UK Online Safety Bill And Encryption

 Will the UK block the WP.  

Wikipedia will not perform Online Safety Bill age checks

Published in the BBC

By Chris Vallance & Tom GerkenTechnology reporters

Wikipedia will not comply with any age checks required under the Online Safety Bill, its foundation says.   Rebecca MacKinnon, of the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the website, says it would "violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors".

A senior figure in Wikimedia UK fears the site could be blocked as a result.

But the government says only services posing the highest risk to children will need age verification.

Wikipedia has millions of articles in hundreds of languages, written and edited entirely by thousands of volunteers around the world.

It is the eighth most-visited site in the UK, according to data from analytics company SimilarWeb.

The Online Safety Bill, currently before Parliament, places duties on tech firms to protect users from harmful or illegal content and is expected to come fully into force some time in 2024.

Neil Brown, a solicitor specialising in internet and telecoms law, says that under the bill, services likely to be accessed by children must have "proportionate systems and processes" designed to prevent them from encountering harmful content. That could include age verification.

Lucy Crompton-Reid, chief executive of Wikimedia UK, an independent charity affiliated with the foundation, warns some material on the site could trigger age verification.

"For example, educational text and images about sexuality could be misinterpreted as pornography," she said.

But Ms MacKinnon wrote: "The Wikimedia Foundation will not be verifying the age of UK readers or contributors."

WhatsApp: Rather be blocked in UK than weaken security

Online Safety Bill changes 'not ruled out' - culture secretary

As well as requiring Wikipedia to gather data about its users, checking ages would also require a "drastic overhaul" to technical systems.

If a service does not comply with the bill, there can be serious consequences potentially including large fines, criminal sanctions for senior staff, or restricting access to a service in the UK.

Wikimedia UK fears that site could be blocked because of the Bill, and the risk that it will mandate age checks. ... '

Rebuilding Wikipedia with Crypto as W3

Been quite interested in how projects like Wikipedia can usefully and safely interact with W3, and in what way. Do not understand the take here, but think it may become important.   Like to see this further outlined. 

Why You Can't Rebuild Wikipedia with Crypto from ACM Opinion   By Platformer

Molly White is a software engineer and creator of the website "Web3 Is Going Just Great."

"Web3 Is Going Just Great" chronicles the latest crises in NFTs, DAOs, and everything else happening in crypto. In an interview, White discusses the site's origins, her favorite crypto catastrophe, and why she thinks giving people financial stakes in projects will not create a host of new Wikipedia-style projects, as decentralization advocates often claim.

"It's concerning to me when people are trying extremely hard to get people to buy in to some new idea but aren't particularly willing (or even able) to describe what it is they're doing," White says. "I was seeing all of this hype for Web3 with all these new projects, but so many of them were just absolutely terrible ideas when you got past the marketing-speak and veneers."

From Platformer   View Full Article  

Building Multilingual, Multipurpose, Multi Context Wikipedias

A long time user, and supporter of Wikipedia.  Have run into the problem that this describes,   Posts in different languages in the WP vary in their knowledge content.  In fact in too many examples,  there may be useful, detailed posts in one language, but the same topic is uncovered in another language. Within 50 million articles in 300 languages.   We ran into some related problems when we scoped out a wikipedia for a large corporation.  So I expanded the title of this piece, to include other aspects. But the article referenced below uses a 'language' knowledge problem example. Sharing knowledge.   Tough problem, let me know if you solve it effectively.

Building a Multilingual Wikipedia,   By Denny Vrandečić  in CACM

Communications of the ACM, April 2021, Vol. 64 No. 4, Pages 38-41  10.1145/3425778

Wikipedia has more than 50 million articles in approximately 300 languages. The content in these languages is independently created and maintained. The knowledge in Wikipedia is very unevenly distributed over the languages: some languages have more than a million articles, but more than 50 languages have only a few hundred articles or less. More importantly, also the number of contributors is very unevenly distributed: English Wikipedia has more than 418,000 contributors, the second-most active one, Spanish, drops down to 90,000. More than half of language editions have fewer than 10 contributors doing more than four edits per month. To assume that fewer than 10 active contributors can write and maintain a comprehensive encyclopedia in their spare time is optimistic at best.

In order to close these knowledge gaps we are building a multilingual Wikipedia where content is created only once but made available in all languages. The multilingual Wikipedia has two main components: Abstract Wikipedia where the content is created and maintained in a language-independent notation, and Wikifunctions, a project to create, catalog, and maintain functions. For the multilingual Wikipedia, the most important function is one that takes content from Abstract Wikipedia and renders it in natural language, which in turn gets integrated into Wikipedia proper.

