How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior • Hacker News Board

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#101

Post by bawolff » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

Gareth321 wrote: post #92

sien wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always. Any particular two or more wikipedians who decide they don't want something in can sometimes stop it. For example, in Australia there is a body that does sport participation statistics, Ausplay. They do this every year. It's a great source for sport statistics on Australia. Two wikipedians decided that these statistics were not permissible in the sport in Australia article. They won : https://en.wikipedia…

>Now things that are controversial like IQ or the role of heritability in ability are surely going to be problematic. FYI this kind of "wrong think" is already being removed in many articles. The way it's removed is applying the existing deep and numerous rules more strictly to information which cuts against the current dominant cultural narratives. For one of the best examples I can provide, have a look at how the "…

> Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has described Wikipedia as "badly biased." He's 100% correct.

Larry Sanger is involved with several competitors, including some for-profit examples, so he has a financial incentive to bash wikipedia

Not to say that he is neccesarily wrong. I wouldn't say "badly biased", but nobody is going to claim wikipedia is perfect.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#102

Post by jimbob45 » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

barnbuilder wrote: post #86

jimbob45 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent post! To be sure, I don’t even live in Mark’s state and it’s on him if he wants another picture on his profile. You’re a stellar citizen, though, for taking action on your own! I simply wanted to point out a trend on Wikipedia. Mark is just one of more than a dozen candidates with bad pictures or, worse, empty pictures that seem to be the result of sabotage. If you look on these candidates’ pages (or Mark’s…

Ronchetti's Wikipedia page has never had any other photos. And the article was protected[0] due to a series of vandalism edits on July 10[1] that had nothing to do with his page's photo. You are right that his article has a poor quality photo, which seems to be due to it being the only free-licensed photo available, but it's simply wrong to use this article as evidence of some sort of "partisanship on Wikipedia". If…

?? I see him as having had a different picture as of this [0] edit (several years ago). The filename (MarkRonchettiNM.png) is a different filename than the current one, leading me to believe that the file was simply taken off the Wikipedia servers and redlinked.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Ronchetti&ol...

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#103

Post by dpifke » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 4:38 PM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #102

barnbuilder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ronchetti's Wikipedia page has never had any other photos. And the article was protected[0] due to a series of vandalism edits on July 10[1] that had nothing to do with his page's photo. You are right that his article has a poor quality photo, which seems to be due to it being the only free-licensed photo available, but it's simply wrong to use this article as evidence of some sort of "partisanship on Wikipedia". If…

?? I see him as having had a different picture as of this [0] edit (several years ago). The filename (MarkRonchettiNM.png) is a different filename than the current one, leading me to believe that the file was simply taken off the Wikipedia servers and redlinked. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Ronchetti&ol...

File history says it was deleted due to the uploader not having rights to it:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MarkRonchettiNM.png

Most likely it was taken down due to a notice from the copyright holder:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Volunteer_Respons...

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#104

Post by DiggyJohnson » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #78

asdff wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by closed?

I think he means that you can't isolate and control the environment of humans the way that physicists or chemists can isolate and control the environment of particles or molecules that they are experimenting on. That's an additional issue to the one I raised in another response just now in this subthread.

Thank you, I didn’t have the time to put together a succinct paragraph like yours.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#105

Post by jacobolus » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 6:29 PM UTC

siva7 wrote: post #89

jacobolus wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really unfortunate that people copy claims made in Wikipedia (often without double-checking any other source) but then don’t cite Wikipedia. Often the claims made by Wikipedia are wrong, misleading, sloppy, one-sided, etc., and this (widespread) practice helps to perpetuate those problematic claims by making it seem that other authors are independently claiming the same thing. Then when future Wikipedia editors…

Wikipedia is not a primary source. Students can cite the original source but not wikipedia itself. The university departments i'm aware of still don't allow citing wikipedia and explicitly cover it as bad style. And i have to agree with the professors there. The quality is plain bad, last time i checked a medical article on wikipedia it was full off of claims without citations and those claims contradicted official m…

If students would always look carefully and critically at the relevant sources Wikipedia cites, assess their authors’ biases, compare multiple sources, etc., before ultimately picking what to cite, that would be one thing.

But what happens instead (in people’s published journal papers! not to mention news articles, etc.) is authors lazily crib material from Wikipedia and then either cite nothing or randomly pick works from among Wikipedia’s sources to cite without ever looking at them.

