CONIECTO

• Boudewijn: NPOV and meme evolution
• Revo Arko Soekatno: The Indonesian language Wikipedia
• Tsila Hassine NPOV dispute dynamics

His hypothesis was that NPOV and other feedbacks can be measured. He referred to the:
- government controlled media model,
- corporate media model, and to a 3rd one,
- the wikisphere selection model,
that is more neutral than the other two.

He considered an article as getting a positive feedback every time new things were added, and a
negative feedback - every time the information was corrected.
NPOV was considered as positive feedback, because it stops politically incorrect information from being suppressed, mentioning a separate point of view. The author envisaged to measure a positive feedback loop by counting how many words were added to a meme or an article.
He showed that his project is still vague and under construction and invited everyone who could be interested to join in.

The comments from the audience:
- this is an abstract way of considering NPOV;
- the important issues are bias, censorship, putting into place a mechanism to avoid some kind of opression, advertising, pressure groups - this issue is no longer a technocratic thing; it looks like the author proposes a technocratic solution to a practical problem;
- Do NPOVs serve any purpose? The majority of NPOVs are not dramatic - see the list.

The second paper, that of Revo Arko Soekatno, focused on The Indonesian language Wikipedia.
A very interesting case study:

• The growth was very rapid following to a press interview: half of the articles (about 5000) were produced in the last 5 months, as a result of an improved awareness in the academic environment.
• The editors are mainly students, researchers, professors, ICT people;
• Among the active users (in the context of Wikipedia, a user is a person who has a registered id and is, more or less, involved in editing the WP- a wikipedian), there are 10% non Indonesian nationals, and 60% of them are very active;
• 24% from the users who are Indonesians live abroad;
• the sources of articles are, beside the printed Encyclopediae, the English, the Dutch and the German Wikipedia - a very interesting phenomenon telling a lot about how knowledge gets diffused;
• they had only one edit war due to an anonymous who tried to use a differite template in an article on Surakarta, the former capital of the Javanese kingdom;
• they now look forward to write Wikipedias in Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese and several other regional languages.

Listening to the presentation, I was thinking of a strategy of promoting Wikipedia in Romania. Could a press campain help? As far as I know, we are several supporters living abroad. Editing the Romanian Wikipedia is the least we can do.
But many people back home doubt about the reliability of the content and avoid using it, and every time I tried to encourage people to become wikipedians, their answer was either they don't feel they have the competence to do it, or they prefer to contribute information to the site of someone they already know. I guess this must be a post-communist syndrome, we don't like to contribute to communities anymore, because too often their goods were confiscated and used by few ("what's mine is mine, and what's yours is ours").

I asked a dumb question - what about the number of people who use the Indonesian Wikipedia (page accesses)?- Revo couldn't answer on the spot, but I got a note from someone in the audience. I typed the URL in, and there I was! Oh, how I love conferences with wireless!

The third paper was really about NPOV. Tsila Hassine coming from Israel and currently studying in Rotterdam, spoke about the dynamics of NPOV disputes .

The current list of NPOV disputed articles can be an interesting point of departure. Some of them are dedicated to hot topics, but others are quite obscure.

Tsila said it could be considered a sort of recommendation system, comparable to that on Amazon -what's going on, what are the hottest topics of the day?

I browsed the list myself , and I was a bit surprised to discover an article on Adrian Paunescu, a Romanian poet turned into politician (a controversial character, but the dispute is about including or not in the article a phrase about his wife who provoqued a car accident!). The article on Slavery in Sudan was, of course, disputed. But the article on egoism is also being disputed, as well as the one on Intel Ireland (see the discussion pages for more details).

Tsila mentioned in her presentation some other articles that were NPOVed, likeYoga,Yasser Arafat, Cauliflower, Aluminum or Al Quaeda.

One of the interesting examples she came up with was the article on the Israeli naval commando Shayetet 13 .

The article was marked NPOV for a long time in the English Wikipedia. See the discussion page to figure out what happened. It looked like users from different backgrounds and nationalities were having a genuine dispute - while in reality they were all accessing the internet from a military school in Alabama ;-)

The same article in the Hebrew Wikipedia is of patriotic nature and involved no discussions.
Tsila also mentioned that most of Hebrew users contribute to the English Wikipedia.

The comments after the presentation referred to the way the editors try to contain and mediate the conflicts, and to the credibility of the contributors - people who declare their identity and biases are more credible than the ones who don't. The case of China was again mentioned as a situation where editors prefer to stay anonymous.

I had the chance to introduce myself to Tsila and, after seeing my name tag, she surprised me with a few words in Romanian. This is a small world after all!

Technorati Tag: WikiMania