Wikimedia director on commercial use of Wikipedia
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Dumping a large cognitive load on shared volunteer infrastructure without some level of compensation? Not cool.
The fact that Youtube is doing this and is not:
* paying wikipedia for the service they are demanding of it
* offering wikipedia support in developing tooling to cope with the NEW TASKING that youtube is expecting
* talking to them about it before announcing it
Suggests that Youtube does not understand its own role in the media ecosystem and is exposing itself to systemic legal and moral risks that could have adverse effects on the company itself and possibly on the entire industry.
If someone gets to a Flat Earther video via autoplay ( start from watching aircraft videos.. ) are they better served by being directed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth orby being shown a countervailing video explaing that the earth is in fact round and there's evidence and how to check it?
Does Youtube have a responsibility to help society stay within shouting distance of the reality principle? I think it does.
Do you?
As for the second part. Can you convince me of why I should trust Youtube's owners to police what I can see and hear, rather than rely on my own whims and judgements?
Let's say we do allow our largest corporations to police thought. In that case, would it be OK for me to question or dissent?
Asking this question is precisely the systemic risk to Youtube. If there's thought policing going on; there will be a host of players with "the best of intentions" who want in on it. From Animal Control to the Pentagon; every branch of .gov will want a piece of that pie as will most of the quasi-governmental and non-governmental stakeholders.
If only truth is allowed; whose truth?
If fiction is marked as such; who decides what is not fantasy?
If some powerful faction makes money from people believing that chemtrails are government mind-control drugs being spewed into the air to make us all more compliant and effeminate; should they be allowed to spread that belief at will? What happens if the profitable meme is that a certain ethnic group is diluting the purity of a majority ethnic groups heritage and should therefore be exterminated? Do we allow that?
What are the limits of acceptable folly?
So Youtube bans videos spreading "fake news" that disagrees with the "science" by "foremost industry experts."
What if it was about leaded gasoline? Or $500 million is missing Haiti charitable funds.
Or the catalyst for the Vietnam War, the Gulf of Tonkin, as well as the WMD claims that set off Iraq War, were all lies?
All these things really happened.
Some videos* are already walled up behind warnings and disabled features.
Because if a video about say, 9-11 conspiracy theories, will have an infobox added to it which quotes the first par of a Wikipedia article, makers and viewers of such a video will go to Wikipedia and edit the first par to front-load the information they want to see. This will happen extensively across hundreds of thousands of topics. Many of Wikipedia's policies and processes won't apply to these new edit wars because they are about whether or not information can be included, rather than which information appears in the introductory part.
Wikipedia is open for everyone, and in my opinion that means you don't get any right (legal or moral) when someone, anyone, uses that information within the rules you set in the license.
If they want to prevent this, they should change their license.
Naturally Google won't prevent users form accessing the search since that would invalidate the purpose of their site, and equally naturally Wikipedia won't change the license since it too would invalidate the purpose of their site. Both however do complain and may invoke blocks when they feel that people are abusing the permission that is normally given.
From a legal stand point, Google can arbitrarily revoke access to their site and in similar way wikipedia could revoke access (which is not the same as changing the license) to Google. They could block Googles bots, or change the targeted information for which they intend to scrape. Wikipedia could publishing a explicit statement on how Google (as a legal entity) may access their servers and Google would be legally bound to follow it or be charged under hacking laws.
I didn't say that, and I disagree with that. The web isn't "default open", and Google has a license that you agree to when using their product that says what you can and cannot do with it. And scraping their site is against that "license" (aka the "terms of service") giving them both the legal and the moral right to stop you while keeping it "publicly" accessible.
Wikipedia's terms of service specifically state that anyone is free to read, print, share, and reuse their articles and other media under free and open licenses. They have no more right (moral or legal) to take issue with youtube including wikipedia snippets in their application than Linus Torvalds has the right to take issue with Google using Linux in their application. As long as you follow the license to the letter, you are legally fine, and in my opinion as long as you follow the "spirit" of the license, you are morally fine.
I don't see this move by google as violating either of them. The director of Wikimedia might not like it, and that's fine, but Google is in no way under any obligation to stop what they are doing (again, legally or morally in my opinion).
