That's very interesting to know. Thanks for telling me. We were quite surprised by seeing very spars talk pages in Hungarian Wiki. I'm sure you know better than me that article talk pages are for different purposes that user talks and the village pump. However that's interesting that Hungarian Wikipedia prefer to take the discussion to other places than talk pages.
szervusz Taha.
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 9:32 PM, Balázs Viczián <balazs.viczian@wikimedia.hu
wrote:
As a Hungarian, it is really interesting to read something specific about the Hungarian Wikipedia :)
I read somewhere (correct me if I'm wrong) that you found little to no discussions on article talk pages on the Hungarian Wikipedia, indicating that users barely discuss the content (or anything at all about the given article).
Actually these discussions are either quickly moving to the village pump after 1-2 comments or happening there entirely. The most common is that the users discuss it on their user talk pages by directly messaging each other about the changes they made/content, creating 2-3-4 paralel threads on each others's user talks. Article talks for this reason are generally considered "deserted lands" on huwiki, what almost nobody reads.
Cheers, Balázs
2013/7/22 Taha Yasseri taha.yasseri@oii.ox.ac.uk
Anders, I really like your idea on "universal" articles. given the fact that translation and communication cross languages is not a very task these
days
any more.
By the way, in a blog post, I have release some more data on languages
like
Japanese, Chinese, and Portugies, in case anyone's interested:
http://tahayasseri.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/wikipedia-modern-platform-ancien...
bests, Taha
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 4:17 PM, Anders Wennersten <
mail@anderswennersten.se
wrote:
I see the difference on the different version as most interesting and
to
have some insight into Arabic version, I have not had before
On a "small version" like sv:wp we are very used to "steal with pride" content from other versions, primary en:wp but also de:wp and others
and we
do this especially for controversial subjects that are not specific
for a
country/culture. But are en:wp and other big versions doing the same?
It is
very refreshing for a clinched discussion to start with an almost all
new
textversion.
Also I wonder over articles like Homeopathy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*
*Homeopathy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy which seems to
be
in top of controversies. Would it be an idea to compile an unverisal article with help from different versions, ie do we really utilize the power of us having many versions and many experts?
Anders
Osmar Valdebenito skrev 2013-07-22 16:13:
I was interviewed a few days ago from a Chilean newspaper because of
this
paper. For those interested that can read Spanish here is the full article: http://www.latercera.com/**noticia/tendencias/2013/07/** 659-533645-9-estudio-dice-que-**chile-es-el-articulo-de-** wikipedia-mas-editado-en-**espanol.shtml<
http://www.latercera.com/noticia/tendencias/2013/07/659-533645-9-estudio-dic...
I read the paper in full and I have to admit it has very interesting approaches to remove the "vandalism" effect. Probably it won't be
perfect,
especially for a platform where it is impossible to have an exact, quantitative measure of quality or neutrality. Is there a measure of controversiality? I will consider controversial those articles where I usually edit and probably I will ignore several others that are more controversial and so on...
But besides the particular issue of which is the most controversial article, I'm more interested in the trends that each Wikipedia has.
They
seem consistent and I think there is a lot of things that we can learn from it.
*Osmar Valdebenito G.* Director Ejecutivo A. C. Wikimedia Argentina
2013/7/22 Taha Yasseri taha.yasseri@oii.ox.ac.uk
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: https://www.dropbox.com/s/**8whovkmipbqdzlv/bbc_radio_**Scotland.mp3
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8whovkmipbqdzlv/bbc_radio_Scotland.mp3. 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@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 2:32 PM, MZMcBride z@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<
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.5566.pdf%3E
>> > 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-2013/#.22The_**most_controversial_topics_in_** Wikipedia:_a_multilingual_and_**geographical_analysis.22<
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/28/wikimedia-research-newsletter-june-201...
(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_conflict_**metrics<
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<
http://www.wikisym.org/ws2012/p18wikisym2012.pdf%3E
Regarding detection of (partial or full) reverts, see also https://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Research:Revert_detection<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Revert_detection%3E
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
-- Dr Taha Yasseri http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/**people/yasseri/<
http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/yasseri/%3E
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 Environment<http://prl.aps.**org/abstract/PRL/v110/i8/**e088701<
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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
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