Politics & Current Affairs — January 11, 2011

Weeding Out on Wikipedia

What can we learn from visualizing the nature and shape of collective decisions about the inclusion of a topic in Wikipedia?

bigthinkeditor

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

What can we learn from visualizing the nature and shape of collective decisions about the inclusion of a topic in Wikipedia? Like a garden, an online encyclopedia needs constant weeding. Unlike a garden, an online encyclopedia has thousands of potential gardeners. Over years Wikipedia has developed guidelines and policies to help editors collectively decide whether topics are suitable for inclusion or not. We analyzed and visualized such Article for Deletion (AfD) discussions. …Delete decisions tend to be fairly unanimous. In contrast, we found many Keep decisions resulting from a discussion that leaned towards deletion.

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Culture & Religion

Maybe the Most Fun Page on the Internet Is Wikipedia’s “Unusual” Page

Wikipedia collects its most unusual articles on a single, weirdly absorbing page.

How AAAS Scientists View the Public, the Media, and the Political Process

Today marks the start of the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s great scientific meetings. Many of the panels held in Vancouver […]

Guest Thinkers

Public Opinion and Political Participation in the Climate Change Debate

Public opinion about climate change, observes the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin, can be compared to “waves in a shallow pan,” easily tipped with “a lot of sloshing but not […]

Guest Thinkers

AU Students Debate the Internet’s Impact on Society, Part A

This fall in the sophomore-level course I teach on “Communication and Society,” we spent several weeks examining the many ways that individuals and groups are using the internet to alter […]

Surprising Science

Twitter: Narcissism or Age-old Communication?

It has become fashionable to castigate Twitter – the microblogging service – as an expression of rampant narcissism. Yet, narcissists are verbose and they do not take kindly to limitations imposed on them by third parties.

Up Next

Politics & Current Affairs

Defending Blasphemy Laws

As much as I disagree with the blasphemy law, I do not think that criminalising the act of blasphemy is violative of any fundamental human rights guaranteed by the Constitution.