Half of the top 50 Wikipedia contributors are bots
slightlynew.blogspot.com
slightlynew.blogspot.com
You can see this right now; go find a page to add a (legit, please) {{clarify}} or {{who}} or {{where}} tag to. Add it without a date, and wait 5 minutes; Smackbot will date the tag for you.
This is a good thing for obvious reasons.
Similarly, I'm guessing the "reversion" stat here is misleading. Reversion isn't deletion; anything that moves content around the page is likely counted as well. Write a graf or two on any well-trafficked WP page and you'll probably see it moved around pretty quickly.
More importantly, reversion isn't permanent. On any popular article, someone is bound to disagree with the merits of your edit. The normal way of things when I was wasting time at WP was, edit, revert, talk page, re-post copy.
Have you ever taken too much penicillin? You'll lose some of your good bacteria and you'll get a fungus from opportunistic infections. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_candidiasis and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidiasis for examples.)
Same thing with Wikipedia. Bots are really helpful for regular maintenance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Plagiarism
or persons who misrepresent their identities,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sock_puppetry
especially after some infamous incidents
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/03/head_wikipedian.ph...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20...
of editors with a lot of trust in the Wikipedia editing community who were abusing that trust. I don't find it easy in the culture of Wikipedia to gain trust by referring to reliable sources and checking what those sources say.
After edit: The phenomenon of edit wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
goes a long way toward explaining why most Wikipedians have had contributions reverted, as the submitted blog post reports.
Also, plagiarism is difficult, because there are a lot of articles based on the kernel of public-domain texts, of which citation is not required. And sock puppetry is difficult, because some people keep bots that do productive work, but if human beings have trouble sensing that, I imagine it'd be much more code than the hundred lines of code that it took to process this the first time: https://github.com/lsb/ugc-contributors/blob/master/mh-diffs...
http://christopherwoodall.com/blog/?x=entry:entry101221-0243...
Learned something new today. I didn't have any idea Wikipedia was partially controlled by bots. I for one welcome our new NLP powered overlords.
Based on that page, though, how are bots contributing? Editing, yes. Creating, how?
My bot (which notifies English Wikipedia of image deletions on Wikimedia Commons) edits about three times more than I do each month (and I am somewhere around #500 activity wise).
The very top bot ClueBot NG does more than double the edits of anyone else per month; that is an anti-vandalism bot, it catches about 50% of vandalism on Wikipedia each month. So pretty crucial :) Cydebot (#2) does some sort of category maintenance (not sure what, never seen it before). SineBot (#5) goes around and signs peoples comments when they forget (handy beast).
Basically it is just infrastructure; but because of the nature of the Wiki it is more visible than other forms of infrastructure :)
Well this makes sense entirely since it is peer reviewed and the articles are a living ecosystem which are built off of and on top of prior submissions and versions.
I think urban planners have found that neighborhood cohesion and community watches are far better than gated communities and lawless knifefights outside, and the online textual equivalent of community dynamics agrees with that.
Although it's notionally possible that a first editor who got something "right" (factually correct based on reliable sources) was later reverted by someone edit-warring to score a point. Sometimes a particular edit makes Wikipedia worse rather than better. If NONE of my edits had ever been reverted (several have been), I would think that I wasn't trying hard enough to check sources and correct commonplace errors. However, it's not clear at the moment whether the editors with the lowest percentages of reverted edits are those who do the best edits, or just those whose prejudices (and topic choices) avoid scrutiny by the mob of other Wikipedia amateur editors. I am conscious of this issue because I was a professional editor and researcher to make my living long before most members of the general public had ever heard of the Internet, and because most wikipedians are so young and so devoid of editing experience that they readily mistake good edits for bad.
I think urban planners have found that neighborhood cohesion and community watches are far better than gated communities
It would be interesting to see citations to research on this issue, as well as the latest citations to research on forming online communities in which fact-checking and encouragement of careful scholarship become the group ethos. I live in a crime-free neighborhood with an annual block party and NO crime in a typical year, not gated, with good community cohesion, but also isolated from a lot of passers-by simply because it isn't a shortcut to anywhere else. Wikipedia is so exposed to the outside world, including spamming advertisers and propaganda agents of warring governments, that it may take more vigilance to protect than just an informal consensus among volunteer amateur editors.
