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Boffin-loving bots are penning potential new Wikipedia pages to recognize the work of notable scientists who are missing from the online encyclopedia. Any human with an internet connection can submit new Wikipedia entries, or edit existing ones. Heck, even AI software can tweak and update the encyclopedia's pages – they even …

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  1. Joe Werner Silver badge

    And if you have a rather common name...

    ... it will be really messy. Hell, updating my publication counts for grant applications from the web of knowledge is a mess, and there you can filter by institution (which might or might not work). I do have to admit that google scholar is a bit more efficient, but it also archives each and every conference abstract and tries to treat it the same as the articles (and so does researchgate, if you do not carefully categorise stuff yourself).

    (no, I do not think I warrant a W'pedia page, and I do not want one)

    6 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    wikidata

    Wikidata seems to be data pulled from Wikipedia in the first place - and leaving the sourcing behind. Or just unsourced data.

    Obviously the guys behind wikidata think it's the best thing since....

    2 0 Reply
  3. find users who cut cat tail

    Web of knowledge is practically useless for that if you have a common name -- unless you get a researcherid and claim your stuff manually. I even suspect they keep it that way to ‘encourage’ people to get researcherid...

    1 0 Reply
  4. steelpillow Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Quality of cites is more important than quantity.

    Every academic knows that a high publication count will help your career, and many form rings who regularly cite each other's stuff so as to bump each other up the ladder.

    Bots counting Google hits is a sure way to include the biggest scammers with the thinnest papers in the list.

    11 0 Reply
  5. AndyS

    > It’s still difficult for computers to craft long and coherent sentences automatically to do this. A group of researchers from Google Brain tried to get a neural network to do cough up new pages by summarizing snippets of information after scraping relevant webpages.

    Apparently it's quite hard for human authors to do cough up coherent sentences too.

    11 0 Reply
    1. Grooke
      Reply Icon

      >Apparently it's quite hard for human authors to do cough up coherent sentences too.

      I can't tell if this was done on purpose or not.

      11 0 Reply
  6. Teiwaz

    It’s still difficult for computers to craft long and coherent sentences automatically to do this.

    I've a cousin (non-IT) who keeps bugging me on this, he seems to think computers should be able to write articles for him so he can put together a wildly successful webpage and retire to play videogames.

    Pretty sure he's the original underpants > ??? > profit, guy

    10 0 Reply
    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      I've a cousin (non-IT) who keeps bugging me on this, he seems to think computers should be able to write articles for him so he can put together a wildly successful webpage and retire to play videogames.

      Phillip Parker beat him to it years ago.

      Machine generation of specialist monographs is a solved problem. The results are quite dry, of course, but the audience for these things isn't looking for a page-turner.

      Machine generation of readable fiction is still pretty primitive, as far as I've seen, but it's coming along slowly.

      (Machine-generated prose literature would actually be a fascinating area to work in. Some other arts, notably music, have long had machine-generated work that fools expert judges. Literature has been tougher, but that just makes it more interesting. I think a really successful system would be heterogeneous and use a consensus mechanism, possibly a GAN-style architecture, on top of competing contribution algorithms, drawing on research areas and non-formal models such as Rhetorical Structure Theory and narrative theory.)

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  8. SkippyBing

    “As it becomes more and more essential to the world, biased and missing information on Wikipedia will have serious impacts,”

    Can I just say, if Wikipedia is becoming essential to the world, you will find me on a remote island in the Pacific distilling my own rum and playing the guitar. Badly.

    8 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Sniff snark

      And which island? Where will you start your research?

      0 0 Reply
      1. SkippyBing
        Reply Icon

        Re: Sniff snark

        'Where will you start your research?'

        Probably with the National Geographic map under the perspex on my desk. It handily has the tectonic plates marked out so I can at least pretend I'm thinking about avoiding quake zones.

        1 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Budge up on that island; I'll bring my flutes & concertina and we can play tunes as the rest of the world disappears up Jimmy Wales's backside

      3 0 Reply
  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Reminds me

    Must update the article on the Bedrock Crack problem. I think Fred is in rehab and Wilma's back on the game.

    3 0 Reply
  10. 89724102172714182892114I7551670349743096734346773478647892349863592355648544996312855148587659264921

    Someday, machine spewed cr9p is all there will be.

    Machines attempting to write content is a grey hat SEO technique which is already being used widely - easy to spot, but that is also useful for negative SEO purposes ie. to reduce visibility of competitors. It's a growing menace.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Someday, machine spewed cr9p is all there will be.

      easy to spot

      Only when it's poorly done. Look at some of Bing Liu's work on machine-generated product reviews, for example; with a number of the systems in use, no one's yet identified any features that distinguish them from the reviews produced by humans with significantly better than random accuracy.

      And this arms race has been going on for about as long as we've had online product reviews. It's an established area of R&D.

      0 0 Reply
  11. MrReal

    Wikipedia's huge income stream

    Wikipedia is great for knowing the official narrative on any subject, or getting deleted/restored should you dare to change anything on there.

    But it's also sometimes a begging site, begging for money because the poor starving orphans who run it are doomed to shut it all down tomorrow should you fail to donate to them...

    ...despite rolling in money for merely pushing the official line to people on their rather ordinary website as noted here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/01/penniless_and_desperate_wikipedia_sits_on_60m_cash/

    So I rarely use it.

    2 2 Reply

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