Dear All, I am also very interested in this topic. I am from academia, with computer science background. In the last two years, I have spent most of my “free research time” to understand the reasons, why Wikipedia has not become a significant publication venue in science. I came to similar conclusions to Kerry and Darius, especially in the context of the review system. There should be a simple way to present how much content is verified. For example, through the font color (and size) of each paragraph.
Involving more students to write Wikipedia articles is challenging; however, we are not far from the future when machines will be able to “read” the scientific publications, and automatically generate content (for Wikipedia) with reasonable quality. I do not think the current review system is prepared for this. Probably there is no simple solution, we also made several game-theoretical analyses of this problem, and much more reviews should be attracted. Furthermore, I think there are some practical issues as well: for example, researchers are not familiar with the markup language used in MediaWiki. Visual editor partially solves this problem; however, a latex editor would make Wikipedia way friendlier for a large group of researchers. The MediaWiki markup and latex seems quite similar, so we started to implement a markup-latex converter. We hope to release the code soon. Best János http://lendulet.tmit.bme.hu/lendulet_website/?page_id=291 > On 2019. Dec 4., at 7:52, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raym...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Thanks for initiating this interesting conversation with your paper, Darius. > > As a retired professor and researcher and now active Wikipedian, I have a > foot in both camps. > > Wearing my academic hat, the concerns I have are the ease of vandalism, the > risk of subtle vandalism (I agree obvious vandalism will be recognised as > such by the reader), how quickly a Wikipedia article can change from good to > bad, neutral to biased etc. Although as an insider to Wikipedia, I know about > the Cluebot, the Recent Change Patrol, watchlists, etc, but to the outside > world there does not appear to be any system of review, and I would have to > admit that our methods of detecting vandalism are far from perfect. When I go > away on holidays, particularly if I don't take my laptop, I stop watching my > watchlist. Then when I get home and try to catch up on my watchlist (an > enormous task), I am stunned to find vandalism some weeks old in articles. Am > I the only active user watching that article? It would seem so. We have a > tool (left-hand tool bar when you are looking at any article in desktop mode) > that reports how many users (but not which users) are watching an article but > for privacy no value is reported if there are less than 30 watchers (it says > "less than 30"). Yet what difference does it make if there are 51 or 61 > watchers or "less than 30" if the users are inactive or are active but not > checking their watchlist. Since none of us (except developers) can gain > access to the list of users watching any page, we have no way of measuring > how many articles are being checked by others following changes, how quickly > are they checked or are they checked it all? So I think we need a better > "reviewing" system and one more visible to the reader if we want to gain > respectability in academic circles. We also need to prevent as much vandalism > as we can (why do we have "5 strikes until you are blocked" policy?, let's > make zero tolerance, one obvious vandalism and you're blocked). > > My 2nd point of difference is this. When I publish an academic paper, I put > my real name and my institution name on it, and with that I am risking my > real world reputation and also that of my institution. That's a powerful > motivator to get it right. What risk does User:Blogwort432 take to their real > world reputation? Generally none. The user name is not their real name. Even > if blocked or banned, we know they can pop up again with a new user name or > be one of the myriad IP addresses who contribute. One of the reasons I edit > with my real name is precisely because I put my real world reputation on the > line (assuming you believe my user name is my real name of course) and that's > a powerful motivator for me to write good content AND to be civil in > discussions. It's easy to be the opposite when you hide behind the cloak of a > randomly-chosen user name or IP address. Also real world identities are more > able to be checked for conflict of interest or paid editing ("so you work for > XYZ Corp and you've just added some lavish praise to the XYZ article, hmm"). > I think we would have a lot more credibility if we moved to having real world > user names (optionally verified) and were encouraged to add a short CV (which > is currently discouraged) so your credibility as a contributor could be > assessed by readers. > > 3rd point. Many academics have attempted to edit Wikipedia articles and got > their edits reverted with the usual unfriendly warnings on their User Talk > page. When they reply (often stating that they are an expert in this field or > whatever claim they make), they usually get a very unfriendly reaction to > such statements. I can't imagine that academics who have tried to contribute > to Wikipedia and experienced hostility or seen their edits reverted for > reasons they did not understand or did not agree with are likely to run > around saying that Wikipedia is as good as the academic literature. > > I think if we want to turn around academic perception, we need to: > > 1. make academics welcome on Wikipedia (apart from the usual conflict of > interests) > 2. as many contributors as possible should be real-world verified and invited > to upload their CV or link to one on another site (if we don't want them on > Wikipedia User pages) > 3. demonstrate we have a comprehensive, fast and effective review of > changed/new content -- wouldn't be good if we could point to an edit in the > article history and see who reviewed it and how quickly that happened (and > have gross statistics on how many reviewed, how quickly, and tools that tell > us what articles aren't being properly reviewed, etc), > 4. eliminate vandalism (well, reduce it substantially) > > Or at least demonstrate we are moving towards these goals. > > Personally I think some of the "norms" of Wikipedia may have served us well > in the early 2000s but don't serve us so well today. To my mind moving > towards real-world named accounts and then real-world verified accounts as a > "norm" will make us better contributors and if we rate-limited pseudonym and > IP accounts, we would at least reduce the amount of vandalism we currently > have to deal with from IP accounts and new user accounts, and make it harder > for the sockpuppets to return, etc. I think we can find ways to do this > without eliminating the privacy needed by a small number of contributors with > legitimate fears about persecution. > > Kerry > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