If you are writing a paper you should cite where you got the information. If the only place you looked was Wikipedia, that’s not great research practice but you should still cite Wikipedia. Honesty is an even more important part of scholarship than diligence.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#106

Post by jacobolus » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 6:37 PM UTC

sien wrote: post #85

jacobolus wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sien: If you think this decision was wrong you can try to bring it up again, and point out the discussion in Wikiprojects or other community pages where a larger number of Wikipedia editors will see it. If you could only get 3–4 people interested enough to discuss and nobody could come up with an acceptable compromise, that’s not really the fault of the process. If you think these particular editors did something imp…

Yes. This is true. But honestly, while it still midly annoys me it just doesn't seem worth the effort. What was interesting is just how unobjectionable this addition is and how hard it was to go through all the processes. I've added stats in a few wikipedia articles which have all gone in just fine. With this one part of it was OMG, really, you can just object and object and keep something out if you're determined en…

From the other side, editor X is doing their best to present a neutral and accurate view of a topic, and editor Y (who is a random stranger to them) keeps trying to add survey data which editor X believes to be methodologically unsound to the point of irrelevance.

(Disclaimer: I didn’t investigate this carefully enough to have a well formed opinion about the outcome.)

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#107

Post by jacobolus » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 6:49 PM UTC

themitigating wrote: post #88

jacobolus wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really unfortunate that people copy claims made in Wikipedia (often without double-checking any other source) but then don’t cite Wikipedia. Often the claims made by Wikipedia are wrong, misleading, sloppy, one-sided, etc., and this (widespread) practice helps to perpetuate those problematic claims by making it seem that other authors are independently claiming the same thing. Then when future Wikipedia editors…

Why are the sources that people cite in Wikipedia not vulnerable to the same issues?

Of course they are. Which is why every scholar should cite where they found their information, so that readers can chase down the reference and critically examine it. Authors should cite the source whether it is a blog post, a newspaper article, a popular textbook, a journal paper, a historical accounting document, or private correspondence with a colleague.

When people don’t cite their actual sources it becomes orders of magnitude more difficult to figure out how they came up with their claims and trace the origin and transmission of those claims through the literature.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#108

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #100

erichocean wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are activists; most people are not. Activists are willing to invest orders of magnitude more time, energy, and discomfort into winning. They are willing to break most social norms to have their narrative become the default. They're willing to suppress facts that would support alternate narratives. They're willing to put their thumb on the scale when inconvenient facts are unavoidable. Et cetera . Non-acti…

There are already various rules against engaging engaging in various types of bad faith behaviours. Like all disciplinary systems it is far from perfect of course, but it exists, and people get banned for behaving inapropriately every day. Most people at the top of the power law are not evil people. Its difficult to be both prominent and evil. The real pov pushers tend to keep a lower peofile to avoid discovery. That…

[deleted]

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#109

Post by fooker » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 9:01 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #87

fooker wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so that when they grow up and start writing real research papers they will continue citing Wikipedia when they find information there. I guess it's fine to be idealistic here but most reviewers would look down upon your work if you do this. And that impression can be the difference between acceptance and rejection. I'm sure ideally this shouldn't happen, but it is what it is for now.

I think it's honesty rather than idealism. If someone took a shortcut by reading Wikipedia instead of research papers, it would be dishonest to try to hide that. Of course, dishonesty often works, but it undermines the whole endeavor. (Although, the original author still deserves credit for their work. Perhaps the citation should be to the original work "via Wikipedia".)

Well, a citation usually not about where you found something. It's more about trying to trace the origin about a particular fact or scientific contribution.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#110

Post by dpifke » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 11:20 PM UTC

dpifke wrote: post #34

jimbob45 wrote: post #27

The partisanship on Wikipedia is becoming more and more visible. Here’s my favorite example [0]. One of the candidates has clearly been given a subpar picture and then had his profile locked from editing so that it can’t be changed. A quick Google search shows scores of better pictures, leading me to believe that this is intentional sabotage by the opposing candidate. Fortunately, this is the kind of thing we can all…

Photos need to be Creative Commons licensed; Wikipedia can't just use ones from a random Google search. The image for Mark Ronchetti was uploaded by a user who shot a video of him in 2020. Since they created the video, they own the copyright to the image and can license it to Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Ronchetti.jpg Searching for other CC-licensed images doesn't return anything: h…

For anyone following along (unlikely), press@markronchetti.com replied with a photo and asked me to upload it for them (sigh). I did so here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Ronchetti_Heads...

...and requested they complete the license authorizing its use:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Email_templates

I'm giving it about 50/50 odds they'll fill out the form and the photo will stay up, but at least I tried.

I agree with the other posters who point out that this is a bit of an unfair advantage for incumbents (who have government-sponsored public domain photos available for use). It'd be an awesome thing for volunteers to try to help with, by reaching out to less tech-saavy campaigns as I've done here.

I've been to New Mexico maybe 4-5 times in my life and have basically zero stake in this race, but I guess duty calls[0]. ;)

[0] https://xkcd.com/386/