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In the media

Wikimedia's Dario Taraborelli quoted on Google's Knowledge Graph in The Washington Post

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By Andreas Kolbe
Dario Taraborelli, the Wikimedia Foundation's head of research

In The Washington Post, resident digital culture critic Caitlin Dewey surmises (May 11) that the Post's readers "probably haven't even noticed Google's sketchy quest to control the world's knowledge":

Google's "knowledge panels" materialize at random, as unsourced and absolute as if handed down by God:

Betty White is 94 years old.

The Honda Civic is 2016’s best car.

Taipei is the capital of—ahem—the "small island nation" of Taiwan.

The problem, Dewey argues, is that the information snippets arrive on Google users' screens without any indication of their source, yet by their placement gain an unearned air of authority. She quotes the Wikimedia Foundation's Dario Taraborelli in support of her thesis:

... to skeptics, of whom there are a growing number, it's a looming public literacy threat—one that arguably dwarfs the recent revelations that Facebook's trending topics are curated by humans.

"It undermines people's ability to verify information and, ultimately, to develop well-informed opinions," said Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation and a social computing researcher who studies knowledge production online. "And that is something I think we really need to study and process as a society."

For Taraborelli, the primary issue with Google's knowledge panels is that they aren't terribly knowledgeable: They provide information but often leave out any context on where that information came from. That makes it difficult for readers to evaluate the accuracy of the statement or whether it's the best and most complete of the available options.

Google contributed a quarter of the initial funding for the development of Wikidata, presumed to be one of the sources for the Google Knowledge Graph
Dewey points out that the Google Knowledge Graph is "an advanced database sourced largely from Wikipedia and constructed in part from user search patterns" and references a study by Mark Graham and Heather Ford pointing out instances of bias and lack of nuance in Google's knowledge panel answers (see previous Signpost coverage):

Google's knowledge panels regularly, if inadvertently, make rather important decisions for us: Taiwan, you'll remember, is described as if it were an independent nation, when only 22 countries actually recognize it as such. Meanwhile, Google corrects searches for "Londonderry," Ireland's fourth-largest city, to "Derry," the (unofficial) term favored by Irish nationalists.

Since Google frequently does not cite its sources—a ploy, Taraborelli says, to make it seem more authoritative—there's no way for users to double-check "answers" for bias or error, which doubtlessly exist.

Dewey's article ends with a hopeful reference to Wikidata, described as

an open-license, machine-readable knowledge base that will both source all of its statements and accommodate conflicting sources. The hope is that Google will begin pulling from that database and citing its sources, instead of dumbing down Wikipedia.

It's a fond hope. Bearing in mind that Wikidata is published under a no-attribution-required CC-0 licence and itself lacks sources for many of its statements, it seems quite possible that many other commercial re-users will jump at the opportunity to use Wikidata content without attribution in order to follow Google's lead and build their own aura of omniscience, replicating and broadening the problem Dewey and Taraborelli lament.

The Komodo dragon is popular



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  • It's discouraging to see our user-created content being used by Google who is making billions of dollars in ad revenue. OTOH Wikipedia would never be this successful if Google changed their algo to filter out or down Wikipedia hits. Google is God-like in other ways. -- GreenC 04:48, 17 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • +1 (no pun intended) Jane (talk) 08:35, 17 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
      • Derry was Derry until the plantation movement when the land was "given" to the City of London hence Londonderry. Now finally both names are official, though you are correct Google are not interested in the historical context. Derry is not and never has been unofficial as it was the original name of the place. Edmund Patrick – confer 13:20, 19 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
        • Surely you mean it was given to the "City of Londinium"? That's the original name of the place, and therefore has "never been unofficial"? MPS1992 (talk) 20:31, 20 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
          • Betty White's age we can be reasonably sure about. But despite my repeated efforts, WSAT is listed by Google as adult standards and oldies. I don't remember if I added oldies to the article, but for the most part between 2006 and 2015, the station's music matched what is defined by the industry as "adult standards". The morning show and some special programs, and some music they played before sports events, were "oldies". Now, the morning show is the only thing close to "adult standards" but still wouldn't fit that definition. I guarantee the rest of the station's music doesn't come close. A few songs fitting that format here and there do not qualify.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:08, 23 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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