
One Easy Way to Make Wikipedia Better - tokenadult
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/wikipedia-open-access/479364/?single_page=true
======
davidgerard
Wikimedia Research list writeup:
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2016/Feb...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2016/February#Test_of_300k_citations:_how_verifiable_is_.22verifiable.22_in_practice.3F)

Discussion on Wikipedia signpost:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-03-02/Recent_research#Test_of_300k_citations:_how_verifiable_is_.22verifiable.22_in_practice.3F)

tl;dr it's not an intrinsically terrible idea, but you'll be unsurprised to
know there is not in fact one weird trick.

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vilhelm_s
> “The point is, basically, that Wikiepdia is not bad,” Evans added, “But it
> needs to meet its own standard for verifiability.”

But published books and journal articles _do_ meet the Wikipedia verifiability
criterion, even if they are not accessible online at no cost.

To make those books get a low "verifiability score" seems like a bad idea to
me. For quite a a few topics, it is still the case that the information you
can find by just googling a topic is a lot worse than what is published on
paper. (I know this from trying to track down online sources for various
things I read about on Wikipedia...)

~~~
chris_wot
There's a difference between verifiability and reliability. A bad actor could
claim a reliable source that is hard to access says something it does not.
That doesn't make the source any less reliable, only it does make it hard to
verify that what is written is indeed what the source actually says.

~~~
vilhelm_s
Sure, I'm just saying that this is considered in the existing wikipedia
standards.

For a claim to be "verifiable"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability))
it must be supported by a citation to a source which is "reliable", which
includes being "accessible" enough that someone can check it. But print and
paywalled sources are still considered to meet the accessibility criterion.
("Do not reject sources just because they are hard or costly to access. If you
have trouble accessing a source, others may be able to do so on your behalf.",
"The costs or difficulties of verifying a source do not impact its
reliability, so long as it is possible for someone to verify it within a
reasonable time.")

~~~
chris_wot
Maybe that needs clarifying then. A source that comes up with information that
can't be verified isn't terribly reliable, and thus not really verifiable.

Every single anti-vaccination site does this. Here's an example:

[http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2012/02/18/the-deadly-
impo...](http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2012/02/18/the-deadly-
impossibility-of-herd-immunity-through-vaccination-by-dr-russell-blaylock/)

"The Deadly Impossibility of Herd Immunity". There are claims in there such as
"as the literature shows" with no reference to the literature itself. It makes
a lot of claims and refers to some sort of group that it doesn't even identify
to characterise claims by vaccination specialists, and gets a lot of facts
wrong about herd immunity.

Thus, as a source it is unreliable in that it doesn't clearly state its own
sources, so I'd have to call it unverifiable.

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takno
Surely it would be trivial to get a nice reassuringly high reading on the
meter by including lots of references which were irrelevant but easy to
access. If you were careful to heavily reference uncontroversial statements
they wouldn't even need to be inaccurate

~~~
chris_wot
If the source for the citation is irrelevant, then that would have to be
considered inaccurate.

I don't think an automated metric could ever check the accuracy of a source,
only its verifiability and reliability.

Any system that relies on metrics can be gamed. Wikipedia has had to deal with
an immense amount of gamesmanship over the years, and experienced editors can
spot it normally very quickly by now.

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UniZero
This would certainly have upfront advantages, like increasing the amount of
information deemed "credible". However, there's a problem: how do you trust an
actor controlling a system like that?

i.e. - If I wanted the power to discredit almost anything online, I would
propose such a system because it can only serve its purpose under the
operation of a private entity. It wouldn't function properly on an open
platform because that information would evidently be just as non-credible.

~~~
chris_wot
I'd make sure the system allows full transparency on how the metric is formed
- for instance it shows that vactruth.com has a low reliability weighting, but
a high verifiability weighting; but that the Journal of Comparitive
Neuroscience has a high reliability score but a low verifiability score (it
costs about US$32,000 a year for a 24 issue subscription).

I'd then let people tweak their own metrics and have the ability to share them
with others.

------
DarkLinkXXXX
Question: is a source "accessible" if it's on Library Genesis? Should it be
considered so or not?

~~~
eumoria
easily to all? nope.

------
chris_wot
I have a few thoughts on this:

1\. When I created [citation needed] I never cared that people would source
unreliable information. At that point I wanted to see the sources that were
being used, and if they were unreliable then say so and under NPOV either make
the fact or view less prominent, or remove it entirely. After all, when
balancing neutrality with accuracy you shouldn't need to give equal weight to
every crackpot theory.

However, access to material was a different issue. I tried a brief experiment
called "bookcasing" where everyone could list the sources they physically
owned, with the idea that if you needed to have material verified you could
reach out to those people and have them check the material for you. Sort of
like a crowd sourced fact checker.

It looks to me like Sci-Hub might now be the best way for Wikipedia to verify
sources. There are many editors who don't have access to university where
these things are freely available. The fact that information is not freely
available to verify for Wikipedia highlights the fact that corporate interests
slow down research and actively cause false and misleading information to be
propagated!

2\. The article asserts that it would be too expensive to make journals free.
That's not exactly correct - a good portion of scientific work and research is
government funded. As has been pointed out time and again, the journals don't
pay for the research, they only pay to vet and publish the research. They are
making profits of 30% and leveraging the research dollars paid by the general
public.

In fact, I think that if they want to publish work, then I'd like to see them
be forced to pay for 25% of the costs of the research. I'm pretty certain at
this point you would see them squeal that it's too expensive - at which point
we can point out that they aren't the ones who do the bulk of the work that
allows them to publish in the first place!

3\. There is nothing stopping third parties from creating a plugin themselves
that verifies the transparency and availability of sources.

I can see a number of metrics I'd be interested in.

* a score that works out a weighting for reliability of journals. So in other words, it would penalise the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine for not making clear how they judge the manuscripts they publish

* another might utilise an impact score

* others might look at the weight that an article gives to a particular viewpoint to give insights into its neutrality.

It would be nice to be able to do this in Wikimedia and to be able to data
analysis with the working clearly shown on how the metrics are derived.

It's workable, and I think it would be insightful!

~~~
douche
Does Wikipedia not have a JSTOR account or access to the other big
aggregators?

There's probably a myriad of licensing and legal issues around that...

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brightball
Or to actively display sources that are edited out multiple times.

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kingmanaz
Ban hasbara editors.

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sparkzilla
A verifiability meter is a reasonable suggestion, but it won't stop make much
of a difference to Wikipedia's deeper problems, most of which come down to the
use of the wiki as a content creation tool in the first place. For those
interested, I've written an outline of Wikipedia's software problems [1]. None
of these problems are going to be fixed any time soon -- the leadership simply
isn't there.

[1][http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-
sins/](http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/)

~~~
yetanotheracc
Policy wise, this comment is a blatant violation of [[WP:COI]] and
[[WP:SPAM]].

Substantially, I am so glad that Wikipedia is governed by the community.
Otherwise, it would be a matter of time until some young, bright and dynamic
manager decided to implement a subset of the "improvements" you propose - with
a disastrous effect.

~~~
davidgerard
Newslines is the guy's startup, aspiring to compete with Wikipedia.

~~~
sparkzilla
Actually we are much bigger than just competing with Wikipedia. We combine
aspects of Wikipedia, daily news, Youtube, LinkedIn and (coming soon)
Facebook.

~~~
chris_wot
Sounds like a lot of competing interests. Best of luck to you, but I think
you'll find this hard to accomplish well.

~~~
sparkzilla
Thanks!

