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Wikipedia in the news: 14 April 2008

Thursday, 17 April 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

Tuesday, 7 August 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

Sunday, 15 July 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!

Monday, 9 April 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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