Simon, If you look at the comments under Barbara's piece, Greg linked to this YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZurOYgQLT44 I had a look at that video before posting here. (I think it's kind of a daft video, but it does a perfectly good job of demonstrating how the Echo works.) In this video, the lady asks at the beginning, "Alexa, who is Edward Snowden?" The response reflects the lead sentence of the Wikipedia article, such as it was at the time. At 0:30 in the video, she asks "Alexa, who is the FBI?" Again, Alexa responds with the lead sentence of Wikipedia's FBI article as it was at the time. So she did not explicitly ask for the Wikipedia article, and yet got Wikipedia content. And I wonder, if she had said "Tell me more", would she have gotten more from Wikipedia at that point? You say that Alexa reportedly gets some of this from Bing. But even if that's the case, how does it make a difference? To me it seems rather like Flickrwashing (Bingwashing?). The end result is that the chain of attribution is broken and the content is treated as though it were public domain rather than published under a Creative Commons licence. Andreas On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 1:03 PM, Simon Poole <si...@poole.ch> wrote: > You need to explicitly ask for a Wikipedia article to get one (and it > ends reading the summary with "More from wikipedia?" or something along > such lines). That kind of renders the attribution issue moot. > > If you don't explicitly ask for Wikipedia it will search with bing and > simply read the result of that (which in general doesn't really work), > which may naturally contain information from WP, but not curated by Amazon. > > I just jumped on this because I was reading one of comparative tests > between the Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon voice controlled > assistant products a couple of days back, and one of the not so good > sides of Alexa was answering general knowledge questions, which it > competitors get around by using WP automatically. This matches with my > experience of the device (in German you need to install a skill with a > rather cumbersome UI to get direct access to WP so it is even worse in > the ease of access to WP department). > > Simon > > > Am 27.07.2017 um 13:26 schrieb John Mark Vandenberg: > > Simon, could you clarify? > > > > Can you configure the device to give attribution? > > > > On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 5:56 PM, Simon Poole <si...@poole.ch> wrote: > >> Maybe some fact checking before getting all upset would be a good idea? > >> > >> The blog post is a good story, but doesn't actually reflect how Alexa > >> works wrt searching WIkipedia (I just quickly reconfigured one of mine > >> to US English just to verify). > >> > >> Simon > >> > >> > >> _______________________________________________ > >> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Wikimedia-l > >> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Wikimedia-l > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