Wikipedia can adjust their terms of use, but they themselves have a framework for how they can update their own terms, and part of that requires a 30 day comment period [0]. If they have issue with this, they can absolutely update their terms, but I would never donate to the wikimedia foundation again and would stop contributing if they are going to start deciding who is allow access to their data that they champion as "free and open".
So all they need to do if they wanted a legal tool to prevent google is to create a community policy which dictate how scraping may be done for the purpose of youtube. No 30 day comment period.
Further down on that page, section 10. Management of Websites: *"The Wikimedia community and its members may also take action when so allowed by the community or Foundation policies applicable to the specific Project edition"
And finally in section 12. Termination: "We reserve the right to suspend or end the services at any time, with or without cause, and with or without notice."
In summary, they reserve the right to block access in response to abuse.
And you are correct that the terms of service and license are different (even if there is a bit of overlap) but it's the license that matters when you are "copying" the content and reproducing it on your own, and the license is either CC BY-SA or GFDL both of which have no ability to prevent any one specific person from using the information.
>In summary, they reserve the right to block access in response to abuse.
This isn't abuse, its use. If copying the data from wikipedia and serving it up with attribution is abuse, then they need to update their terms of service and licenses to explicitly say so (which would pretty much end wikipedia). If Google is harming their infrastructure by causing excessive load doing the scraping, wikipedia has every right to block them. But Google is not (as far as we know), and therefore wikipedia does not have any moral right to block access, and Google has no moral or legal obligation to stop scraping and reproducing the content on their own servers. And if wikipedia does block Google from the service, Google has every right (legally and morally in my opinion) to find an alternate way of getting the data and reproducing it that doesn't access wikipedia's servers directly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...
This is an opinion piece, but the author is a respected professor who has done some really interesting research on this stuff, so I'm inclined to take it seriously.
Now, you and others may think they have some ethical responsibility (I'm not sure I agree with that) but if YouTube had to parse all the ethical requirements their users thought they had to abide by, they'd never get anything done.
B2B interactions are never bound by the same ethical constraints that human-to-human interactions are. Corporations are not people - they can be bound by laws but not arbitrary social conventions.
Near as I can tell, Wikipedia is SOL unless YouTube wants to help them out. YT is certainly not obligated to.
Corporations are bound by social conventions for the same reason natural persons are: if they sufficiently violate them, people impose consequences on the corporation by actively avoiding interactions beneficial to the corporation.
This debate is based on all sorts of fallacies. First, that fake news elected someone. It did not. Second, that this is something new or inherent to the Internet. It is not. Fake rumours and gossip have existed ever since we have existed. People's judgement has been the sole thing holding the whole system together for hundreds of years. Bankers, for example, spread rumours that Nikola Tesla had sex with pigeons. It was fake but it spread like fire in NYC. Did we ban free speech because of such things? No.
From most the discussion threads here it seems that censorship is the only way forward, which scares me because people are falling for the trap and they are justifying censorship.
Who will decide what videos are "controversial"? If we agree that fake news should be regulated, what is the limit of state regulation? Why not then allow them to censor most other politically incorrect forms of speech?
It seems to me like this is headed down a very dangerous path and it's scary how people fall for it. Fake news is absolutely irrelevant and how it's been blown up and is being exagerated in order to justify censorship is a conspiracy in its own right. I'd be more concerned about this particular conspiracy: someone is trying to justify censorship because one particular candidate won an election.
Fact: There was a small case of "troll farms" producing totally click bait content. But the effect was minimal. This is what was originally meant by "fake news".
Now fake news can literally be anything, and the resulting moves to counteract anything will be bad. What also concerns me is that most of the voices against whatever fake news is, reside on the left hand side of the political spectrum.
Okay. Now. lets assume that Fake News is responsible for manipulating and influencing stupid people into voting wrongly. The way to counteract that is by education, by a free press, not by counter propaganda and censorship.
