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How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

csail.mit.edu

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Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#81

Post by asdff »

pdonis wrote: post #77
asdff wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did do a controlled experiment here. They had articles in a treatment group and articles in a controlled group. What are the shortcomings you have in mind when you say that "controlled experiments simply cannot be done" when it appears that they have done a controlled experiment?

> 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.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#83

Post by fooker »

jacobolus wrote: post #4
stevenjgarner wrote: post #2

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.

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…

> 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.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#84

Post by sien »

setr wrote: post #68
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…

If I’m reading this right, I’m seeing a vote taking place in the “Survey” section, with 5 votes invoked — 2 no, 3 yes. And an end result of No Consensus. Framing this as if 2 Wikipedians exercising outsized power to produce this ruling seems disingenuous at best. And their basic objection (I only bothered skimming) of bias and ambiguity in the source/data/methodology seems fairly reasonable on its face; whether it’s…

Some of the stats in the current article come from the predecessor of the AusPlay Survey.

Also, there are stats in the article that are completely biased that are self-reported stats from sports organisations.

The people objecting to new stats had no problem with these ones.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#85

Post by sien »

jacobolus wrote: post #73
setr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’m reading this right, I’m seeing a vote taking place in the “Survey” section, with 5 votes invoked — 2 no, 3 yes. And an end result of No Consensus. Framing this as if 2 Wikipedians exercising outsized power to produce this ruling seems disingenuous at best. And their basic objection (I only bothered skimming) of bias and ambiguity in the source/data/methodology seems fairly reasonable on its face; whether it’s…

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 enough.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#86

Post by barnbuilder »

jimbob45 wrote: post #50
dpifke wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 anything it is an example of bias towards incumbents, who get professional taxpayer-funded public domain portraits that are easy to drop into Wikipedia pages.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=...

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

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#87

Post by leereeves »

fooker wrote: post #83
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…

> 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".)

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#88

Post by themitigating »

jacobolus wrote: post #4
stevenjgarner wrote: post #2

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.

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?

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#89

Post by siva7 »

jacobolus wrote: post #4
stevenjgarner wrote: post #2

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.

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 medical guidelines. If i would receive a academic home assignment without citations the student would have failed the course, so why should it be OK on wikipedia.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#90

Post by Gareth321 »

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?

Some of them are, which is why it's important to look at the sources and verify for themselves. Citing a news article provides a very different level of evidence for an assertion than a peer reviewed paper.
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