Internal:Speakers/TH1
TH1:Tsila Hassine
Title: The Dynamics of NPOV Disputes (ID TH1)
- Language: english | License: cc
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- type: presentation
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Author[s]: Tsila Hassine.
- Contact: tsila.hassine@gmail.com [OTRS]
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- (From: | available days: 4-5 august)
Wikipedia is currently developing into something that goes beyond its initial intention of being a free encyclopedia. In addition to its open informative role, it is also developing into a debate forum, a moderated and edited Hyde Park where the various contributors sometimes "slide" into "edit wars".
Disputes range over a broad spectrum of topics, of varying notoriety. Some have been at the focus of universal disputes for centuries, such as Jesus Christ, Jews, etc. Others, such as cloning, have become objects of dispute only in recent years. Still others have been disputed only among a handful of people, the dispute remaining unnoticed by the rest of the world, such as the dispute over Cornwall's claim to independence. This last category is of particular interest, since it exposes issues that haven't been recently illuminated by the media. In this sense, Wikipedia serves an additional purpose of exploring issues that haven't been deemed interesting by media powers.
Wikipedia currently maintains a special page of all NPOV disputes. This page lists all topics that are currently tagged as NPOV . New subjects are constantly added, and existing ones are removed as the NPOV tag is removed from the page. This page actually acts as some kind of recommendation list, a recommendation of topics that are important and interesting enough for the contributors to discuss them, sometimes a little too fervently. This list can be viewed as the list “hot Wikipedia pages”, as defined by Wikipedia users.
The dispute pages provide some interesting information by themselves. Whether the page in dispute is the article itself, or its accompanying discussion page, In both cases the discussion pages provide an interesting insight into the different sides of the dispute, and can reveal to some extent the depth of the divide between the different sides of that dispute. Further information can be gleaned from the “history” pages related to the disputed articles and their discussion pages. Parameters such as the start (and sometimes end) of a dispute, its volume, the size of the contributing audience, the heat of the dispute (based on editing frequency), the nature of the contributions, etc., can all be tracked in order to gain some insight on the impact of the issue.
My project already consists of: 1. A script that tracks the weekly changes in the NPOV list, and keeps track of which subjects have been removed from the list, and which have been recently added. 2. A script that tracks individual pages on the dispute list, and estimates the “heat” of the dispute.
Further features I would like to be able to add (with Wikipedia’s cooperation): A dispute timeline: Tracking all the issues that have been marked as NPOV since the foundation of Wikipedia, along with the dates in which they were tagged and de-tagged as NPOV. A dispute "recommendation list" to be featured in the NPOV disputes page, a daily updated list informing the reader which pages have been recently added to or removed from the disputed topics’ list, along with a list of "10 most disputed articles of the week".
I believe the perspective and tools suggested here may serve to promote the diversity of information sources on the Web, and on Wikipedia in particular. Moreover, it may attract readers and contributors to Wikipedia, and especially to the disputed topics, where they could gain a broader insight into their topics of interest, while at the same time amplify the NPOV list. This may also induce readers to contribute their own point of view to disputed articles, and increase the general level of audience participation in Wikipedia. This project has been initiated during an Information Politics course given by Dr. Richard Rogers at the Media Design MA program of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam from December 04 to April 05.
About the author[s]:
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- accept: EM (medium to low priority), JV (dito), AB (could be interesting, but maybe too English-focused)
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