This will considerably reduce the effort required to create a comprehensive and maintain a current encyclopedia in many languages. It will allow more people to share more knowledge in more languages than ever before. It will be particularly useful for under-served languages, providing an important way to help improve education and ready access to knowledge in many countries. ... "

Automatically Updating Facts

 When we sought to construct a company Wiki, we found one of the most important issues, after validating it, was updating knowledge.  Here MIT CSAIL is looking at that problem.

Auto-Updating Websites When Facts Change

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

March 29, 2021

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed models to reduce the amount of incorrect or outdated information online and dynamically adjust to recent changes. The researchers used deep learning models to rank an initial set of about 200 million revisions to popular English-language Wikipedia pages. Annotators found about a third of the top 300,000 revisions included a factual difference. The researchers created a model to mimic the filtering performed by human annotators, which can detect nearly 85% of revisions that include a factual change. They also created a model to automatically revise texts and suggest edits to other articles, as well as a robust fact verification model. MIT's Tal Schuster said, "Instead of teaching the model that the population of a certain city is this and this, we teach it to read the current sentence from Wikipedia and find the answer that it needs." ... '

Rewriting Wikipedia Articles with AI

Just mentioned the Wikipedia on another piece,  here is another kind of bot that could be useful for internal articles and reports as well, depending on how well it worked.

AI can automatically rewrite outdated text in Wikipedia articles
You wouldn't have to wait for a human editor to handle a trivial task.

Jon Fingas, @jonfingas

It's good to be skeptical of Wikipedia articles for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the possibility of outdated info -- human editors can only do so much. And while there are bots that can edit Wikipedia, they're usually limited to updated canned templates or fighting vandalism. MIT might have a more useful (not to mention more elegant) solution. Its researchers have developed an AI system that automatically rewrites outdated sentences in Wikipedia articles while maintaining a human tone. .... '

Bots that Make the Wikipedia Work

Quite instructive and interesting look at behind the scenes at the WP.  I can see this same approach being used for some things we tried to do with enterprise level knowledge.   I note that often when I make a positive point about the WP  I get negative responses.   It 'lies, deceives, steals, can't be trusted ...'     And yes, like everything on the internet is use must be carefully considered, based on use context.  Its flawed, contains opinion, as all writing does.  Yet I don't know of anyone who does not use it.   Wikipedia is now 19 years old, and I remember using it very early on.

Meet the 9 Wikipedia bots that make the world’s largest encyclopedia possible   By Luke Dormehl in Digitaltrends  

The idea behind Wikipedia is, let’s face it, crazy. An online encyclopedia full of verifiable information, ideally with minimal bias, that can be freely edited by anyone with an internet connection is a ridiculous idea that was never going to work. Yet somehow it has.

Nineteen years old this month (it was launched in January 2001, the same month President George W. Bush took office), Wikipedia’s promise of a collaborative encyclopedia has, today, resulted in a resource consisting of more than 40 million articles in 300 different languages, catering to an audience of 500 million monthly users. The English language Wikipedia alone adds some 572 new articles per day.

For anyone who has ever browsed the comments section on a YouTube video, the fact that Wikipedia’s utopian vision of crowdsourced collaboration has been even remotely successful is kind of mind-boggling. It’s a towering achievement, showing how humans from around the globe can come together to create something that, despite its flaws, is still impressively great.

What do we have to thank for the fact that this human-centric dream of collective knowledge works? Well, as it turns out, the answer is bots. Lots and lots of bots.  ... " 

Wikipedia Adds Credibility with Digital Books

Fascinating additional link to readily accessible knowledge.     Of course, you can ask, how accurate is the book cited?  Still like the further effort, will look for examples now.   Also note the use of the Internet Archive, which we also used for research.

Wikipedia references now include book previews hosted by the Internet Archive    130,000 references have been digitized so far.

By Georgina Torbet, @georginatorbet  in Engadget

Wikipedia is an incredible resource, but the accuracy of claims published on its pages is sometimes called into question. To improve the site's credibility and usability, the Internet Archive is working to make references easier to follow by linking them to digital copies of books.

So far, 130,000 references have been linked to 50,000 digitized books that are hosted by the Archive. To see an example of the new digital referencing in action, you can head to the Wikipedia page for Martin Luther King, Jr. If you look at the reference for Adam Fairclough's book To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference & Martin Luther King Jr at the bottom of the page, you'll see it's a clickable link. Clicking takes you to the Internet Archive's digital version of the book, open to the page from which the reference was taken.

When you open a digital book hosted by the Archive, you can see a few pages of preview to check the reference information. If you want to read more, you can borrow a digital copy of the book through the Controlled Digital Lending program.  ... " 

The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds

A topic that has long interested me.  How biased is the Wikipedia?

