Thanks, Phoebe. I think I mentioned that I first started editing Wikipedia in 2005 when it looked like things were going spectacularly well, except in some of the more controversial articles. So I decided to concentrate on those, since I had already been working on some of the topics involved as a citizen, with mixed results. I wonder if a tool like this would have made it easier. I've signed up for Dispute Finder and am eager to try it out on cold fusion.

For something like global warming, clearly it would have helped because that's what they've chosen to focus on first. I'm not sure whether it would have helped for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles, because the problem there isn't with disinformation, it's with large corporations ignoring -- and sometimes colluding to ignore -- the huge amount of good information that is out there. However, I'm skeptical that they would have made it much easier for uranium toxicity, instant runoff voting, or cold fusion, because there was and still is a huge amount of disinformation in the wild on those topics which a lot of people believe without bothering to do any research beyond some superficial googling.

Cold fusion is the only area of non-ethnic, non-religious, non-political controversy where I think the English Wikipedia still has a huge issue. Mostly because it's been in front of the arbcom so often, established editors sort of have a knee-jerk reaction to it. The article and its talk page is locked down, at least five proponents have been banned (zero dissenters are banned, and several of them watch the article very closely) but hope springs eternal: http://bit.ly/coldFusionRSN

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 3:44 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.ayers@gmail.com wrote:

Potentially of interest to Bay Area people: http://berkeley.intel-research.net/?openhouse

I went to a talk today about one of the tools they are developing, the dispute finder plugin: http://disputefinder.cs.berkeley.edu/

it does text mining to find phrases on web pages that are disputed by trusted sources. definitely related to theoretical wikipedia problems :)

-- phoebe

• http://phoebeayers.info | phoebe.ayers@gmail.com

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