Hello Hector,
This all sounds very exciting. Kudos to you!!
According to my own opinion, I would say Wikiopinion.org fall under a
non-profit project under Wikimedia Foundation.
Yes, I'm up for this and would like to join as a
volunteer(Developer/Community Liaison).
I'll help Wikiopinion.org to fund raise.
Looking forward to join your team.
Regards,
Amit Kumar Jaiswal
On 1/4/17, Hector Perez <hecpeare@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all, I proposed to create Wikiopinion.org based on our work on AgreeList
> that might fit into Wikidata [1]. I paste it here:
>
> Storytelling was the most important way to share knowledge for thousands of
> years — before writing was invented — so our brains evolved to be
> influenced by stories. As Conor Neil explains, many times we are still
> “more easily persuaded by one clear and concrete anecdote than by data and
> expert statistical analysis”. He says that, “an anecdote is a one off. It
> is not data. It is not science. It is dangerous”.
>
> This made me think about two things:
>
> Firstly, people such as Lydia Pintscher of Wikidata and Dario Taraborelli
> of Wikicite are working on projects that improve considerably the quality
> of Wikipedia and they could even accelerate world’s research.
>
> Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base:
> ...
>
> And Wikicite is building a repository of all Wikimedia citations and
> bibliographic metadata. The sum of all citations:
> ...
>
> Secondly, it also made me think about how this relates to the work we have
> been doing with AgreeList.com With AgreeList, we are creating a ‘platform
> for informed opinions’ that gathers the opinions of leading experts and
> influencers and favors the building of rational opinions on issues of key
> importance. Our first issue was ‘Brexit’ where we collected the opinions of
> almost 2000 opinion-makers on the impact of Brexit to the UK economy,
> immigration, politics, and education, and built a summary of opinions on
> both sides to inform the public during the referendum. In other words, we
> believe in the value of informed opinions over anecdotes and the data of
> who agrees on what and why can help us to build our own opinion. E.g. if
> NASA, the Royal Society, Obama, the Pope and a friend of mine who knows
> more about climate change than me think that it’s real and we should do
> more to tackle it, I believe it.
>
> Similarly, if I read something health-related, I can check the number of
> doctors who agree or disagree as fast as I see the number of likes on
> Facebook. If it is more than 95%, I believe it straight away. Done. I
> learned a new thing today. This way we could fight the fact that false
> health content seems to be more popular on social media and we could get
> informed of more topics than ever.
>
> When we are interested in a topic and have time, we read about it and
> contrast different points of views. But when we don’t have time or are not
> interested in something, we believe what our culture, friends and
> influencers say. And we are so bombarded with information nowadays that we
> can’t get informed about everything all the time.
>
> However, when we want to have an educated opinion about a complex topic
> such as Universal Basic Income, we can read the arguments and even go to
> the sources where we can find more information. We are still building up
> the database on Basic Income and it is currently biased towards opinions in
> favour given that it is easier to find them given how early stage the
> public debate and the AgreeList tool are, but you can see below what
> different opinion-makers say about Universal Basic Income via Agreelist:
> ...
>
> And when there are many opinions, such as on Brexit, we organise them in a
> board or summary that aggregates the arguments per categories.
>
> We can also filter them by profession, university, awards (e.g. Nobel Prize
> winners), etc. E.g:
> ...
>
> How did we get this data? First, the data from occupations comes from
> Wikidata. Second, the data of who agrees on topics such as these ones is on
> AgreeList. These lists are crowdsourced — people add influencer’s opinions.
> Users only need to provide a source, for example an article in the New York
> Times or the tweet of the person. Moreover, users of the site can vote and
> add their own opinions and, at some point, we could aggregate opinions
> automatically by semantic analysis. This way we might organise all the
> opinions in the world on key topics or statements. AgreeList or Wikiopinion
> could one day become ‘The sum of all opinions’.
>
> We can also play with Google BigQuery to do joins of AgreeList’s tables
> with Wikidata’s ones. For example, in order to get all Nobel laureates in
> economics that agreed or disagreed on Brexit before the referendum we did a
> query and we got:
> ...
>
> Extent is the degree to which they agree (at least for now it can only be
> 100=agree or 0=disagree). Therefore we got that from all Nobel laureates in
> economics that have ever given their opinion on Brexit (on the BBC, their
> twitter account or whatever), all 11 of them disagreed. As every
> opinion/vote on AgreeList has a source, we see then that 10 of them signed
> a letter published on The Guardian and the other one is Paul Krugman who
> gave his opinion in The New York Times.
>
> Then, if for example we go to Paul Krugman’s Wikidata page, we see that he
> worked for the MIT in the past. What if we want now to get all the public
> figures that supported Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump who work or have
> worked for the MIT? Easy, we just change the property to P108 (employer),
> set it in the where clause to Q49108 (MIT) and select the statement_id=182
> (or we could add a new join and specify the title) and the result of this
> new query is:
> ...
>
> We see that from 7 people who are or have been employed by the MIT, 6 of
> them preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump.
