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Augmented Social Cognition @ PARC, Models Of Authorship And Governance |
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Somey |
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Sounds rather ominous! (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif) Having read that, it seems clear that Mr. Chi here is approaching this from an almost entirely ergonomic perspective, as opposed to an ethical-humanist or societal-impact perspective. That would be in keeping with his professional focus, of course (PARC has been a leader in computing ergonomics for a long time, as is well known). That isn't to say he's missing the point, but this bit strikes me as the key question he's interested in: QUOTE So now the research question is whether you want to design your editing policy to favor the upper class (top editors and administrators), the middle class (the 5000-6000 editors who contribute the middle 50% of all edits), or the lower class (the 15000 editors who contribute the last 25%).
One way to think about this problem is to study the amount of resistance each of these four classes of editors experience on Wikipedia. A metric that we used is the reverts-to-edits ratio. That is, on average, what percentage of edits were reverted, as experienced by each of these four classes of editors? Turns out that the reverts-to-edits ratio for each of these 4 classes of editors were 1.3%, 1.4%, 1.5%, and 4.7%, respectively. Meaning that the lower class of editors clearly experience greater resistance, such that, on average, 1 out of every 20 edits they contribute are reverted. For good or ill, hardly anyone on Wikipedia thinks in these terms, and the vast majority of them believe that the same rules should apply to everyone, including admins, even Jimbo himself in many cases. That's not necessarily bad, of course, but the real issue for them is how do they define the term "everyone."In other words, it's obvious now that a clear majority of WP'ers agree that the higher rates of "disruption" and "tendentious editing behavior" by AnonIP's makes it acceptable to treat them as a different, less-privileged class of editor than the "community" of named users. This should have been obvious to all of them from the start, but old egalitarian dogmas die hard. The really unfortunate thing about this isn't that AnonIP's will be treated differently now; the unfortunate thing is that they waited so long to do it, it's now much harder to implement this because of the fear of what's considered negative publicity - most of which is likely to come from the tech media, which is what many of them read almost exclusively. Moreover, I would think that quite a few Wikipedia admins and "power users," having looked at those numbers, would not think, "gosh, there's a significant disparity there." Instead, their reaction would be, "how is it that admins are getting a whopping 1.3 percent of their edits reverted? And who's doing these reverts? And can they be banned summarily"? And so on.
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Jon Awbrey |
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QUOTE(Somey @ Fri 13th February 2009, 4:32pm) Sounds rather ominous! (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif) Having read that, it seems clear that Mr. Chi here is approaching this from an almost entirely ergonomic perspective, as opposed to an ethical-humanist or societal-impact perspective. That would be in keeping with his professional focus, of course (PARC has been a leader in computing ergonomics for a long time, as is well known). That isn't to say he's missing the point, but this bit strikes me as the key question he's interested in: QUOTE So now the research question is whether you want to design your editing policy to favor the upper class (top editors and administrators), the middle class (the 5000–6000 editors who contribute the middle 50% of all edits), or the lower class (the 15000 editors who contribute the last 25%).
One way to think about this problem is to study the amount of resistance each of these four classes of editors experience on Wikipedia. A metric that we used is the reverts-to-edits ratio. That is, on average, what percentage of edits were reverted, as experienced by each of these four classes of editors? Turns out that the reverts-to-edits ratio for each of these 4 classes of editors were 1.3%, 1.4%, 1.5%, and 4.7%, respectively. Meaning that the lower class of editors clearly experience greater resistance, such that, on average, 1 out of every 20 edits they contribute are reverted.