The small-community-far-from-everything is quite similar to Wikipedia in its early years. Look at 2002-2005 and you'll see lots of anonymous Good Samaritans contributing helpful content. (Look for R6 and R7 on http://slightlynew.blogspot.com/2011/05/who-writes-wikipedia... to see a time series of anonymous contributions from 2003 to 2010.)
BOUML is a free UML2 tool for C++, Java, Python and others. The developer, Bruno Pages, has stopped its development due to some issue with Wikipedia administrators.
I attempted to get more information from Bruno but he is upset enough to not talk about it. The following is quoted verbatim from http://bouml.free.fr/ and is all I know:
"Due to the continuous license violations, attacks and insults from people of wikipedia ( the worst of them were the administrators Bapti (commons)/ Bapti (fr.wikipedia)/ Bapti (de.wikipedia) , Dereckson (commons)/ Dereckson (fr.wikipedia)/ Dereckson (de.wikipedia) and Esby (commons)/ Esby (fr.wikipedia) ), I have decided to stop work on Bouml except to fix bugs. Bruno Pagès."
And then there is the fact that for ages the Jean Claude van Damme article said he had killed 100 men with his bare hands {expletives deleted}.
Many of the mathematics articles contain appalling errors. You post about the errors in the discussion page and the issue is totally ignored. There seems to be no way to work with the community process to get things fixed.
I use wikipedia a lot for things that don't matter, e.g. as a structured skeleton for notes on a particular topic that I am writing for my own benefit and understanding. But as a project, I think it has basically reached its limits.
There's no way to move it significantly past what it is now.
Which is my experience entirely. Sorry, but being bold is a great way to waste my time, not to actually get things fixed.
I think having paid editors would fix most of those problems..
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/16/wikipedia_britannica...
Furthermore, take Wikipedia and compare it with authoritative books on the subject matter in the actual articles and you will find that Wikipedia contains many very serious errors.
http://www.economist.com/node/17902943?story_id=17902943&...
(Search for Ofqual in that article.) In particular, Wikipedia is about as accurate as general books and press articles. It is not an accurate source of academic information.
It has never claimed to be. It seems a bit silly to say that something is bad because it isn't some other thing that it was never designed to be. My iPhone is a pretty lousy toaster, too.
So don't. Fix it yourself, and source it. It's really ridiculously easy to do, and it's what Wikipedia encourages you to do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sofixit
>There's no way to move it significantly past what it is now.
There are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pages in need of some loving. Even the good ones aren't perfect. There's still plenty of room for improvement, and thousands of people doing just that.
Also, when I edit wikipedia articles without consultation with the community first, it invariably gets shouted at and reverted. Consult the community, and you have to expect that people there actually understand why the article is in error. Mathematics is sometimes very subtle. Errors can be subtle. Trying to explain them to people who didn't understand what they were writing in the first place is impossible.
Yes, there are very many extremely qualified academics adding stuff to Wikipedia. But there are also very many amateur mathematicians who write many almost-but-not-quite-true things, not understanding the subtleties involved.
I already spend a lot of my time teaching people how to do mathematics. Doing so on Wikipedia is a poor venue.
By the way, since when did people start using the down voting feature on HN for posts they didn't personally agree with?
I think it was more the implied laziness of thinking Wikipedia is a great resource but not being willing to fix it.
As for your issue, if you know something's wrong from your own research, have you published it? There's a secondary source right there.
Wikipedia, by necessity, aims to be verifiable, not true. People will argue till the cows come home about truth, and do so much less civilly than when arguing about verifiability. So yes, there are plenty of errors on Wikipedia that exist because the source is wrong. The only consistent way to deal with this is to leave it in until other secondary sources emerge that allow you to fix it.
Still, you can just run the math, as that isn't OR. If you'd prefer, you can tell me the page and the error and I'll take care of it. Being an established editor can be handy sometimes.
If you spend your life teaching and doing research, laziness is not something you like to be accused of. Some of my papers and computing projects have been referenced on wikipedia. I feel my time is far better spent writing such things than entering edit wars with people who don't understand the subtleties of the subject they are writing about.