>
> This is what we have done until now.
>
> The next natural step of AgreeList is to add social network features where
> you can see what people you follow are discussing, opinions from the topics
> you follow, etc. Next, if I post/agree that governments should do more to
> tackle climate change, other users could add then that I also agree that
> climate change is real and that we need to act on climate change —
> organising in this way the opinions.
>
> Other important aspect could be that AgreeList questions your opinions.
> Besides having the list of people who disagree with you (and why) just
> there, it could tell you, do you know that Tim Berners-Lee and your friend
> from school disagree with you on this? Would you like to see why?
> Therefore, this could be a social network which challenges what you post
> and help to tackle the fact that the Internet is allegedly full of myths
> and mis-truths — as pointed out by Tim Berners-Lee says. Similarly,
> Facebook recently said that it must do more to stop the spread of
> misinformation on its platform.
>
> This could be specially important because on mainstream social media there
> is a filter bubble — as described by Eli Pariser in one of his books.
> Social media networks tend to hide the opinions that differ from what we
> think. We only listen to the media that agrees with what we think.
>
> This is so significant that Tom Steinberg said that social media giants
> will be remembered, not by their business successes, but by how well they
> tackle the problem of the filter bubble.
>
> This filter bubble makes the polarisation of opinions worse. You can see
> Barack Obama talking about polarisation of opinions:
> ...
>
> Taking all of this into account, we are considering whether the best
> approach for Agreelist is a non-profit project in a new organisation or
> under Wikimedia Foundation if they like the idea — it could be renamed as
> Wikiopinion.org — or a for-profit startup.
>
> As a non-profit project it would focus on its social impact and it would
> follow the three golden rules of the Internet: nobody owns it, everybody
> uses it, and anybody can add services to it — which are what distinguished
> the Internet from any previous communications medium according to Vinton
> Cerf— so initially that seems to make sense.
>
> On Wikipedia, Wikidata and the other Wikimedia projects, facts precede
> opinions. So it is not clear if Agreelist (or Wikiopinion.org) would be a
> good fit as a non-profit project under the Wikimedia umbrella.
>
> In fact, my friend Ángel Alberich — CEO @QuibimBiomarker & MIT Innovator
> Under 35 — says that facts should not be opinable. However, I argue that
> knowing exactly who has a different opinion (and why) might be really
> useful. For example, more than 100 Nobel laureates signed a letterendorsing
> Genetic Modified Organisms (GMO) and challenging the environmental NGO
> Greenpeace to halt its anti-GMO campaigns to prevent the introduction of
> potentially life saving options for the world’s poor. Ángel said that there
> is not a single scientific paper which says that they present a hazard for
> human health. But as Greenpeace and many governments are so reluctant,
> isn’t there a clear need for something else that facilitates discussion?
> Would it not be useful to know which ones of your friends and
> representatives disagree and try to convince them?
>
> Similarly, despite the fact that almost all scientists agree that climate
> change is real and that we need to act, there are still many politicians
> who deny it or don’t do enough to tackle it.
>
> However, as Greg Mankiw — Harvard professor in economics — said in Leonardo
> DiCaprio’s recent film about climate change, if we want to change
> politicians view on something, we have to change people’s view first.
>
> Therefore, a social network which organises opinions and challenges what
> you think might help to do so. Actually, Barack Obama recently said on
> Wired that at some point we might make voting and civic activism as
> addictive as scrolling through your Twitter feed.
>
> Let’s do exactly that, a social network where we discover, share and
> organise a plurality of opinions where the objective could be to help us
> make up our mind. In other words, to accelerate quality decision making.
>
> And this could be really important because of three reasons:
>
> As the MIT professor Alex Pentland said:
>
> The biggest problem in the world is not global warming, is not war, but how
> can we organise among ourselves to make good decisions and carry them out.
> ...
>
> 2. According to Terry Jones— disruption occurs when new technology allows
> us to deliver new forms of asynchronous communication. And this is what
> AgreeList is about. Until now, if you wanted to get a quick opinion on
> Basic Income and the arguments on both sides, you had to go to many
> different sites or talk to multiple people. Not any more.
>
> 3. As the economist Jeffrey Sachs said in his book The End of Poverty, the
> single most important reason why prosperity spreads is the transmission of
> technologies and the ideas underlying them. But currently we don’t need
> more bridges or faster communications (in the privileged part of the
> world), but making up our mind accurately in the myriad of the new topics
> that arise in our hectic lives.
>
> To sum up, we think that a social network that challenges what you post and
> organises who agrees on what and why would complement Wikipedia and the
> traditional story telling. What do you think? Would you like to join us?
> Should this project be non-profit or for-profit? Would you donate or help
> us to fund raise?
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Hector
>
> [1]. Original post: https://medium.com/@HectorPere
> z/wikipedias-social-network-578b0257b8ae
>
--
Amit Kumar Jaiswal
[Mozilla Reps](reps.mozilla.org/u/amitkumarj441 )
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Kanpur | Uttar Pradesh | India
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