On 2015-12-01 12:27, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
Article by Mark Graham in Slate, Nov. 30, 2015:
Why Does Google Say Jerusalem Is the Capital of Israel?
It has to do with the fact that the Web is now optimized for machines,
not
people.
Second, because of the stripping away of context, it can be challenging
to
represent important nuance. In the case of Jerusalem, the issue is less
that particular viewpoints about the city’s status as a capital are
true or
false, but rather that there can be multiple truths, all of which are
hard
to fold into a single database entry. Finally, it’s difficult for users
to
challenge or contest representations that they deem to be unfair.
Wikidata
is, and Freebase used to be, built on user-generated content, but those
users tend to be a highly specialized group—it’s not easy for lay users
to
participate in those platforms. And those platforms often aren’t the
place
in which their data is ultimately displayed, making it hard for some
users
to find them. Furthermore, because Google’s Knowledge Base is so opaque
about where it pulls its information from, it is often unclear if those
sites are even the origins of data in the first place.
Jerusalem is just one example among many in which knowledge bases are
increasingly distancing (and in some case cutting off) debate about
contested knowledges of places. [followed by more examples]
The story with Jerusalem is very simple. I created the Wikidata item.
The English description was "city in Israel". Then POV pushers came.
Some of them wanted "city in Palestine", and others wanted "capital of
Israel". Then one user, who later was elected to the board of Wikimedia
Israel, canvassed a number of users in Hebrew Wikipedia. When there were
too many POV pushers, I just unwatched the page, and it became "capital
of Israel". Later on, someone managed to change it to smth neutral.
That's it. There is nothing automatic here.
Cheers
Yaroslav
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