Facebook meddles in science for its own interest

I read an article by Professor Danah Boyd about recently released discovery materials indicating that Meta directly targeted Jonathan Haidt by trying to stir up academics to oppose him. Read the article and honestly Meta deserves all the bad press that it royally deserves.

Professor Boyd was particularly upset for the targeting of Professor Candice L. Odgers so much so that she used "wtaf", an acronym I did not know.

So what to do. Given that Scholia is more or less functional, I did the Wikidata thing; I added a few awards, several recent publications and attributed known publications to the people involved. When you consider the sum of all knowledge, it is what AI systems including the one by Meta use for their training material, it introduces a dilemma. Will it include info in its systems critical of its operations and objectives? If not why trust its systems as a neutral source of intelligence?

Thanks,

       GerardM

AI is a tool. The question is how to use it.

The sentiment among Wikimedians is clear; there is no room for artificial intelligence.

In my opinion that is stupid. You do not blame the hammer; the problem is where the hammer lands. The point of AI is in its analytics. It is not necessary to ask for new information. It can be asked to analyse existing texts, for instance all the Wikipedia articles on the same subject. The objective would be to find inconsistencies and with a corpus as large as the "sum of all knowledge" there will be plenty.

Once we are made aware of inconsistencies, the implicit challenge we always faced becomes explicit. Important is that all the knowledge necessary is in the "sum of all knowledge" itself meaning that the AI can be trained on all content from all Wikimedia projects. This would make it a multilingual and multicultural model,

What one Wikipedia knows and another does not is an inconsistency and at first the least interesting one. More relevant is to know what one Wikipedia knows different from another Wikipedia. Things like is he alive or is she the minister of defence for Whereeverland. The difference is in references. 

When an AI points to inconsistencies and to the latest references, how can any self respecting Wikimedian object to a tool like this?

Thanks,

        GerardM

Fallout of the Language Diversity Conference

I was not at the Language Diversity Conference in Ghana and for many reasons I wish I was. I am grateful that there is a lot of messaging about events like this, results can be measured in many ways relevant for the Wikimedia ecosystem are two growth of knowledge about languages and cultures (sum of all knowledge) and the viability and relevance of languages for our global public.

At day one of the conference, Professor Samuel Alhassan Issah gave the keynote speach. One of his arguments is that translation is not enough. Relevance is gained by writing about the language, the culture the country itself that goes with a language. Anyway there is a Wikidata item for the professor it even includes a link to his ORCID identifier and that is what enables me/us to find publications and co-authors.

Adding the first publication, "The semantics of Dagbani cut and break verbs" to Wikidata brings me a few surprises. Wikidata has Dagbanli as the preferred name for Dagbani.. never mind. Also there are two co-authors both with ORCID identifiers. One of them is Bashiru Nurideen, who also has a Google Scholar identifier, I found this because I wanted to see a picture. He now has a Wikidata item and is linked to this publication. Wikidata knows about a Bashiru Nurideen Ponaa known as a volunteer, he may be the same person if he is, someone may merge the Wikidata items. Google Scholar indicates another publication for the same author. However in the publication there is no link to his ORCID identifier and his name is now Nurideen Bashiru..

In the article there is a picture who may include the professor and Bashiru Nurideen Ponaa. It would be good when there is a foto for them at Commons..

Thanks,

     GerardM