On 2015-12-01 12:27, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
Article by Mark Graham in Slate, Nov. 30, 2015:
Why Does Google Say Jerusalem Is the Capital of Israel? It has to do with the fact that the Web is now optimized for machines, not people.
Second, because of the stripping away of context, it can be challenging to represent important nuance. In the case of Jerusalem, the issue is less that particular viewpoints about the city’s status as a capital are true or false, but rather that there can be multiple truths, all of which are hard to fold into a single database entry. Finally, it’s difficult for users to challenge or contest representations that they deem to be unfair. Wikidata is, and Freebase used to be, built on user-generated content, but those users tend to be a highly specialized group—it’s not easy for lay users to participate in those platforms. And those platforms often aren’t the place in which their data is ultimately displayed, making it hard for some users to find them. Furthermore, because Google’s Knowledge Base is so opaque about where it pulls its information from, it is often unclear if those sites are even the origins of data in the first place.
Jerusalem is just one example among many in which knowledge bases are increasingly distancing (and in some case cutting off) debate about contested knowledges of places. [followed by more examples]
The story with Jerusalem is very simple. I created the Wikidata item. The English description was "city in Israel". Then POV pushers came. Some of them wanted "city in Palestine", and others wanted "capital of Israel". Then one user, who later was elected to the board of Wikimedia Israel, canvassed a number of users in Hebrew Wikipedia. When there were too many POV pushers, I just unwatched the page, and it became "capital of Israel". Later on, someone managed to change it to smth neutral. That's it. There is nothing automatic here.
Cheers Yaroslav