How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior • Hacker News Board

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#111

Post by barnbuilder » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 2:21 AM 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...

Apologies, I did not see that image in the article's history. I assume it lacked a free license as the other commenter mentioned.

Interestingly, the current image on that article appears to also not be legitimately freely licensed. It is a screen shot of a Youtube video uploaded by a resort in New Mexico. The uploader[0] gives no indication on their user profile that they are affiliated with the resort, while putting a Creative Commons license on the screenshot that the Youtube page makes no indication of.

The uploader is also now suspended on all Wikimedia projects for abusively using multiple accounts, and their main account[1] has on their talk page lots of records of deleted political-oriented images with many instances of inaccurate licensing and poor quality.

(If someone has a Wikipedia account it would be nice to flag the image on Ronchetti's page for deletion!)

All this to say, Wikipedia's editing process can by its nature be pretty messy and often produce some suboptimal results, until such time as someone comes along and fixes it. This should not be confused with a concerted effort by the people running the project itself.

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Melvingatez34

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Over9000edits

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#112

Post by pwdisswordfish0 » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #64

MisterMower wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have weird requirements for citations. Want to cite a link to a blog where a guy has spent 20,000 hours researching a topic but doesn’t have a degree? Not allowed. Want to post a link to a NYT article written by a journalist with no relevant experience in that same field? Go for it. It’s really strange. It’s like they’re aiming for narrative over fact or something.

To be fair usually when the nyt article is wrong they issue a retraction and when the blogger is wrong they triple down

Citation needed.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#113

Post by pdonis » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 12:12 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #81

pdonis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They did do a controlled experiment here. No, they didn't. You can't do a controlled experiment on humans. Nobody has a "human source" that can stamp out a series of humans that are identical in all respects, to be used in an experiment, the way physicists have "particle sources" that can stamp out a series of identical particles. That's what "controlled experiment" means. The fact that they call one group a "contr…

At that point you might as well write off the entire field of biology since no two animals could be identical. Even clones could be subject to random point mutations.

> At that point you might as well write off the entire field of biology

No, you don't need to write off the entire field, you just need to be aware of its limitations. As you should be with any field of knowledge.

> no two animals could be identical. Even clones could be subject to random point mutations.

Yes, and any honest assessment of what we know in biology, and how confident we are in our knowledge, has to take these things into account.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#114

Post by pdonis » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 12:16 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #80

pdonis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can when you have many samples divided into treatment and control groups that are otherwise identical, that overcomes any biases or confounding variables that might be influencing the design and ensures that what you are seeing is causal. How much are physicist or chemists really controlling in the lab setting? There could be plenty of confounding variables in their experiments too. Maybe "RT" in this lab for tha…

> How much are physicist or chemists really controlling in the lab setting?

A lot more than can possibly be controlled when you're gathering data from events in the real world instead of in a controlled lab environment.

> To overcome those potential confounding variables and other biases, chemists and physicists often turn to the exact same statistical tests being employed by people in the social sciences.

No, not "often"--"when they have no other choice". The preferred method of dealing with such variables is to measure them, develop predictive models for how they affect the desired outputs, and test those models in further experiments. For ewxample, if "nominal" temperature is 75 F but temperature in labs can vary, physicists or chemists will want to do experiments over a range of temperatures, develop a predictive model for how temperature affects the results, and test the model. They won't just throw up their hands and do "statistical tests" and call it a day--unless it's impossible to do anything else. Which it almost never is in physics and chemistry.

> Good experimental design builds robustness no matter what your topic is.

And good science is aware of the limitations inherent in each specific field no matter what the field is. Good science does not make claims that are not justified in the light of the limitations of the field. "Statistical tests" simply cannot give the same level of confidence as predictive models that have been tested against further experimental data and have passed the tests. And good scientists should not pretend otherwise.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#115

Post by amriksohata » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 11:06 AM UTC

This is why in itself Wikipedia cannot be a trusted source but should be treated as purely, an extension of the media. They choose who they can cite and who they cannot.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#116

Post by framperz » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 6:48 PM UTC

erichocean wrote: post #93

bawolff wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not directing this comment at you, but to the other children of this thread: So much criticism of wikipedia seems to come down to: wikipedia did X. I think X is wrong. Other people don't see it that way. I don't want to spend the time proving my point. How dare wikipedia not just take me, a random internet stranger, at my word. All i want to know is how do y'all think it could possibly work differently? Everybody thi…

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…

I think that's an interesting point on activism. It's more than just individual activists though, there are also corporations/businesses - I can't think of the number of times I've heard people talk about hiring a team/contractor to revamp/clean up a corporate Wikipedia page, or an individual's Wikipedia page.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#117

Post by barnbuilder » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 6:58 AM UTC

barnbuilder wrote: post #111

jimbob45 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?? 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...

Apologies, I did not see that image in the article's history. I assume it lacked a free license as the other commenter mentioned. Interestingly, the current image on that article appears to also not be legitimately freely licensed. It is a screen shot of a Youtube video uploaded by a resort in New Mexico. The uploader[0] gives no indication on their user profile that they are affiliated with the resort, while putting…

Just wanted to retract that about the license -- I missed on the Youtube page that it does have a Creative Commons license listed there.