Wikipedia and the Wisdom of Polarized Crowds
A lesson in how to break out of filter bubbles.
By   Brian Gallagher

In 2013, James Evans, a University of Chicago sociologist and computational scientist, launched a study to see if science forged a bridge across the political divide. Did conservatives and liberals at least agree on biology and physics and economics? Short answer: No. “We found more polarization than we expected,” Evans told me recently. People were even more polarized over science than sports teams. At the outset, Evans said, “I was hoping to find that science was like a Switzerland. When we have problems, we can appeal to science as a neutral arbiter to produce a solution, or pathway to a solution. That wasn’t the case at all.”

Paper:  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0541-6

Google Donates to Wikipedia

Makes sense for all the assistant players to do this, since keeping the information up to date, quickly accessible and maintained, is an important resource for assistants.     Also support for the future of Wikimedia, and how its data resources link to AI capabilities, is also important.

Google.org donates $2 million to Wikipedia’s parent org   By Megan Rose Dickey in Techcrunch

Google, as well as many other companies, has long relied on Wikipedia for its content. Now, Google and Google.org are giving back.

Google.org President Jacquelline Fuller today announced a $2 million contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment. An additional $1.1 million donation went to the Wikimedia Foundation, courtesy of a campaign where Google employees decided where to direct Google’s donation dollars. The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia, while the Endowment is the fund.

“Google and Wikimedia each play a unique role in an internet that works for and reflects the diversity of its users,” the Wikimedia Foundation wrote in a blog post. “We look forward to continuing our work with Google in close collaboration with our communities around the world.”

In addition to the donation, Google and Wikipedia are expanding Project Tiger, an initiative to expand the content on Wikipedia into additional languages. The pilot program has already increased the amount of locally relevant content in 12 Indic languages. With the expansion, the goal is to include 10 more languages. .... " 

See also in the Wikimedia foundation:

Google and Wikimedia Foundation partner to increase knowledge equity online   By Lisa Gruwel Wikimedia Foundation.

Creating Books from Wikipedia with Wiki-Book Bot

We tested a similar approach in-house, meant to combine public and internal knowledge.   There were of course gripes about both the reliability, completeness of the Wikipedia, and how well the internal sources had been maintained.  The automation did provide a means to quickly understand what we had, and needed to still get.    Good details at the top level article .... more technical at arXiv linked to below.

This algorithm browses Wikipedia to auto-generate textbooks  in Technology Review
Wikipedia is a valuable resource. But it’s not always obvious how to collate the content on any given topic into a coherent whole.     by Emerging Technology from the arXiv  January 9, 2019

Machine Learning—The Complete Guide is a weighty tome. At more than 6,000 pages, this book is a comprehensive introduction to machine learning, with up-to-date chapters on artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, and machine vision.

 It is a Wikibook, a textbook that anyone can access or edit, made up from articles on Wikipedia, the vast online encyclopedia.

That is a strength. Crowdsourced information is constantly updated with all the latest advances and consistently edited to correct errors and ambiguities.  ... " 

" The last sentence is debateable.   Sometimes constantly edited, but less than consistent depending on participants, editors, the context. ...  - FAD

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1812.10937 : Wikibook-Bot—Automatic Generation of a Wikipedia Book  

Downloading the Wikipedia

Since I am always connected, and have been technical since you had to solder things together,  I was unaware you could do this.   The further question is why would I do this?  With smartphones,  laptops and voice assistants arrayed all around me.    Connected to Wifi most everywhere I go.   The article below makes the case why you may want to, and tells you how to download the whole thing to use offline. 

How to Download Wikipedia
Here's how to download Wikipedia. Seriously. The whole thing ... 
By Ed Oswald in DigitalTrends.... "

Cooperative Work: Editing the Wikipedia

 Fascinating experiment.  Which has implications to other kinds of cooperative work that have to come to some conclusion.  Surprised me how little poorthe complete resolution is.Perhaps because goals are not well stated?  Or there is no clear management?    Is this an example where  an augmenting assistant could manage and resolve closure?   Assistant becomes a manager with goals?

 Why some Wikipedia disputes go unresolved

Study identifies reasons for unsettled editing disagreements and offers predictive tools that could improve deliberation.

Rob Matheson | MIT News Office 

Wikipedia has enabled large-scale, open collaboration on the internet’s largest general-reference resource. But, as with many collaborative writing projects, crafting the content can be a contentious subject.

Often, multiple Wikipedia editors will disagree on certain changes to articles or policies. One of the main ways to officially resolve such disputes is the Requests for Comment (RfC) process. Quarreling editors will publicize their deliberation on a forum, where other Wikipedia editors will chime in and a neutral editor will make a final decision.

Ideally, this should solve all issues. But a novel study by MIT researchers finds debilitating factors — such as excessive bickering and poorly worded arguments — have led to about one-third of RfCs going unresolved.

