Here's an opinion piece, "The Problem with Wikidata", by Mark Graham, who "is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute," which appears on The Atlantic's website. I'm not personally supporting or opposing his views but I found this to be an interesting read. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-problem-with-wikid...
I would like to second that recommendation. I read that article too, and thought it highly relevant.
Information is power, and there is a real danger of both monopolisation and manipulation of information here.
Andreas
On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 12:46 AM, En Pine deyntestiss@hotmail.com wrote:
Here's an opinion piece, "The Problem with Wikidata", by Mark Graham, who "is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute," which appears on The Atlantic's website. I'm not personally supporting or opposing his views but I found this to be an interesting read. http://www.theatlantic.com/** technology/archive/2012/04/**the-problem-with-wikidata/**255564/http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-problem-with-wikidata/255564/
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I agree that Mark has written a nice article, but I disagree with some of his conclusions, as you can find in my comment on the page (alas, not permalinkable).
Andreas, do you think that it is easier to monopolise and manipulate information on Wikidata, visible to potentially many editors and users coming from different backgrounds, than it would be in a Wikipedia language edition with a small number of active editors? I.e. do you think that Wikidata *increases* that danger, or merely does not improve the situation, or maybe even has the chance of leading to a less likely to be manipulated system?
Cheers, Denny
2012/4/11 Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com
I would like to second that recommendation. I read that article too, and thought it highly relevant.
Information is power, and there is a real danger of both monopolisation and manipulation of information here.
Andreas
On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 12:46 AM, En Pine deyntestiss@hotmail.com wrote:
Here's an opinion piece, "The Problem with Wikidata", by Mark Graham, who "is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute," which appears on The Atlantic's website. I'm not personally supporting or opposing his
views
but I found this to be an interesting read.
technology/archive/2012/04/**the-problem-with-wikidata/**255564/<
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-problem-with-wikid...
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https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l%3E
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Hoi, It is interesting that people consider the potential negative aspects and forgets about the positive.
For me the big thing is that translatable info boxes is a perfect method of populating relevant information in stub articles. This is of particular relevance to the smaller Wikipedias, the projects where people are actively building something up. I noticed on the Zulu Wikipedia that they are working hard on doing something like this. Being able to translate the labels, some words relating to the content.
There is also the notion of NPOV. Yes, sometimes people will fight over the numbers but this will benefit the whole of Wikipedia. Thanks, Gerard
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2012/04/wikidata-and-what-it-can-do-for....
On 11 April 2012 10:09, Denny Vrandečić denny.vrandecic@wikimedia.dewrote:
I agree that Mark has written a nice article, but I disagree with some of his conclusions, as you can find in my comment on the page (alas, not permalinkable).
Andreas, do you think that it is easier to monopolise and manipulate information on Wikidata, visible to potentially many editors and users coming from different backgrounds, than it would be in a Wikipedia language edition with a small number of active editors? I.e. do you think that Wikidata *increases* that danger, or merely does not improve the situation, or maybe even has the chance of leading to a less likely to be manipulated system?
Cheers, Denny
2012/4/11 Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com
I would like to second that recommendation. I read that article too, and thought it highly relevant.
Information is power, and there is a real danger of both monopolisation
and
manipulation of information here.
Andreas
On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 12:46 AM, En Pine deyntestiss@hotmail.com
wrote:
Here's an opinion piece, "The Problem with Wikidata", by Mark Graham,
who
"is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute," which appears
on
The Atlantic's website. I'm not personally supporting or opposing his
views
but I found this to be an interesting read.
technology/archive/2012/04/**the-problem-with-wikidata/**255564/<
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-problem-with-wikid...
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On 11 April 2012 11:25, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, It is interesting that people consider the potential negative aspects and forgets about the positive.
For me the big thing is that translatable info boxes is a perfect method of populating relevant information in stub articles. This is of particular relevance to the smaller Wikipedias, the projects where people are actively building something up. I noticed on the Zulu Wikipedia that they are working hard on doing something like this. Being able to translate the labels, some words relating to the content.
It also fixes the whole death anomalies thing: if someone dies, we can update the Wikidata entry, rather than having conflicting information on different language versions of Wikipedia. I would think some of our more fanatical BLP adherents would rather like that. ;-)
Of course, I think the primary thing for me with Wikidata is the uses that it can be put to that don't actually involve Wikipedia. Governments are putting out thousands of datasets: complex spreadsheets with often confusing or obscure information about the societies we live in. Having a central place to store and improve that information is something people have been trying to imagine for a while: projects like CKAN and LinkedGov. It'd be interesting if we could get a productive, drama-free community of people to maintain and curate public government data, as this would enable all sorts of usage both inside and outside the Wikimedia projects. "Data driven journalism" is something that's actually flourishing pretty well without much in the way of open source and free culture, it'd be interesting from a long-range strategic kind of view how the Wikimedia projects fit in.
On 11 April 2012 12:09, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
It also fixes the whole death anomalies thing: if someone dies, we can update the Wikidata entry, rather than having conflicting information on different language versions of Wikipedia. I would think some of our more fanatical BLP adherents would rather like that. ;-)
The Atlantic article is arguing against consensus reality existing, and against NPOV rather than article forks. (This is quite aside from the writer not understanding the feature and extrapolating from his misunderstanding.)
- d.
On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 04:46:50PM -0700, En Pine wrote:
Here's an opinion piece, "The Problem with Wikidata", by Mark Graham, who "is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute," which appears on The Atlantic's website. I'm not personally supporting or opposing his views but I found this to be an interesting read. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-problem-with-wikid...
From reading, it looks like the wikidata team has this at least partially covered.
We're making plenty of positive progress, but we do have to keep our eyes open for (potential) pernicious potholes in the road.
If someone shouts "look out", we should definitely stop and look, just to be sure. ;-)
sincerely, Kim Bruning
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