Tag Archives: wikipedia

Wikipedia and education: fear or foresight?

Posted by on December 11, 2010 No comments

Since it was first cited by a student in an academic paper controversy over the accuracy, validity, truth or shall we say ‘correctness’ of Wikipedia has been debated. Before the widespread availability of information on the Internet we were relegated to what was available to us through schools, the library and media such as television and radio. Each of these institutions had its gatekeepers. Curriculum, particularly at the elementary and high school levels, was tightly controlled, libraries could chose which books they would shelve and sell. Radio, television and film were also tightly regulated both by the owners of these media outlets and government regulatory bodies. Of course we could purchase books and magazines at our local bookstores. But even this was regulated by “buyers”, who were responsible for ordering content that would sell. After all bookstores are there to make money.

It seems as though every source had an agenda. Was it ever really about providing information? Openly? One thing we know now. The free flowing information available at Wikipedia has a lot of people “concerned”. The potential for an opportunity lost is of concern. Can everyone see the incredible value this kind of basic information could have on education? Most elementary, high school and even undergraduate curriculum are focused on students forming a foundation of knowledge. They must learn to read, write, add, subtract, multiply and divide. What if they showed up on the first day of school with those skills intact? What an incredible gift sites such as Wikipedia have given us. What incredible foresight to provide basic information on almost every subject imaginable.

During my education, in particular the high school and undergraduate years, the body of truth, that which was required to demonstrate understanding in order to pass examinations was mainly contained within books and lectures. Both regulated. We could not gain access to textbooks; they were produced by special academic publishing houses and they were not available at our local bookstore. No doubt due to their lack of “bestseller” appeal.

Back then if, after a particular inspiring class in grade 10 biology, one had to wait until the subsequent semester or year to take grade 11 biology, in order to gain access to more information. Now it is a different game. I think we should encourage and embrace this. What teacher wouldn’t want a student who has already familiarized themselves with the core fundamentals and is eager to move on to a more challenging curriculum? Think of how much further advanced we could be in our understanding of the world. We might be able to focus more on the co-creation of new knowledge, not the imparting of basic concepts, which are now freely available to anyone with Internet access. What is it that people are so afraid of? Oh ya, knowledge is power.

Tables as a form of information visualization

Posted by on August 1, 2010 No comments

Readers, you may find this blog posting of interest:

http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/2010/08/the-interpretation-of-tables-in-texts-2000.html

First, this guy (not to be rude, his name is Matthew Hurst) did his PhD on the depiction of data in tables. This is interesting in of itself. By tables I mean a plain old box with fields in rows and columns. It may seem “useless” or “stupid” to a lot of people but how many of us read data in this format today? Excel alone means probably millions. I, for one, am glad that people are working on ways to improve this.

Now comes the value added part. The author goes on to reference an article, “Exploiting a Web of Semantic Data for Interpreting Tables”, which can be found here:

http://journal.webscience.org/322/

The abstract states:

Much of the world’s knowledge is contained in structured documents like spreadsheets, database relations and tables in documents found on the Web and in print. The information in these tables might be much more valuable if it could be appropriately exported or encoded in RDF, making it easier to share, understand and integrate with other information. This is especially true if it could be linked into the growing linked data cloud. We describe techniques to automatically infer a (partial) semantic model for information in tables using both table headings, if available, and the values stored in table cells and to export the data the table represents as linked data. The techniques have been prototyped for a subset of linked data that covers the core of Wikipedia.

I’m looking forward to what this collaboration yields.

Wikipedia and Flickr – a semantic marriage?

Posted by on September 26, 2009 1 comment

Wikipedia tends to primarily contain written content on practically every topic conceivable. Although it allows for pictures not every entry has (or needs) visual images. There are rules about what the content considered appropriate, including that it must be of merit (e.g. an article cannot be posted about a person unless they are a “notable“). Wikipedia has also specifically stated that it is not a repository of images. Finding written content on Wikipedia somewhat depends upon whether a page has been already created. Flickr, on the other hand, is all about images. They also have terms of service pertaining to copyright and objectionable content. However, anyone can pretty much post a picture of anything. Many of the pictures included at Flickr are created by amateur photographers, are of things or events that may only be of interest to a limited number of people or only themselves. There is little information about these images at Flickr, in some cases only a photo appears.

I searched for “rubber balls” on Wikipedia, guessing that it would not have its own page. The results indicated as such but provided links to other entries in which rubber balls were mentioned. I also ran a search at Flickr using the words “rubber balls”. The result contained reference to 8,781 images that were tagged with “rubber balls”.

My intention in this exercise is not to compare the two sites (after all, this would be like comparing apples and oranges) but to draw attention to Wikipedia’s need to improve the indexing or labelling of their content , preferrably using a community-based tagging sytem or folksonomy. Flickr would benefit from some descriptive information about the pictures that are posted, especially if they have historical or public information. For example, Wikipedia has an informative entry on anatomy but would likely benefit from the many images tagged as anatomy on Flickr

Once we move more towards the semantic (providing meaning) web which site will be in the better position in terms of preparing its content with metadata (data about data or tags that describe content)? Although Wikipedia has plans for a semantic version I think they have “dropped the rubber ball” by not building in a tagging feature now. Crowdsourcing is only going to take your site so far, especially when it is content that has already been created that needs to be tagged. We need to start building in tagging functions now, including other collaborative environments as well (e.g. message forums). What we really need is a message forum at both Wikipedia and Flickr. Well, one social scientist with an interest in the power and value of collaboration can only dream…

The wacky world of Wikipedia

Posted by on August 3, 2009 No comments

In December of 2008 Alex Jadad and I published had an editorial on the definition of health in the BMJ. The purpose of this article was to stimulate discussion on the definition of health, first proposed by the WHO in 1948. We felt it was time to re-visit this issue. One of our ideas was to use a blog to support the collaborative discussion and building of a new definition. We wanted to provide a mechanism in which anyone, regardless of where they were located or what their interest in health was to participate in this endeavor. In the summer of 2008 we tried to edit the Wikipedia entry of health to open up the discussion in advance of our anticipated editorial publication on the definition of health. Instead of supporting our efforts we were informed that this was not the place for such a discussion. Fair enough we though and moved on.

Turns out this has happened to others (Nitpicking Wikipedia’s Vulnerabilities, Edit Wars in Medical Wikipedia). In fact Wikipedia even has a page dedicated to the lamest edit wars (ours is not listed, I guess we gave up too quickly). Oh ya, the current entry for health at Wikipedia now cites our editorial in BMJ. Go figure.