As far as I can make out, James was referring to English Wikipedia articles on economics, not Wikidata. One of us is confused. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2017 11:30 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Research Showcase Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC
Hoi, The problem is that sources become controversial when there is nothing that mitigates their validity when other sources indicate that they have been invalidated. This is of particular relevance when organisations like Cochrane indicate this. The wholesale import into Wikidata essentially cements these sources as being valid. As a consequence it has everything to do with data uploads. Wikidata is not a stamp collection and we do not have proper means to invalidate. Consider for instance that in Norway a whole set of substances used in mental health are no longer provided. In the USA and elsewhere these same substances are subscribed while it is KNOWN that they are no better than a placebo.
Just copying controversial data into Wikidata is problematic and just saying that somebody else has to fix it is dodging responsibility. Thanks, Gerard
On 27 September 2017 at 08:42, Peter Southwood <peter.southwood@telkomsa.net
wrote:
Gerard, If someone sees a thing on Wikipedia that needs to be fixed, they can go ahead and do something about it. Please refer to the context of my comment. If James wants to start a project or task force to clean up economics articles, he is free to do so. I don’t think this has anything to do with data uploads. If it does, perhaps you could enlighten me. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: Tuesday, 19 September 2017 12:17 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Research Showcase Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC
Hoi, There is a responsibility by the people doing massive uploads of data that is full of everything under the sun. Given the scale of these imports "so fix it" is not appropriate. Thanks, GerardM
On 19 September 2017 at 07:14, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net
wrote:
So fix it, Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of James Salsman Sent: Tuesday, 19 September 2017 2:53 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Research Showcase Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC
Wow, first there was solid evidence that tourism is causally influenced by Wikipedia, and now science. The English Wikipedia's Economics article still says "Tax cuts [boost] aggregate demand." Isn't it time that potentially harmful biases in economics articles are tempered as carefully as those in medical articles?
On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:53 AM, Sarah R srodlund@wikimedia.org wrote:
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR5JwqyVGSk
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And, you can watch our past research showcases here <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/
Showcase#September_2017>.
...
Science is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial By Neil C. Thompson and Douglas Hanley
As the largest encyclopedia in the world, it is not surprising that Wikipedia reflects the state of scientific knowledge. However, Wikipedia is also one of the most accessed websites in the world, including by scientists, which suggests that it also has the potential to shape science. This paper shows that it does. Incorporating ideas into a Wikipedia article leads to those ideas being used more in the scientific literature. This paper documents
this in two ways:
correlationally across thousands of articles in Wikipedia and causally through a randomized experiment where we added new scientific content to Wikipedia. We find that fully a third of the correlational relationship is causal, implying that Wikipedia has a strong shaping effect on science. Our findings speak not only to the influence of Wikipedia, but more broadly to the influence of repositories of scientific knowledge. The results suggest that increased provision of information in accessible repositories is a very cost-effective way to advance science. We also find that such gains are equity-improving, disproportionately benefitting those without
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