For good or ill, hardly anyone on Wikipedia thinks in these terms, and the vast majority of them believe that the same rules should apply to everyone, including admins, even Jimbo himself in many cases. That's not necessarily bad, of course, but the real issue for them is how do they define the term "everyone."In other words, it's obvious now that a clear majority of WP'ers agree that the higher rates of "disruption" and "tendentious editing behavior" by AnonIP's makes it acceptable to treat them as a different, less-privileged class of editor than the "community" of named users. This should have been obvious to all of them from the start, but old egalitarian dogmas die hard. The really unfortunate thing about this isn't that AnonIP's will be treated differently now; the unfortunate thing is that they waited so long to do it, it's now much harder to implement this because of the fear of what's considered negative publicity — most of which is likely to come from the tech media, which is what many of them read almost exclusively. Moreover, I would think that quite a few Wikipedia admins and "power users," having looked at those numbers, would not think, "gosh, there's a significant disparity there." Instead, their reaction would be, "how is it that admins are getting a whopping 1.3 percent of their edits reverted? And who's doing these reverts? And can they be banned summarily"? And so on. Actually, I was thinking of inviting Ed Chi et al. here to discuss the state of their research — as I have long been interested in the more general context of questions they are tackling — but I thought I'd let the Earth take another spin before doing that. Then again, maybe inviting folks over for a Valentine's Day Party would sound even more ominous … Jon (IMG: http://wikipediareview.com/stimg9x0b4fsr2/1/folder_post_icons/icon9.gif)
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Jon Awbrey |
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QUOTE The Prize So what gives? Is there a right way or wrong way to constructing and compiling knowledge resources? As designers of social systems, what should be the governance model for these systems? Ed H. Chi (26 Jan 2009), " Governing and Authorship Models at Wikipedia and Britannica", Augmented Social Cognition Blog. More information about the Mission and Vision of the Augmented Social Cognition Group can be found in these recent blog items:
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Jon Awbrey |
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QUOTE The Prize So what gives? Is there a right way or wrong way to constructing and compiling knowledge resources? As designers of social systems, what should be the governance model for these systems? Ed H. Chi (26 Jan 2009), " Governing and Authorship Models at Wikipedia and Britannica", Augmented Social Cognition Blog. Here's a nice summary of the Living Laboratory idea: QUOTE The Augmented Social Cognition group have been a proponent of the idea of 'Living Labratory' within PARC. The idea … is that in order to bridge the gulf between academic models of science and practical research, we need to conduct research within laboratories that are situated in the real world. Many of these living laboratories are real platforms and services that researchers would build and maintain, and … would remain somewhat unreliable and experimental, but yet useful and real. The idea is to engage real users in ecological valid situations, while gathering data and building models of social behavior. Ed H. Chi (05 Nov 2008), " 'Living Laboratories' : Rethinking Ecological Designs and Experimentation in Human-Computer Interaction", Augmented Social Cognition Blog. QUOTE Time has come to do a great more deal of experimentation in the real world, using real and living laboratories. Ed H. Chi (13 Feb 2009), " WikiDashboard and the Living Laboratory", Augmented Social Cognition Blog.
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Jon Awbrey |
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QUOTE Re: "What if we can design an expertise finding system that recommends the best articles for you to contribute to in Wikipedia? Would it increase participation rates?" Ed, This is so clueless that it boggles the imagination. You have clearly not spent a lot of time actually participating in Wikipedia. Do you have any idea how many "expertise enhancing efforts" have gone already gone down in flames on Wikipedian shores? You need to put aside your wiki-pipe-dreams, spend a little more time talking to people outside the Wikimediocracy, and try to grasp the real dynamics of what goes on in Wikipedia. Jon Awbrey, 11 Mar 2010, 8:08 AMI'm afraid I allowed myself to get a little exasperated — I probably should've gone for my walk in the park before commentating. Still, it's all true … Jon (IMG: http://wikipediareview.com/stimg9x0b4fsr2/1/folder_post_icons/icon9.gif)
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Milton Roe |