"As for your issue, if you know something's wrong from your own research, have you published it?"
I suspect you aren't an academic and I can see why you might think this would be a good course of action. You cannot publish corrections to blatant errors in Wikipedia and get academic credit for it. We are under continual pressure to publish new and interesting things. That we have found an error in Wikipedia is unfortunately not one of them.
"If you'd prefer, you can tell me the page and the error and I'll take care of it. Being an established editor can be handy sometimes."
I suspect you'd add a note to the page asking for a citation to support the existing incorrect statement because you won't be able to check it yourself. It will remain there for months, and by then everyone will have lost interest and moved on.
Or perhaps the statement has a citation, but for subtle reasons the statement is correct, but nothing to do with the subject of the article. Without understanding the mathematics, you have no way of checking that. So even "verifiability" doesn't help.
You need to understand just how very difficult this is. Go to the page on "Group action". Look at the section "Types of actions". Now look at the bullet point "irreducible". Do you see anything wrong there? Do you see a citation? (Please do not remove it -- I am not stating there is or isn't an error there.) How would you, an experienced editor, check whether this was correct and relevant information?
Edit: I edited the above for tone after someone pointed out that I sounded like I was yelling. Not my intention.
As someone who jumped into WP with the primary intent of improving technical software security coverage, I know where you're coming from. WP can seem hostile to experts, because it is --- unlike the real world --- structured to prevent experts from carrying higher status. Whole WP forks have been created to allow acknowledged experts to contribute without arguing with laypeople.
Having said that, all those projects failed, and WP is perhaps the most impressive resource on one of the top 5† most impressive information technology projects in human history. I don't love WP's attitude towards expertise, but I also don't love tilting at windmills. WP will continue to be successful without your mathematical expertise. That's just a fact. Knowing that, maybe you can understand how people on HN would feel it's unproductive to loudly complain about your experiences on WP.
† Prepared to concede the human genome project as more impressive than the Internet.
Nor am I suggesting that having "Dr" in front of your name should give you more power on Wikipedia.
What I am alleging is that Wikipedia has a problem with plagiarism, with incorrect information and it has not brought a technological solution to the very difficult problem of verifying information in technical areas (I have also alleged elsewhere that Wikipedia has a problem with deletionism). The general Wikipedia approach works extremely well for general knowledge, but badly, IMHO, with specialised knowledge.
For that reason, some academics prefer to devote their time to writing primary peer reviewed articles (the corpus of which is vast compared to Wikipedia, and much more successful if quantity and quality is the metric). As I have already noted, there are many academics who do spend time adding to Wikipedia. They are not wrong to do so. But I personally see limitations to the approach, with no workable solution, technological or otherwise, in sight.
Academics like yourself are much better off writing primary and secondary sources outside the encyclopedia. It is the goal of the encyclopedia to aggregate and promote primary and secondary sources. It is not the goal of the encyclopedia to itself be the authoritative source for information on any given topic.
You will find that having written even a simple survey paper that your ideas and critiques are far more readily incorporated into WP than by bloodying your forehead against the brick wall of other editors following what they know to be well-intentioned and, empirically, effective rules.
However, what is happening is that Wikipedia is attempting to deal with very technical topics. As such there is a great divide between the techniques that are empirically observed to successfully collate general knowledge and the tried and tested techniques, developed over hundreds and even thousands of years for collating technical knowledge.
Precisely because academics have so little time to communicate their knowledge to nontechnical audiences there is a dire need for an approach that can successfully deal with this very difficult problem. My claim is that the wikipedia approach is so far not as successful in this area.
On forums where ignorance is king, I frequently advocate the use of Wikipedia to inform. Both aspects need to be understood. There are many people for whom Wikipedia should be a tremendously important tool. In forums like this, I emphasise the other side of things. The Wikipedia approach has its limitations as a means of disseminating precise and technical information.
This is the great thing about the Internet, and it's something WP management has been saying for years and years. Start your own wiki. Limit it to experts. Make it an amazing source. Wikipedia can then cite it, and use its content to resolve disputes and correct mistakes in its sourcing.
Wikipedia needs "popularized" knowledge, to some extent, not just primary sources. Experts probably don't have a use for those resources, though.
