Thanks Tilman.
Especially for your effort to resolve the misunderstandings, which most of
them I suppose are due to a shallow reading: "I had a bit of free time last
night waiting for trains and I skimmed through the study and its findings."
We had two strategies to get rid of vandalisms, as you mentioned,
considering only mutual reverts and waiting editors by their maturity, I
suppose a vandal could not have a large maturity score by definition.
As for the data, this study has been carried out in 2011, and we worked on
the latest available dump at the time. Someone experienced in academic
research, especially at this scale well knows that it really takes time to
get the analysis done, write the reports, get them reviewed, etc.
Especially that we have published 7-8 other papers during the same period.
I see no problem in this as long as the metadata and such information about
the methods and the data under study are mentioned in the manuscript, which
is clearly the case here. I have seen many Wikipedia studies without any
mention of the dump they have used!
Back to your concern for the general impression that the news media give
on wikipedia being a battlefield, I'd like to mention that I have
emphasised the small number of controversial articles compare to the total
number of articles in every single media response I had. Again as you
mentioned, we had given the percentages explicitly in our previous work.
But of course for obvious reasons journalists are not happy to highlight
this. They like to report on controversies and wars! This is not our fault
that what they report could be misleading, as long as we had tried our best
to avoid it. An interview of mine with BBC Radio Scotland: at 04:00 I
clearly say that there are millions and thousands of articles in WIkipedia
which are not controversial, is available here:
. I have
done the same in all the others.
Finally, I wish that the public media coverage of our research which is
clearly far from perfect, could also provide the members of the public a
better understanding of how Wikipedia works and how fascinating it is!
Thanks again,
Taha
On 22 Jul 2013 05:58, "Tilman Bayer" <tbayer(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 2:32 PM, MZMcBride
<z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Anders Wennersten wrote:
A most interesting study looking at findings from
10 different language
versions.
Jesus and Middle east are the most controversial articles seen over the
world, but George Bush on en:wp and Chile on es:wp
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.5566.pdf FWIW, here is the
review by Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia in last month's
Wikimedia Research Newsletter:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/28/wikimedia-research-newsletter-june-20…
(also published in the Signpost, the weekly newsletter on the English
Wikipedia)
Thanks for sharing this.
I had a bit of free time last night waiting for trains and I skimmed
through the study and its findings. Two points stuck out at me: a
seemingly fatally flawed methodology and the age of data used.
The methodology used in this study seems to be pretty inherently flawed.
According to the paper, controversiality was measured by full page
reverts, which are fairly trivial to identify and study in a database
dump
(using cryptographic hashes, as the study did),
but I don't think full
reverts give an accurate impression _at all_ of which articles are the
most controversial.
Pages with many full reverts are indicative of pages that are heavily
vandalized. For example, the "George W. Bush" article is/was heavily
vandalized for years on the English Wikipedia. Does blanking the article
or replacing its contents with the word "penis" mean that it's a very
controversial article? Of course not. Measuring only full reverts (as the
study seems to have done, though it's certainly possible I've overlooked
something) seems to be really misleading and inaccurate.
They didn't. You may
have overlooked the description of the
methodology on p.5: It's based on "mutual reverts" where user A has
reverted user B and user B has reverted user A, and gives higher
weight to disputes between more experienced editors. This should
exclude most vandalism reverts of the sort you describe. As noted in
Giovanni's review, this method was proposed in an earlier paper, Sumi
et al. (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2011/July#Edit_wars_and…
). That paper explains at length how this metric serves to distinguish
vandalism reverts from edit wars. Of course there are ample
possibilities to refine it, e.g. taking into account page protection
logs.
Personally, I'm more concerned that the new paper totally fails to put
its subject into perspective by stating how frequent such
controversial articles are overall on Wikipedia. Thus it's no wonder
that the ample international media coverage that it generated mostly
transports the notion (or reinforces the preconception) of Wikipedia
as a huge battleground.
The 2011 Sumi et al. paper did a better job in that respect: "less
than 25k articles, i.e. less than 1% of the 3m articles available in
the November 2009 English WP dump, can be called controversial, and of
these, less than half are truly edit wars."
In order to measure how controversial an article is, there are a number
of
metrics that could be used, though of course no
metric is perfect and
many
metrics can be very difficult to accurately and
rigorously measure:
* amount of talk page discussion generated for each article;
* number of page watchers;
* number of page views (possibly);
* number of arbitration cases or other dispute resolution procedures
related to the article (perhaps a key metric in determining which
articles
are truly most controversial); and
* edit frequency and time between certain edits and partial or full
reverts of those edits.
There are likely a number of other metrics that could be used as well to
measure controversiality; these were simply off the top of my head.
Perhaps you
are interested in this 2012 paper comparing such metrics,
which the authors of the present paper cite to justify their choice of
metric:
Sepehri Rad, H., Barbosa, D.: Identifying controversial articles in
Wikipedia: A comparative study.
http://www.wikisym.org/ws2012/p18wikisym2012.pdf
Regarding detection of (partial or full) reverts, see also
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Revert_detection
The second point that stuck out at me was that the study relied on a
database dump from March 2010. While this may be unavoidable, being over
three years later, this introduces obvious bias into the data and its
findings. Put another way, for the English Wikipedia started in 2001,
this
omits a quarter of the project's history(!).
Again, given the length of
time needed to draft and prepare a study, this gap may very well be
unavoidable, but it certainly made me raise an eyebrow.
One final comment I had from briefly reading the study was that in the
past few years we've made good strides in making research like this
easier. Not that computing cryptographic hashes is particularly
intensive,
but these days we now store such hashes directly
in the database (though
we store SHA-1 hashes, not MD5 hashes as the study used). Storing these
hashes in the database saves researchers the need to compute the hashes
themselves and allows MediaWiki and other software the ability to easily
and quickly detect full reverts.
MZMcBride
P.S. Noting that this study is still a draft, I happened to notice a
small
typo on page nine: "We tried to a as diverse
as possible sample including
West European [...]". Hopefully this can be corrected before formal
publication.
--
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB
Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford
1 St.Giles
Oxford OX1 3JS
Tel.01865-287229
-------------------------------------------
Latest Article: Phys. Rev. Lett. Opinions, Conflicts, and Consensus:
Modeling Social Dynamics in a Collaborative
Non-technical review: University of Oxford, Mathematical model 'describes'
how online conflicts are
resolved<http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2013/130220.html>