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QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Thu 11th March 2010, 9:15am) QUOTE Re: "What if we can design an expertise finding system that recommends the best articles for you to contribute to in Wikipedia? Would it increase participation rates?" Ed, This is so clueless that it boggles the imagination. You have clearly not spent a lot of time actually participating in Wikipedia. Do you have any idea how many "expertise enhancing efforts" have gone already gone down in flames on Wikipedian shores? You need to put aside your wiki-pipe-dreams, spend a little more time talking to people outside the Wikimediocracy, and try to grasp the real dynamics of what goes on in Wikipedia. Jon Awbrey, 11 Mar 2010, 8:08 AMI'm afraid I allowed myself to get a little exasperated — I probably should've gone for my walk in the park before commentating. Still, it's all true … Jon (IMG: http://wikipediareview.com/stimg9x0b4fsr2/1/folder_post_icons/icon9.gif) Chi seems to have a bad case of nerditis. You can always tell a true nerd by their aversion to ever actually tackling any project directly. Instead, they'll suggest tackling it at the next level up. You say, "Gee, we need somebody to invent a [system/ device/ program] that does X or Y." Nerd: "No, no, what we need is for somebody to invent an automatic machine or computer that will INVENT systems and devices that do X and Y. Then you just tell them what want, and voila, they do it automatically." (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/ermm.gif) I think actually what we really need is a machine that does the following: anytime you need a job done, you feed the job-description into the machine, and out comes a suggestion that we need a machine that do that job, and perhaps even a machine that invents machines that can do that job... You see-- you can replace nerd suggestions with an algorithm. So why do we even need nerds at all? What is needed is a nerd-replacement machine. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif)
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Malleus |
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Thu 11th March 2010, 7:22pm) I added my own comment to Ed Chi... QUOTE Ed, is it a scientific process if you have an unwavering viewpoint that the subject matter (in this case, Wikipedia) is inherently a wonderful phenomenon and couldn't possibly be wrongly governed or nefariously exploited?
My viewpoint is that you are studying something like malaria, but you (as the scientist) have chosen an agenda that takes the side of the eukaryotic Plasmodium protist. What a tragedy if this beautiful parasite were to become extinct, you seem to be saying. I have rarely seen such pseudoscientic intellectual claptrap as is on display here. There is no "scientific process", there is a scientific method, one that demands testable hypotheses. Your viewpoint is neither here nor there, except insofar as it's a manifestation of your own prejudice. Same goes for Awbrey of course, in spades. Ja, Ja.
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Somey |
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To the best of our knowledge Mr. Chi actually did register a WR account as edchi, but as of now he hasn't posted anything. Sometimes these academic types get to thinking we're all too unruly and end up being scared off, but I think there's still reason to hope in his case. My own experience with "recommendation engines," at least at the consumer level, has been fairly consistent so far - I'm not impressed by any of them yet. The one I'm exposed to the most, that of eMusic.com, is terrible. The ones for Netflix and iTunes aren't much better, and this is after Netflix put up $1 million in prize money for an improved algorithm. Amazon.com probably has the best one of the major music/movie sites I actually use, but that's not saying much, and they probably have the largest database for mining purposes. (Last.fm seems to be pretty good too, but AFAIK that's almost entirely human-driven, isn't it? I don't go there much.) I'm not saying the technology won't improve (I'm sure it will), and to some extent my tastes in both movies and music tend to be non-mainstream and therefore (I assume) harder to work out automatically. But it does strike me that music/movies are fairly basic-simplistic applications in comparison to something like what Mr. Chi is suggesting for Wikipedia. It might be a good idea **IF** they can do it in such a way as to not involve the entrenched WP user community, but without them they might not get widespread adoption, because they won't be allowed to integrate it into WP itself, at least not immediately.
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Jon Awbrey |
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Ed Chi's replyMy follow-up — QUOTE Let me rephrase your suggestion: "What if we can design an expertise finding system that recommends the best articles for you to contribute to in [Ideal System X]?" That, of course, is brilliant idea, and well worth trying somewhere or other, almost anywhere but Wikipedia. The catch is that there is already a culture in place at Wikipedia, a culture that is antithetical to every condition that it would take to make such a utility work. This is true of every attempt to bring Wikipedia up to par with the intellectual virtues usually associated with responsible scholarship and journalism, and automation would not make the slightest difference, since you cannot implement disciplined routines without the consent of the mob. You could try to follow the 5-year debacle over "flagged revisions" if you wanted an ever-ongoing example. Jon Awbrey, 11 Mar 2010, 11:14 AM
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