Move Over, Wikipedia. Dictionaries Are Hot Again. New York Times In the hours after Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, was silenced by her Republican colleagues for impugning a fellow senator by reading aloud a letter Coretta Scott King had written that was critical of Jeff Sessions, Republican ... |
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Move Over, Wikipedia. Dictionaries Are Hot Again. - New York Times
3D representation of 30 days of Wikipedia talk-page revisions, of which 1092 contained toxic language (shown as red if live, gray if reverted) and 164,102 were non-toxic (shown as dots).
Quantification of types of harassment experienced by Wikipedia users.
Wikipedia
Percentage of attacking comments attributed to Wikipedia editors at different activity levels.
Chart by Nithum Thain/Hlud
We've all heard anecdotes about trolling on Wikipedia and other social platforms, but rarely has anyone been able to quantify levels and origins of online abuse. That's about to change. Researchers with Alphabet tech incubator Jigsaw worked with Wikimedia Foundation to analyze 100,000 comments left on English-language Wikipedia. They found predictable patterns behind who will launch personal attacks and when.
The goal of the research team was to lay the groundwork for an automated system to "reduce toxic discussions" on Wikipedia. The team's work could one day lead to the creation of a warning system for moderators. The researchers caution that this system would require more research to implement, but they have released a paper with some fascinating early findings.
To make the supervised machine-learning task simple, the Jigsaw researchers focused exclusively on ad hominem or personal attacks, which are relatively easy to identify. They defined personal attacks as directed at a commenter (i.e., "you suck"), directed at a third party ("Bill sucks"), quoting an attack ("Bill says Henri sucks"), or just "another kind of attack or harassment." They used Crowdflower to crowdsource the job of reviewing 100,000 Wikipedia comments made between 2004-2015. Ultimately, they used over 4,000 Crowdflower workers to complete the task, and each comment was annotated by 10 different people as an attack or not.
Once the researchers had their dataset, they trained a logistic regression algorithm to recognize whether a comment was a personal attack or not. "With testing, we found that a fully trained model achieves better performance in predicting whether an edit is a personal attack than the combined average of three human crowd-workers," they write in a summary of their paper on Medium.
The researchers unleashed their algorithm on Wikipedia comments made during 2015, constantly checking results for accuracy. Almost immediately, they found that they could debunk the time-worn idea that anonymity leads to abuse. Although anonymous comments are "six times more likely to be an attack," they are less than half of all attacks on Wikipedia. "Similarly, less than half of attacks come from users with little prior participation," the researchers write in their paper. "Perhaps surprisingly, approximately 30% of attacks come from registered users with over a 100 contributions." In other words, a third of all personal attacks come from regular Wikipedia editors who contribute several edits per month. Personal attacks seem to be baked into Wikipedia culture.
The researchers also found that a large percentage of attacks come from a very small number of "highly toxic" Wikipedia contributors. Eighty percent of personal attacks on Wikipedia come from people who rarely make personal attacks. But a whopping 9% of attacks in 2015 came from 34 users who had made 20 or more personal attacks during the year. "Significant progress could be made by moderating a relatively small number of frequent attackers," the researchers note. This finding bolsters the idea that problems in online communities often come from a small minority of highly vocal users.
Depressingly, the study also found that very few personal attacks are moderated. Only 17.9% of personal attacks lead to a warning or ban. Attackers are more likely to be moderated if they have launched a number of attacks or have been moderated before. But still, this is an abysmal rate of moderation for the most obvious and blatant form of abuse that can happen in a community.
The researchers conclude their paper by calling for more research. Wikipedia has released a dump of all talk-page comments to the site between 2004-1015 via Figshare, so other researchers will have access to the same dataset that the Jigsaw team did. Understanding how attacks affect other users is urgent, say the researchers. Do repeated attacks lead to user abandonment? Are some groups attacked more often than others? The more we know, the closer we get to having good tools to aid moderators. Such tools, the researchers write, "might be used to help moderators build dashboards that better visualize the health of Wikipedia conversations or to develop systems to better triage comments for review."
Listing image by Hoshi Ludwig
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Handful of highly toxic Wikipedia editors cause 9% of abuse on the site - Ars Technica
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This weeks Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction? guest is drumming legend Gene Hoglan. Watch thrash metals otherworldly Atomic Clock prove and disprove whats written about him online in this exclusive segment!
You may know Hoglan as the percussionist for Testament, Dethklok, Death, Strapping Young Lad, Dark Angel and a ton of other bands, but Genes family calls him Eugene Victor Hoglan II. But wait why is he Gene II instead of Gene Jr.? Hoglan explains in this fresh clip.
