections already. Can bots be programmed to be snarky and disingenuous? Will they be able to upload sexually explicit photos of themselves? I know that some of you are prepared to argue that there are some aspects of human behavior which can never be successfully duplicated by what some like to call “artificial intelligence.” And most importantly, from the standpoint of a crowd-sourced online neo-encyclopedia, can a bot push POV?* Does a bot even have a POV? These are questions which demand answers. In order explore the topic further, we present these YouTube videos where the bots themselves grapple with the most fundamental questions about what it means to be a Wikipedian.
* [for the novice reader, to “push POV” is WikiSpeak for the practice of slanting Wikipedia articles so that they conform to one’s own set of biases, or “point of view.”] (This blog post was originally published September 2, 2012) Video …continue reading Wikipedia: a Bot’s-Eye View By Sam Lee . Wikipedia organizes its article topics into categories, which assists the reader in locating articles related to a general field of interest… or, it helps propagandists to consolidate their preferred bias over a broad topic area, depending on your point of view. If you look at Category:Murdered Israeli children (T–H–L) you will note that all the listed 32 articles in this category have one thing in common: they were killed by Arabs, or, in a case where the killer has not been apprehended; were suspected of being killed by an Arab. Now this is strange, as it is a sad fact that in the industrialised world, the majority of murdered children are killed by a parent, or other next of kin. Take the US, for example, where more than half of all infanticides (killing of children less than the age of 5) are committed by a parent, while only 10-20% are committed by a stranger, or by parties unknown. Alas, if you follow the Israeli media, you will soon find that there is no lack of children being killed by a family member there, either. A study in 2010 showed that 40 Israeli children had been killed by a parent in the previous 7 years. And after that, we have had: 2010: Omer, 10 years old, Roni, 8, and Or, 5, killed by their father, Itay Ben Dror 2013: Yahav, 5 and Eden, 3, killed by their father, Eli Gur 2013: Igor, 7, and Mira, 5 , killed by their mother, Karina Brill 2014: Yishai, 11, and Sara, 10, killed by their father, Avi Levy Alas, these children will never get their own pages on Wikipedia. They were not killed by Arabs. Almost the same goes for Category:Israeli …continue reading Wikipedia: All murdered Israeli children are murdered by… Arabs |
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