The point I hope I'm making, though, is that the improvement needs to happen outside Wikipedia. The experts can't directly be duking it out on WP pages as their journal articles get published.
Moreover, most academics don't have time for the wiki part. They barely have time for the papers part. Some academics get to write graduate texts because they can get credit for that, but that's about it. They do get time to write lectures to give to students though (sometimes barely).
But there's a problem. In mathematics, a result may depend on definitions, e.g. whether a ring has a unit element or not, which definition of natural number you are using, or which definition of compact, whether you allow the axiom of choice, what definition of norm you are using, or how a function is normalised. The actual results may be completely different in different books depending on the assumptions made and the precise definitions given. Language also changes over time. Sometimes the same word is used to mean totally different things, and the meaning depends not just on context, but era!
What happens in Wikipedia is you sometimes get a mosaic view of things which are not compatible. Only an experienced expert in the field can spot that and correct it, and it may be days of work to cleanly demonstrate why it is an error. Wikipedians can add such errors far faster than they can be noticed, corrected and justified.
The issue is that people think of science in a reductionist kind of way as a list of true statements. Books are lists of true statements and you can pick and choose the ones you understand and collect them together however you like. But this is totally false. Maybe the only reason you can even understand the book is because the author took pains to define things in such a way that a pedagogically sound route through the material exists.
In the mean time, academics are marking the same wrong answers to homework assignments and in written projects and dissertations over and over again. So this is a huge problem.
(This is to say nothing of the fact that many students believe that using quotations from Wikipedia without attribution in dissertations is permissible, presumably because Wikipedia allows this for public domain sources or something like that.)
What process or processes can bridge the vast chasm between what academics are trying to do on the one hand (advance the forefront of knowledge and disseminate it through teaching to the next generation) and what is being done on the other hand by wikipedians (collate human general knowledge in a way that is easily accessible to all)? There's a vast gap and it is precisely at the intersection of these two great enterprises that things are going woefully wrong.
Now, notice the phrase "A subspace W of V that is invariant under the group action is called a subrepresentation." Which group action is it talking about? This is completely orphaned.
You might think to click through to the page on "Group action" and see if you can get a clue what might have been meant before an edit orphaned this phrase.
In fact, a module can be thought of as a generalisation of a vector space. So in the case of an irreducible group action as defined on the "Group action" page, if R is a field, the module there is a vector space. That G acts R-linearly means precisely that there is a group homomorphism from G into GL(X), i.e. that you have a group representation into the vector space X. So, now the definition of an irreducible group action is that there is no non-trivial, proper vector subspace of X which is invariant under the group action. The definition of an irreducible group representation on the other hand states that there is no non-trivial, proper vector subspace of V that is invariant under the associated group action.
But how in a million years is anyone supposed to work that out from looking at either page? And if either page changes, the connection is totally lost.
A substantial part of the "Group representation" article would have to be rewritten to fix this. And similarly for the "Group action" article. Then the two would have to be connected so that a revert in one doesn't mess up all the hard work in the other.
Naturally people have pointed out in 2004 that there are problems here. But in seven years it has never been fixed.
As far as sourcing errors goes, think about it from the perspective of a generalist. For any given "correction," I think it's fair to assume that the change is more likely to be wrong than correct. The generalist who curates many pages is probably not qualified to determine either way, so the safest thing to do is revert back to the old version. Hence, sourcing corrections can give them confidence that the change is more likely to be correct than the original.
Yes, this is difficult. But I think that's it's inherently difficult. That is, providing a vast source of knowledge covering many topics digestible by non-experts is inherently a difficult endeavor.
The author draws a wonderful parallel between bots in the Wikipedia ecosystem and bacteria in the human body.
And if you want the code + data, you can just xargs https://github.com/lsb/ugc-contributors/blob/master/mh-diffs... over all of your pages-meta-history.7z files from http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20110317/ or get the sqlite database from Infochimps from http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/entropy-per-revision-of-w...
You could also just get an outdated version with the work already done for you, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_bots_by_numbe...
Keep that in mind the next time Jimmy Wales gives beaucoup credit to editors, or some super-user gets power-happy.