Gene actually watched the Kerry King episodes of Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction? and was anxious to clear up something the Slayer shredder credited as false. Contrary to what King remembers, Hoglan recalls being Slayers light engineer and roadie back in the bands early years and never taking any photos of the thrashers. Perhaps Kerry got Gene confused with The Atomic Clocks sister? Thats what Hoglan thinks!
The funniest tale from this Wiki episode comes from the band Zimmers Hole, which was lovingly named after Dean Zimmer, a late friend of the band who loved chasing people with his buttcheeks spread during parties. Hoglan confirms this entry, adding that Zimmer chose who he chased with his sphincter extremely carefully.
Check out the Gene Hoglan episode of Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction? above! HoglansThe Atomic Clock: The Clock Strikes Two drumming DVD will be released Feb. 3 and can be pre-ordered here while Canadian pre-orders can be placed at this location.
Dethklok Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction?
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Slayers Kerry King Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction? (Part 1)
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Gene Hoglan Plays 'Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction?' - Loudwire - Loudwire
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) Wikipedia has barred citations of The Daily Mail after editors of the online encyclopedia concluded Wednesday that the British tabloid is generally unreliable.
The decision came after a spirited, years-long debate over the Daily Mails credibility among Wikipedias active community of volunteer editors. The editors explained Wednesday that the decision stemmed from the Daily Mails reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism, and flat-out fabrication.
As a result, the Daily Mail and its online offshoot have been generally prohibited as a reference on Wikipedia, especially when other more reliable sources exist.
The editors recommended installing an edit filter that will warn editors attempting to use the Daily Mail as a reference. They also encouraged the volunteers to review the thousands of Daily Mail citations already on Wikipedia, and to remove/replace them as appropriate.
A spokesman for the Daily Mail did not respond to a request for comment.
Such a move is unusual for Wikipedia, which has faced its own share of scrutiny for inaccuracies. But the site has a dedicated group of editors who actively police entries for any errors or dubious citations.
Some of those editors opposed the prohibition on the Daily Mail, saying the tabloid is reliable on certain topics. They also argued that singling out an individual source ignores other questionable sources that are still allowed on Wikipedia.
The Daily Mail is one of the UKs most commercially successful tabloids, and its website churning out upwards of 1,600 stories a day is the most-read online newspaper in the world. But the publication has at times been as wildly inaccurate as it is widely read.
In 2014, George Clooney ripped the Daily Mail for a story claiming that the mother of Clooneys then-fiancee, Amal Alamuddin, opposed their marriage for religious reasons. The story, littered with false claims, was eventually deleted.
Earlier this week, a lawyer for First Lady Melania Trump re-filed a lawsuit against the Daily Mail over an already-retracted story detailing claims that she used to be involved in a high-end escort service.
But the Daily Mail has also racked up its share of legitimate scoops over the years, including during last years presidential race when it reported that Anthony Weiner allegedly had an online sexting relationship with a 15-year-old girl.
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Wikipedia bans citations of The Daily Mail - fox2now.com
Student Organizations of Library and Information Science is planning an Edit-a-Thon to put factual and cited information into Wikipedia pages. SPECIAL TO THE ORACLE
A group of people hunched over laptops and books while eating pizza and drinking soda is an image commonly associated with studying. However, Student Organizations of Library and Information Science (SOLIS) has a different plan for the image.
SOLIS is organizing a group Wikipedia editing event for Friday from 5-9 p.m. at Jimmie B. Keel Library on Bearss Avenue.
Though SOLIS puts on this event monthly with varying topics, Fridays event will focus on Black History Month.
The Edit-a-Thons goal is to put factual and cited information out onto Wikipedia pages that can be edited by anyone and therefore can be inaccurate. SOLIS member and event organizer Paul Flagg said the group is also looking to diversify the content on the site.
Our Edit-a-Thons are really an attempt to bridge the diversity gap that is the content of Wikipedia, he said.
Each participant picks an article on Wikipedia and goes through to verify that the information in it is correct while adding information thats missing. The idea of hosting the event at a library is that research materials are at participants fingertips so they can verify facts and add citations to the Wikipedia page theyre editing.
Moving the event off campus was the groups attempt to bring in more members of the community and prove that this isnt just for students.
I decided that it would be nice to move it away from the school just to represent and encourage a greater population of people because SOLIS is a student organization but we also want to engage other library professionals and information specialists as well as just other people in the community, Flagg said.
The event is focused on articles relating to the African American community for Black History Month. However, SOLIS plans to continue hosting such events with next months scheduled to be about women.
I really wanted to make it focus on really something more than editing Wikipedia, Flagg said. As a group, SOLIS decided to make the Edit-a-Thon gear toward social justice and equality. We want to support diversity among the content represented on Wikipedia as well as diversity among the people who produce that content.
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Wikipedia event enables community members to take editing into ... - The Oracle