Autonomía digital y tecnológica

Código e ideas para una internet distribuida

Linkoteca. wikipedia

Wikipedia Is Battling for the Soul of the Internet

Imago voragine.net
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Wikipedia has long been a proxy battleground for warring ideas about truth: What constitutes balance? What makes a good source? But now, those online debates could result in real repercussions.

“The most important thing to understand about Wikipedia is it is truly a democracy,” said Bill Adair, who created the fact-checking site PolitiFact and is writing a book about the encyclopedia. “It’s messy, it’s loud, it often works.”

“We are not seeking to be part of culture wars, of political discourse,” Ms. Meehan said. “These are people who want to put knowledge into the world, for people to do with it what they want.”

To those convinced of bias on Wikipedia, her recommendation is simple: Become an editor.

The more urgent worry, though, is that Wikipedia is being exploited to train its own competitors, as A.I. systems hoover up its content to inform chatbots like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. The bots then regurgitate the information, often imperfectly, polluting the information ecosystem that feeds into the encyclopedia.

A.I.-generated summaries atop search results also siphon away potential visitors, she said. Human page views of Wikipedia’s English edition slumped 8 percent late last year compared with a year earlier. The decline is concerning enough that Ms. Meehan — whose favorite entry describes “tsundoku,” the Japanese term for collecting books and letting them pile up unread — is pushing to reach younger people through TikTok and Roblox.

Wikimedia wants more give-and-take from the A.I. industry. It now charges clients like Amazon and Microsoft for faster bulk access to its data through a four-year-old commercial subsidiary called Enterprise. Last year, Enterprise earned $8.3 million, more than doubling the prior year’s revenue.

This spring, Wikimedia also began limiting automated freeloaders from scraping its site and overwhelming its back end — which accounts for nearly a third of its most intensive bandwidth demands. But the foundation can currently halt only about 30 percent of abusive data requests — about 1.5 billion daily.

Since 2020, at least 10 Wikipedia editors have been imprisoned for their work and countless others threatened.Since 2020, at least 10 Wikipedia editors have been imprisoned for their work and countless others threatened.

Governments are also targeting Wikipedia content specifically. Of the 934 requests the foundation received last year to take down or alter content (it granted two), 117 came from governments, up from 10 a decade ago.

Most were from Russia, whose antagonism toward Wikipedia deepened after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022. Moscow has repeatedly accused the site of violating a sweeping censorship law that criminalized content deemed to “discredit” Russia’s military (Wikimedia refuses to pay the associated fines). A Russian clone of Wikipedia called Ruwiki was introduced in 2023; a Russian network of fake news portals managed to infiltrate some Wikipedia citations.

Quedar en la Wikipedia

Imago voragine.net
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Australia fue el primer país del mundo en impedir, desde el pasado diciembre, el acceso a las redes a millones de menores. No hay, por tanto, demasiada experiencia previa sobre un experimento similar. Ni siquiera existe consenso científico sobre si los móviles son buenos o malos a esa edad (o a cualquier otra). Un estudio publicado este mes por la Universidad de Mánchester siguió la evolución de 25.000 niños y niñas de entre 11 y 14 años a lo largo de tres años, y concluyó que ni las redes ni los videojuegos se relacionan con el empeoramiento de su salud mental. El debate se suele centrar en los efectos psicológicos de la tecnología, pero puede generar otro tipo de problemas. Y dejando aparte los informes, sobre lo que sí existen evidencias es de la mala fe de las plataformas, que fomentan la violencia, el acoso, la sexualización, la polarización, el engaño y la adicción de los menores por el bien del negocio. La discusión sobre las puertas y el campo es tan vieja como internet, y viene acompañada por la hipervigilancia ante una potencial pérdida de libertades. Porque, ¿quién decide qué es una red social?, ¿qué órgano la supervisa?, ¿cómo garantizar que actúa de forma efectiva, pero sin extralimitarse? También hay que preguntarse cómo podemos impedir que caigan en otras tecnologías inseguras para acceder a lugares aún más peligrosos y ocultos de internet. Y, sobre todo, de qué manera proteger su derecho a aprender, crear, relacionarse, informarse, expresarse y divertirse. Muchas cuestiones complicadas pueden ser ciertas a la vez: hay verdad en que las redes son atroces, pero también en la cuestión que plantea Ezra Scholl, un quinceañero australiano cuadrapléjico, en The Guardian: “¿Qué pasa con quienes estamos aislados?

Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia

Imago voragine.net
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Gender is one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of inequality. For example, English-language Wikipedia contains more than 1.5 million biographies about notable writers, inventors, and academics, but less than 19% of these biographies are about women. To try and improve these statistics, activists host “edit-a-thons” to increase the visibility of notable women. While this strategy helps create several biographies previously inexistent, it fails to address a more inconspicuous form of gender exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and quantitative analysis of web-scraped metadata, this article demonstrates that biographies about women who meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion are more frequently considered non-notable and nominated for deletion compared to men’s biographies. This disproportionate rate is another dimension of gender inequality previously unexplored by social scientists and provides broader insights into how women’s achievements are (under)valued.

DBpedia

Imago voragine.net
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DBpedia is a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured content from the information created in various Wikimedia projects. This structured information resembles an open knowledge graph (OKG) which is available for everyone on the Web. A knowledge graph is a special kind of database which stores knowledge in a machine-readable form and provides a means for information to be collected, organised, shared, searched and utilised. Google uses a similar approach to create those knowledge cards during search. We hope that this work will make it easier for the huge amount of information in Wikimedia projects to be used in some new interesting ways.

DBpedia data is served as Linked Data, which is revolutionizing the way applications interact with the Web. One can navigate this Web of facts with standard Web browsers, automated crawlers or pose complex queries with SQL-like query languages (e.g. SPARQL).