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Wikipedia in the news: 14 April 2008

17 Apr 2008 in Wikipedia by Enoch Lau | 1 comment

(As you may know, I write the “In the news” sec­tion for the Wiki­pe­dia Sign­post. From this week onwards, I’ll be post­ing up the ITN sec­tion on my blog as well as hav­ing it pub­lished in the Signpost.)

Pro­fessor says Wiki­pe­dia crowds out expert knowledge

Wiki­pe­dia breeds ‘unwit­ting trust’ says IT pro­fessor – Deakin Uni­ver­sity asso­ci­ate pro­fessor Shar­man Licht­en­stein believes that the increas­ing use of Wiki­pe­dia cre­ates blind trust in inform­a­tion, to the det­ri­ment of valu­able know­ledge and expert opin­ion. She says that Aus­trali­ans already dis­respect intel­lec­tu­als and aca­dem­ics, but she asks us to con­sider whether we would use a trained brain sur­geon or a stu­dent who has just read Wiki­pe­dia for brain sur­gery. She notes that Wiki­pe­dia prides itself on being built by groups of lay cit­izens, and experts are unlikely to con­trib­ute any­way because they would expect to be paid. Cred­ib­il­ity of Wiki­pe­dia art­icles is ques­tioned because of the form­a­tion of “elite” edit­ors and admin­is­trat­ors, a trend that has caused grow­ing dis­sat­is­fac­tion with Wikipedia’s edit­or­ial pro­cess, lead­ing oth­ers to cre­ate com­pet­it­ors to Wikipedia.

Other men­tions

Other recent men­tions in the online media include:

  • Wikipedia’s Zealots – An editor who receives per­sonal com­mu­nic­a­tion about a scientist’s views on global warm­ing edits Wiki­pe­dia to include these com­mu­nic­a­tions but is rever­ted by other editors.
  • Sci­entific cita­tions in Wiki­pe­dia – The pat­tern of cita­tions on Wiki­pe­dia is com­pared with the Journal Cita­tion Reports, which counts journal cita­tions; Wiki­pe­dia is increas­ingly using struc­tured cita­tion markup.

[As pub­lished in the Wiki­pe­dia Sign­post]

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Wikipedia talk

07 Aug 2007 in Wikipedia by Enoch Lau | No comments

The SUITS sem­inar series aims to provide a cas­ual lunch­time chat about inter­est­ing top­ics and cutting-​​edge research, and I had the priv­ilege of tak­ing the first one… and I took the chance to talk about Wiki­pe­dia, everyone’s favour­ite wiki. The audi­ence is inten­ded to be under­gradu­ate level, but there weren’t any under­gradu­ates there…

I gave a brief insider’s look at Wiki­pe­dia, show­ing off some of the admin­is­trator tools that ordin­ary users can­not see. I went over some of the parts of the web­site (com­munity portals, the Sign­post, policy pages, spe­cial pages) that are import­ant tools for reg­u­lar con­trib­ut­ors, espe­cially in keep­ing track of van­dal­ism. I also men­tioned the efforts under way to form the local chapter of the Wiki­me­dia Foundation.

Because if I talk for too long, people might die from bore­dom (!!) so I brought along some light enter­tain­ment. I played a bit of Eben Moglen’s lec­ture on GPLv3 – the part about the arith­metic shop. I was going to play video from Wiki­mania 2007, but the lazy bug­gers haven’t put up any­thing yet, so I had to be con­tent with 2006 stuff – but it turned out to be a good choice. Lawrence Lessig is a fant­astic speaker – he speaks with con­vic­tion and there’s no one who can match his slides. Finally, I played a bit of audio from the Wiki­pe­dia Weekly, broad­cast­ing from Taiwan dur­ing the conference.

Some of the ques­tions I hadn’t really pre­pared for – e.g. a ques­tion on pat­ents. I should know more than what I man­aged to mumble out… and no, I still haven’t learnt that present­ing without much sleep isn’t good.

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Sure you do

15 Jul 2007 in Wikipedia by Enoch Lau | 2 comments

The fun stuff you get to read as a Wiki­pe­dia admin…

wp-fluent1.png

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Weekend hacking – and I finally triangulate!

09 Apr 2007 in Computing, Wikipedia by Enoch Lau | No comments

The fruition of some week­end hack­ing in C#:

WP:FRIEND – A Wiki­pe­dia Administrator’s Best Friend

WP:FRIEND is my answer to the deluge of house­keep­ing duties facing Wiki­pe­dia admin­is­trat­ors. Faced with weeks-​​old back­logs of dele­tions, a tool that makes chores easier and faster is what we need. There are exist­ing edit­ing tools, such as AutoWikiBrowser, but they are not par­tic­u­larly suited for admin­is­trator clean-​​up jobs. I’ve just imple­men­ted the dele­tion of images tagged {{Now Com­mons}} so far – and there are plenty of bugs to be fixed and func­tion­al­ity to be imple­men­ted before I’ll release it pub­licly – although that’s the even­tual goal. Here’s the oblig­at­ory plug to Dot­NetWikiBot for sav­ing me hours of pained debug­ging (the inter­ac­tion between the browser and Medi­aWiki is actu­ally quite com­plic­ated, and there is thank­fully an effort to provide a clean API, but it’s not quite done). Les­son of the day: don’t rein­vent the wheel.

FRIEND

Com­pu­ta­tional geo­metry code

Com­pu­ta­tional geo­metry looks all nice and dandy on paper – and as usual the devil is in the detail. It has to be the area of com­puter sci­ence where corner/​special cases require the most care­ful hand­ling. And there we have it! After hours of argh, I have code that tri­an­gu­lates! One inter­est­ing thing to com­ment on is that, whilst cod­ing, I stubbed out some parts that I’ll even­tu­ally write with .NET lib­rary calls (the idea being that I can get to the goal faster) but that turned out to be one of the causes of my head­ache: e.g. GraphicsPath.IsVisible() has unex­pec­ted beha­viour. Les­son of the day: write your own code because you know pre­cisely what it does1.

1 or what it’s meant to do at least.

Triangulation

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