Just look at how much political capital Obama had to spend on countering the “birther” nonsense. That was 8years ago, and it crowded out all sorts of actual policy discussions, arguably gave rise to the Tea Party and everything that followed from it, and probably had effects on every election starting from the 2010 midterms.
I'm sure someone is very happily converting this into a chance for control over the censoring.
Here’s the gist, just in case you are actually confused: there are some sites both large and small, from shady operations in the balkans to infowars, that publish stories completely made up. One example might be the child abuse enterprise run by Hillary Clinton from the basement of a pizzeria.
As we all know, that pizzeria didn’t even have a basement. So we can agree, hopefully, that this was an insane conspiracy theory.
Such stories were/are extensively shared on social media in the run up to the last election. And while they may not have been decisive, it’s hard to argue that they had no effect whatsoever. At the very least, they fed the cynicism and distrust already rotting in the core of society.
That’s the idea of „fake news“. You can dispute that it has any effect. You can argue that some good comes out of this free-for-all. But note that traditional media publishers simply play no role in this. To make this about some perceived failure of the New York Times takes quite a lot of logical gymnastics.
I don't know if the government should get involved, but if it is to, then it should only be a educative and preventive job, to warn people that:
* Other than reputed news sources using their Twitter account to spread information, it is to be assumed than information from social networks is garbage
* When a reputed news source is referencing information from Twitter or other social networks, they're doing a bad job
As for Twitter: it’s just a tool, like email. If the president uses Twitter, and actual policy news break there, it’s perfectly fine to report on it.
The problem is that gamification and engagement mechanisms pull people deeper into that rabbit hole. Go see what the recommendation algorithm does with "fake news" style content sometime. It'd be harder to build a system to "radicalize" people towards extremist ideas if you tried.
As one guy on twitter put it: "my dad and his iPad went from vaguely interested in the knights templar's operations in portugal to believing in ancient aliens seeding global cultures in the space of like three weeks"
I probably agree with you that there shouldn't be straight up censorship. But neither should youtube blindly and algorithmically identify that someone is susceptible to conspiracy-style content and then drive engagement by serving them a never-ending stream of the stuff.
Are their demonitization efforts not working well enough to shut down those who disagree with their viewpoints?
YouTube has tried to implement moderation and failed to address conspiration-wielders. No matter what they do, someone will decry it as “a platform controlled by the rich” [0]. Wikimedia has been addressing similar issues for almost two decades and has proven more effective than YouTube. Or anyone, really: there is a reason they are scraped for truth. Snopes itself shouldn’t be trusted as a direct source anymore than Wikipedia. The difference is that Wikipedia allows a debate.
Katherine Maher wants use to “read @Wikipedia with a critical eye” [1] and who is going to do that better than Flat-Earthers? That change is going to be disruptive but will help Wikipedia develop its own critical-thinking.
Is it a good move for Wikipedia? No, it’s exposing itself to critics, which is painful, but it is what the foundation explicitly say they need.
Should YouTube have made a deal, given Wikipedia money to help with that problem? Probably not, it would hurt more than it helps.
Is YouTube exposing Wikipedia’s brand more and given then an opportunity to communicate on their mission? They have. I’m more likely to give to them if they tell me that they need money to face DDOS from the Flat Earth society than if they keep offering a very easy to overlook service.
I’m not saying Google is innocent: they should attribute their facts to the proper author list in their snippets, for instance, but I seriously doubt that they would hesitate to respond to any request for support.
Instead they seem to be complaining that someone (albeit a huge multinational corporation, though I don't see why that should matter) dare use their content without ponying up cash as a "donation" to the cause.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
I don't know if wikipedia now strictly monitors page edits. But, if they don't I hope Youtube also adds a big red warning on the page - Do not believe everything on the internet, even if it is wikipedia.
I think what youtube should do is just put a disclaimer on videos saying "This video is related to an unproven conspiracy" or similar. I doubt linking to a wikipedia page is going to change anyones mind.
[0]: Wikipedia doesn't have "moderators". Anyone can revert edits and just because they opposed your edit, it doesn't automatically mean they're an admin, of which there are only around a thousand.
Also run into problems where pages on companies are wrong and edits are prevented even though the information is outright inaccurate. Apparently having the info on the company website isn't cite-able? Seems stupid to me.
