Wikipedia Vulnerabilities Explored In New Research

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Monopolization of community-based information networks by cartels of a few “super editors” among several risks that could lead to a diminished Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s quality benefits from high levels of free participation, but volunteer information databases like Wikipedia can be negatively effected by tendencies toward information monopolization, and, according to a recent study, this negative effect is more prevalent in more frequently edited articles — articles that could be considered to be more important.

In the study, researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and the Korea Institute for Advanced Study looked at how editors interact with each other as well as how they interact with articles, and integrated previously-ignored factors such as the consideration of real time — not just the number of edits used in previous studies to mark time.

Among the team’s findings: infrequently-referred articles grow faster than frequently-referred ones. Not only that, but articles that attracted a high motivation to edit actually reduced the number of participants. Yun and his colleagues inferred that this type of Wikipedia article participation decay results in inequality among community editors. The trend will become more severe as time goes on, they suspected:

“For the previous decade, many of these open-editing access movements have significantly affected the entire

Jinhyuk Yun
Jinhyuk Yun

society,” Jinhyuk Yun, a Ph.D. candidate at the Complex Systems and Statistical Physics Lab at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea, told us.

“Wikipedia, Creative Commons Licenses, GNU, etc. To sustain such movements, they must maintain their motivations for participants, which might be taken away by monopolization.”

Yun explained how communal information databases like Wikipedia slow down.

“There are various reasons to participate in such ‘open-editing’ movements. Some are collective reasons shared in a society, and others are somewhat personal. Because the motivation is diverse, slowing down is also due to various causes. First, there can be a loss of necessity to contribute due to changes in society — or technology. Some GNU software based on old platforms no longer continue because the number of users of such software is getting smaller. In addition, there can be new barriers caused by governmental regulations — not about such communal databases, but considering the case of UBER. One particular candidate we discussed in the paper is the monopolization by few ‘super-editors.'”

Yun also commented on how we can consider the health of such community databases?

“It is very hard to quantify the ‘health’ of such database because of the ambiguity in the definition of health. In my point of view, the databases should meet the standard of accuracy and instantaneity. In other words, it should keep the trend, but it should not lose its accuracy in the contents. Although these databases are mainly based on the contribution of anonymous sources, it should also have reliable references to cross-check.”

However, data monopolization is not a black and white issue, Yun noted.

“To be honest, monopolization sometimes does good in particular occasions,” Yun told us, “yet it has many risks in most cases. Consider political issues in authoritarian governments, where media controlled by the government sometimes manipulates people’s opinions by a simple nudge or filtering. Such manipulation can also happen in Wikipedia — for example, by cartels of super-editors.”

Yun offered some possible remedies for content monopolization on Wikipedia:

“Based on our observations, Wikipedia could consider a reward program to recruit new editors. Simple achievement reward programs — like those in video games — at an early stage might be helpful, yet it should be done under strict supervision to avoid vandals. For instance, giving merit to editors who supply new reliable references might help to keep the quality of articles.”

The report, “Intellectual interchanges in the history of massive online open-editing encyclopedia, Wikipedia” was completed by J. Yun, S. H. Lee, and H. Jeong.

By Andy Stern

China Making It’s Own Wikipedia, but Public Can’t Edit It

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The government, which enforces strict censorship of media, has decided it needs its own online encyclopedia. Wikipedia, like many other popular free information sources on the internet, is blocked in China.

China’s encyclopedia will not be like Wikipedia, though. It will not allow public edits, and its editors will be hand-picked by the government.

The want to put together 300,000 entries. Analysts have said they do not expect to see subjects China does not like to talk about, such as “Tiananmen Square 1989” and “Falun Gong spiritual group” to be included.

Wikipedia Creator Making News Version: Wikitribune

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Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales is creating Wikitribune, a news version of Wikipedia where he hopes news will be more fact-based than what he sees elsewhere.

He will be hiring many journalists for the initial phase, and see how things develop from there.

Wikitribune will not focus on doing original journalism. It will use the same community model as Wikipedia to put together long-form contextual articles for news events, as well as finding related questions that can be filled in by people at home.

Regarding whether the venture would succeed, Wales stated, “[O]ne of my main questions is the question of scale – I think if we can get to scale, it will be successful. If we aren’t able to produce enough good work early on to persuade people to contribute further support, I think that means that potentially we are going to struggle to get traction. But the response so far to the announcement has been so positive that I’m feeling ok.”

Turkey Blocks Wikipedia

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A formal judgement has approved the administrative measure, indicating that a permanent restriction is now in place for all language editions of the online encyclopedia in Turkey.

Some are pointing towards Wikipedia’s depiction of Erdogan as a dictator as a cause:

“Erdoğan detractors have noted that under Erdoğan, more journalists have been incarcerated in Turkey than in any other country, including North Korea. Detractors have also pointed out the fact that the April referendum essentially nullified the traditional legal ‘check’ of parliamentary fiscal review, that parliament had previously held over his executive branch of government. Detractors have claimed that Erdoğan’s unceasing efforts at broadening his executive powers while also minimizing his executive accountability may amount to the ‘fall of Turkish democracy,’ and the ‘birth of a dictator.’

“The loss of availability is consistent with internet filters used to censor content in the country,” according to independent, non-partisan network monitoring observatory Turkey Blocks.

“SSL errors are issued for https requests, indicating failing to connect to the authentic servers, while the unencrypted addresses now return an nginx http 404 error indicative of filtering.”