For the study, the researchers compiled and analyzed the first-ever comprehensive dataset of RfC conversations, captured over an eight-year period, and conducted interviews with editors who frequently close RfCs, to understand why they don’t find a resolution. They also developed a machine-learning model that leverages that dataset to predict when RfCs may go stale. And, they recommend digital tools that could make deliberation and resolution more effective.  ... "

Wikipedia Adds Preview Hover

Wikipedia adds a hover over page preview capability to make navigation easier.  Been testing, a nice idea.  Lets you make somewhat fewer clicks while you browse.

Navigating through Wikipedia articles on desktop just got a lot easier    By Olga Vasileva, Wikimedia Foundation ... More usage and testing stats ... 

Page previews, deployed today, is one of the largest changes to desktop Wikipedia made in recent years. .... " 

Social Proof at the Wikipedia

Roger Dooley writes about the approach of the Wikipedia fundraising.  Many have seen their 'ads', as I have, when doing a Wikipedia search. The argument is  " ... Many people use our service, but few contribute ... "

From the Wikipedia: " ...  Social proof (also known as informational social influence) is a psychological and social phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior in a given situation.   ... "

So you can argue in a way that says:  'Join all the many people who have contributed".  Or,  "Very few people contribute, so please do,  you can make a difference ... "

Wikipedia does the latter.  But suggests the former works better.

I have admit that I contributed based on this effort, and I rarely contribute based on online appeals.  So am I particularly anti-susceptible to this argument?

As a suggestion in the comments says, they certainly have the data and traffic to figure out which approach works better.   ... "

Why Wikipedia

Have had a long time interest in how we curate the world's knowledge.  And thus Wikipedia asks ...

Wikipedia Asks its Readers Why. 
Wikipedia has a lot of readers–approximately 6,000 people visit every second. Since the online encyclopedia isn’t your typical information source, it had never bothered to ask its users why they showed up, and what they wanted from the site.

That changed in June 2017, when Wikipedia asked readers in 14 languages one simple question: “Why are you reading this article today?” More than 215,000 responses flooded in, and here’s the first results of that data ... "

Misinformation and the Wikipedia

Been a longterm Wikipedia fan.   And have also been directed to many, many examples of misinformation there.  But still use it daily.  So whats the solution?  Apparently Youtube planning to resource credibility with WP articles, among others.    Further curated?   Only as good as the curators.  Bias is all over the place.

Don't ask Wikipedia to Cure the Internet   by Louise Matsakis in Wired.

" .... On stage at the South by Southwest conference on Tuesday, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that her company would begin adding "information cues" to conspiracy theory videos, text-based links intended to provide users with better information about what they are watching. One of the sites YouTube plans to use is Wikipedia. "We’re just going to be releasing this for the first time in a couple weeks, and our goal is to start with the list of internet conspiracies listed where there is a lot of active discussion on YouTube," Wojcicki said on stage..... " 

Journies in Wikipedia

Here I was less interested in the fact that people spent large amounts of time linking around the Wikipedia,  I knew that,  than the particular journies they took.  Now if only they accepted advertising.

Wikipedia explains how those late-night reading binges happen
Most people visit another link when they look up a topic on Wikipedia. .... " 

By Mariella Moon, @mariella_moon in Engadget

Electronic Health Data And Drugs

Fascinating thought.  Like the leveraging of 'public' data like the Wikipedia too.  Taking a look.

Mining electronic health records and the web for drug repurposing

Kira Radinsky describes a system that mines medical records and Wikipedia to reduce spurious correlations and provide guidance about drug repurposing.     By Kira Radinsky in O'Reilly

This is a keynote highlight from the Strata Data Conference in Singapore 2017. Watch the full version of this keynote on Safari. .... 

You can also see other highlights from the event. .... " 

A Rival to Wikipedia?

But Elsevier is a walled garden, and this approach will not be publicly edited.  The power of Wikipedia is the breadth of coverage.   And as the article suggests, you can't scrape Elsevier texts to do the same thing.

Elsevier Launching Rival To Wikipedia By Extracting Scientific Definitions Automatically From Authors' Texts   s likely to undermine open access alternatives by providing Wikipedia-like definitions generated automatically from texts it publishes. As an article on the Times Higher Education site explains, the aim is to stop users of the publishing giant's ScienceDirect platform from leaving Elsevier's walled garden and visiting sites like Wikipedia in order to look up definitions of key terms  ..... " 

Wikipedia Games

Some time ago was introduced to developers that were using the Wikipedia API to do classification tasks.   Now discovered that people are using this to do things like creating exploring games and and even constructing novels.   I often see a look into the Wikipedia as an adventure.  A revelation for we that previously read the encyclopedia.    In Arstechnica: 

A programmer turned Wikipedia into a classic text adventure
Developer turned a novel-generation project into an interactive Infocom tribute. ... by Sam Machkovech  ....