> Apparently having the info on the company website isn't cite-able? Seems stupid to me.
Depends what you're trying to cite. Most small pieces information can be cited just fine to primary sources, though secondary sources are preferred. [1] However, more controversial statements or claims of notability require a reliable independent source, [2] or else any company could claim "we're the best" on their page and include it on Wikipedia.
Anyway in both these cases, you fall into the trap I listed before, where you're soooooooo certain that you're in the right and the stupid encyclopedia and its editors are power hungry. Have you ever considered maybe there's more reasoning to it then? Again, I almost guarantee there were reasons given in both cases to which you didn't give the least attention. You wouldn't go making a pull request to an open source project full of code that goes against their style guide, introduces a regression, and is suboptimal and then get righteous that it wasn't accepted without question would you?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Nati...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...
It's still more reliable than other encyclopedias and far more reliable than a good part of traditional news websites.
One needs to keep in mind - they are NOT interested in building video version of Encyclopedia Britannica; they only interested in as many click on their site as possible (to display as much ads as possible). For all their care with YT business model, all their videos could be fake news, so long as enough people are sitting and watching.
While multiple studies comparing several encyclopedias are mentioned, they tend to have small sample sizes (only a few articles) and being on par with other encyclopedias doesn't necessarily make Wikipedia reliable, it could just as well be that the other options are similarly unreliable (it seems like all studies found something to criticize).
Additionally, I interpret "Wikipedia's information about pharmacology was 99.7% accurate when compared to a pharmacology textbook" to mean that the pharmacology textbook was taken as the gold standard and Wikipedia got pretty close. But 3 errors per 1000 (whatever their unit of measurement was) might not be reliable enough to be used by pharmacologists.
I do think that Wikipedia is quite reliable, so I don't have a problem with that, but I think the article doesn't quite support your point.
Compared to alternatives, Wikipedia is perhaps the best at combining high reliability, "freshness" and breadth of content. What's your benchmark for measuring reliability? I can't think of many others.
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...
Summary
There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.
But it's best to read the tweets yourself, since it's based on interpretation. There's not that many of them.
If someone wants to believe (insert grandiose and stupid theory), who cares? YouTube started as an entertainment platform, not a learning tool.
If you're going to murder your parents over a conspiracy theory is there any reason to assume you wouldn't murder them for a dozen other reasons? How justified is censoring a platform for millions of users because of one mentally ill user?
Is there any evidence that being exposed to certain ideas "pushes someone over the edge" any more than what they can come up with in their own head or without technological assistance? I've read some stuff about school shootings that suggests media coverage encourages "copycat" attacks.
I'm not just trying to be a contrarian or apologist for a murderer but the causation here seems rhetorically appealing but realistically sketchy to me. People have been killing each other over politics since as long as recorded history.
That doesn’t answer your question about justifying censorship, but I think that’s not the best question to ask, since media recommendation algorithms that penalize certain radical subjects is hardly what I would call “censorship.”
I get where you're coming from but I have some issues with that perspective. Would you agree that a conspiracy theorist who uses physical violence and/or threats of physical violence is strong indicator of a dangerously radicalized person? Then how can we explain the large number of people exposed to radical media but only a small handful performing radical violence? Are conspiracies and radical beliefs always some kind of treadmill where you take a nibble and then inevitably go deeper and deeper until you become so delusional that you feel the need to take violent action? To me that feels too much like a just-so narrative.
Also, I think we should be concerned about what some people consider "radicalization." Everyone is against radical violence and media that contributes to that end. But what about media that makes someone a Trump voter? Rhetorically some argue that they are just as dangerous as any shooter because they create a social environment that precipitates violence, even though the causation isn't direct.
It's difficult to talk about these things without coming up with false dichotomies or bad generalizations. Really what I'm trying to get at is a "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" understanding. It's easy to get rid of the baby when it's not your baby or the baby is casually stereotyped in an appealing way.
