diff --git a/thesis/conclusion.tex b/thesis/conclusion.tex index 8846842e8db84ecf132f9e50018bc55637dc7ffa..157ca86929b61f03e70b3f9a1b998cc6dde200b7 100644 --- a/thesis/conclusion.tex +++ b/thesis/conclusion.tex @@ -28,12 +28,12 @@ Compared to machine learning techniques, rule-based systems such as the edit fil % TODO Refer back to title! Who is allowed to publish? Who decides? Taking a step back, -according to the Wikipedian community, people adding made up information like references to Brazilian aardvarks or proclaiming themselves mayors of small Chinese towns~\cite{Wikipedia:ChenFang} shall preferably not publish at all. +according to the Wikipedian community, people adding made-up information like references to Brazilian aardvarks or proclaiming themselves mayors of small Chinese towns~\cite{Wikipedia:ChenFang} shall preferably not publish at all. If this type of disruption is to be handled with edit filters, two approaches seem feasible: Warn editors adding the information that their contribution does not contain any references, or outright disallow such edits (which does not solve the problem of freely invented sources), but that was pretty much it. -Albeit edit filters may not be the ideal mechanism to deal with hoaxes, what they can do effectively is prevent someone from moving hundreds of pages to titles containing ``ON WHEELS'', thus sparing vandal fighters the need to track down and undo these changes, allowing them to use their time more productively by for example fact checking unverified claims and hence reducing the number of fake aardvarks and increasing the overall credibility of the project. +Albeit edit filters may not be the ideal mechanism to deal with hoaxes, what they can do effectively is prevent someone from moving hundreds of pages to titles containing ``on wheels''~\cite{Wikipedia:OnWheelsVandalism}, thus sparing vandal fighters the need to track down and undo these changes, allowing them to use their time more productively by for example fact checking unverified claims and hence reducing the number of fake aardvarks and increasing the overall credibility of the project. %Outlook: centralisation, censorship It is impressive how in under 20 years ``a bunch of nobodies created the world's greatest encyclopedia'' to quote new media researcher Anrew Lih~\cite{Lih2009}. diff --git a/thesis/introduction.tex b/thesis/introduction.tex index a9f5ec7f231211cb4d87c48e27df618dd2350c6d..94d66438b8f000784b87d98bb2e8f1fd47581f27 100644 --- a/thesis/introduction.tex +++ b/thesis/introduction.tex @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ \label{chap:introduction} In May 2014 the US American magasine \textit{The New Yorker} published a story called ``How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark'' in its column ``Annals of Technology''~\cite{Randall2014}. -It tells an anecdote about a New York student who, some six years before, edited the Wikipedia article on ``coati'' (a member of the racoon family native to South and Central America) to state that the coati is ``also known as [...] Brazilian aardvark''~\cite{Wikipedia:Coati}. +It tells an anecdote about a student from New York who, some six years before, edited the Wikipedia article on ``coati'' (a member of the racoon family native to South and Central America) to state that the coati is ``also known as [...] Brazilian aardvark''~\cite{Wikipedia:Coati}. This simple action is a mundane example of how Wikipedia works: Anyone can edit and small contribution by small contribution the world's largest knowledge base is created. @@ -97,7 +97,7 @@ Which stuff? \end{itemize} \end{comment} -The present work can be embedded in the context of (algorithmic) quality-control on Wikipedia and in the more general research area of algorithmic governance. +The present thesis can be embedded in the context of (algorithmic) quality-control on Wikipedia and in the more general research area of algorithmic governance. %TODO go into algorithmic governance! There is a whole ecosystem of actors struggling to maintain the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia as accurate and free of malicious content as possible. The focus of the this work are edit filters, the mechanism initially introduced by User:Werdna under the name of ``abuse filters'', previously unexplored by the scientific community. @@ -149,7 +149,7 @@ themselves, as well as their log data in order to determine what they actually d First results show that edit filters were implemented to take care of obvious but persistent types of vandalism such as mass moves of pages to nonsense URLs. The community was willing to disallow this kind of edits from the very start, reasoning that the efforts spent to clean up such cases can be used more efficiently elsewhere (i.e. for judging whether less obvious cases were malicious or not). In addition to disallowing such vandalism, edit filters appear to be applied in ambiguous situations where an edit in itself is disruptive but the motivation of the editor is not clear. -(For example, deleting the entire content of a page could be malignant, but it could also be the result of a new editor not familiar with proper procedures for deleting or moving pages.) +For example, deleting the entire content of a page could be malignant, but it could also be the result of a new editor not familiar with proper procedures for deleting or moving pages. In such cases, the filters take an ``assume good faith'' approach and seek via warning messages to guide the disrupting editor towards transforming their contribution to a constructive one: In the page blanking example, a warning contains links to the documentation for redirects and the Articles for Deletion process, and advices the editor to revert the page to the last uncompromised version in case it has been vandalised and to use the sandbox for test edits. There are also a smaller number of filters which take care of various maintenance tasks—above all tracking a certain bug or other behaviour for further investigation. diff --git a/thesis/references.bib b/thesis/references.bib index 55c3447056a879757524473eac60b6f1068fbe27..1ac6077dff6f1c2deb20c221406463dfc1a341c2 100644 --- a/thesis/references.bib +++ b/thesis/references.bib @@ -966,6 +966,15 @@ \url{https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Core_content_policies&oldid=903666779}} } +@misc{Wikipedia:OnWheelsVandalism, + key = "Wikipedia On Wheels", + author = {}, + title = {Wikipedia: On Wheels Vandalism}, + year = 2019, + note = {Retreived 25 July, 2019 from + \url{https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=Willy+on+wheels+for+President+2008&namespace=&tagfilter=&start=&end=}} +} + @misc{Wikipedia:PageProtection, key = "Wikipedia Page Protection", author = {},