41–50 of 117 posts
The referenced article on a similar effect for scientific citations can be found below. This isn't an entirely trivial matter, as it shows that "random" persons may be able to shape judicial and scientific narratives through wikipedia. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3039505
This research seems...ethically questionable, since it sought to sway judicial outcomes and did so without the consent of the experiment's subjects.
I disagree. The actual paper shows it was approved by the ethics boards of two universities. Here is a quote from the paper describing the actual methodology for creating the articles: > The experiment featured Wikipedia entries authored by faculty and by law students under faculty supervision, who each had access, through their university library, to all the relevant primary and secondary legal materials available t…
The issue isn't that they were misleading anyone; the issue is that they were, for research purposes, trying (successfully) to influence the outcomes of court cases without the subjects' consent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's difficult to impossible to impossible to actually fix those mistakes on Wikipedia. Its good theory only on paper without any change in real life.
It is entirely possible to fix those mistakes (one at a time) on Wikipedia.... if you do the research work to find out what happened. But this takes significant effort (like, a half-day of research to sort out one claim), and then sometimes back and forth with other Wikipedians to convince people that you actually chased down the real story. The problem is that for every mistake someone is willing to put effort into…
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…
> The Hunter Biden laptop controversy involves a laptop computer that conservative media outlets claimed without evidence had belonged to Hunter Biden. They further stated that the laptop had been dropped off but never collected.by an unknown individual at the Wilmington, Delaware repair shop of a blind proprietor in April 2019.
Three paragraphs saying it's all made up, you can't trust the NY Post's reporting, it's probably just Russian propaganda and then it finishes with:
> In March 2022, The New York Times reported it had authenticated some emails "from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop."[10][11] Also in March, The Washington Post reported that two security experts authenticated thousands of the 129,000 emails, though the vast majority of the laptop contents, including most of its emails, could not be authenticated.[12] Among the emails that The Washington Post was able to authenticate was the Pozharskyi email that formed the basis of the New York Post's original article.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controve...
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…
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…
Here's one[0]. > The Hunter Biden laptop controversy involves a laptop computer that conservative media outlets claimed without evidence had belonged to Hunter Biden. They further stated that the laptop had been dropped off but never collected.by an unknown individual at the Wilmington, Delaware repair shop of a blind proprietor in April 2019. Three paragraphs saying it's all made up, you can't trust the NY Post's re…
It seems the greatest value of Wikipedia is consistently as a repository of citations. The reliance of moderation or review of those citations is the question. EDIT: I hear complaints from students all the time that they are not allowed to cite Wikipedia. I tell them no you should instead cite the Wikipedia citations. They invariably tell me how much better they do academically because of that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find obvious errors all the time, but the pages are locked. This is enough of a barrier to stop me from trying to fix it. Sometimes the discussion will have the same correction listed but overruled by partisan Wikipedians.
If you can’t be bothered to sign up for a free account, it’s unlikely you’ll do the (sometimes nontrivial) amount of research required to prove your case if you get in an edit war with another author. You could equally well say “I find obvious errors in textbooks / lecture videos / journal articles / paper encyclopedias / ... all the time but it’s too hard to contact the author so I don’t do anything about it”. The m…
A study that literally affects the constitutional landscape of a nation based on coin flips - the ethics review board discussions must have been interesting.
Most (all?) of those decisions were going to come down the same way regardless; the judge (or clerk or amicus brief author or whoever) had already decided and the citations are just a way of making up a post-facto justification. There’s even a whole “judicial philosophy” based around this method of deciding first (based on personal preference or coin tosses or bribes or whatever) and then cherry-picking citations to…
It's true that since they find that the gain appears to be concentrated in 'positive' citations, used as justification, they probably didn't flip many decisions immediately (if any). But they also do followup linguistic analysis to show that (like the earlier studies) judges are borrowing language in describing their decisions. So you are going to have an accumulating effect here where the citations at zeroth order are used for justification, but that makes those cases better known later on, and they will be described as the article describes, and increasingly interpreted that way when read by later judges due to being precedent, and who will then copy it (that's how common law is supposed to work!). And that may well start begin flipping cases.
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…
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 page), you can look at the revision history and determine that there were past pictures taken down or replaced near election times.
Again, I don’t care. It’s up to these candidates to fix this stuff if they want to win. With the amount of money they’re bringing in, you’d think they could hire someone to spin them up nice profiles with ‘Political Stances’ sections and quirky stories about their family life. I wonder if they intentionally keep their profiles empty to funnel traffic to their personal websites instead.