Surely there's some various in the predisposition of individuals to become radicalized, but I don't suspect that means that people who do become radicalized would inevitably have become radicalized regardless of their exposure to certain ideas. The fact that terrorist groups put a lot of effort into radicalizing people indicates that they are under the impression that their efforts are meaningful. Even if the predisposition for an individual to become radicalized is already determined and unchangeable, there is an incentive for various radical groups to radicalize those people under their banner rather than some other banner.
> Everyone is against radical violence and media that contributes to that end. But what about media that makes someone a Trump voter? Rhetorically some argue that they are just as dangerous as any shooter because they create a social environment that precipitates violence, even though the causation isn't direct.
I agree that there's a continuum here, and that it's extremely subjective. I think most people agree that explicitly inciting violence is not (and should not be) protected speech/communication. But what about communication about groups dedicated to violence that don't explicitly mention violence? Then what about groups espousing philosophies which are strongly correlated with advocating violence, like blatant racism? Then what about groups that espouse philosophies described to just barely not quite be blatant racism, like "white nationalists" who explicitly advocate for "peaceful ethnic cleansing" of certain people from certain regions, but claim to not be racist and not support violence? Do we throw up our hands and say "well, they said the word 'peaceful,' therefore they're not technically advocating violence, therefore it's protected speech"?
I'd wager that some will and some won't, and that if you were morbid enough you could probably measure such a thing statistically.
> How justified is censoring a platform for millions of users because of one mentally ill user?
Not only the mentally ill occasionally have absolutely terrible ideas, buy into something stupid, or get occasionally conned. Adding information to videos is also not censorship - at least insofar as I'd define the term, or generally seen it defined, unless perhaps if you're going so far as to try to bury a needle in a haystack - so I'm not sure the question is relevant here unless you're worried about some slippery slope or something.
I'd hesitate to impose censorship, but adding information to pierce the walls of echo chambers - and to let e.g. "the marketplace of ideas" actually work - seems like a great idea to me. Not that any implementation of such a thing won't have it's flaws, mind you.
> Is there any evidence that being exposed to certain ideas "pushes someone over the edge" any more than what they can come up with in their own head or without technological assistance? I've read some stuff about school shootings that suggests media coverage encourages "copycat" attacks.
I feel like you've answered your own question here, but I may be missing something. Isn't what a copycat being exposed to when they read the news about one of these incidents, also ideas? Terrible, terrible ideas? Or are you perhaps asking if any of that stuff you've read rises to the level of evidence instead of clickbait hearsay? I've likely read little more than you have - references to studies that suggest the evidence is there. I don't recall reading about any studies refuting that idea or showing no correlation.
I included the example of copycat attacks to show good faith that I'm not ignoring examples I know of that counter my own argument. What I'm trying to understand is the role of radicalization and conspiracy in violent acts. We know there are large communities of radical conspiracy theorists and yet physical violence or violent harassment is only a small subset of that community. How safely can we presume that "radical media" is the main cause of the latter violent groups? It's definitely an appealing narrative to imagine these people groom and reinforce their own beliefs until they "boil over" into violence but is that really how it works? We act as though people can be almost brainwashed into doing terrible things just by mere exposure. I'm arguing that at the very least it's more complicated than that and we should inject a little bit of nuance into the rhetoric of what conspiracy theories mean for society.
It's quite possibly the case that people most susceptible to conspiracy theories are often also more susceptible than average to other stimuli, but then, we don't fail to limit emission of (and public exposure to) various industrial respiratory irritants just because many the people most susceptible to many of them are also more susceptible than average to other environmental hazards like common allergens.
And that is often limits with the force of law, not merely private actors choosing to limit (or even merely warn about) what is put out by their operations.
Per the article, the fact he acted out so horribly didn't surprise me when I read that he was involved with Gamergate--a horrendous display of aggressive, toxic behavior in the gaming community. I am a gamer, and I know that neo-Nazi, racist, sexist hateful ideologies are alive in gaming communities from my time spent playing games like TF2 and CS. They're kind of like 4chan--unmoderated, except the people are angrier.
A long time ago; see, as an example—but not the first harmful conspiracy theory—the theory of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy that was a central element of early-20th Century anti-Semitism.