This week, Slate commented on how, with Google sourcing more and more content automatically from databases such as Wikidata, with little human intervention, misinformation can spread quickly (Nov. 30). The article points towards a search for Jerusalem, which comes up with the result "Capital of Israel" in the Google Knowledge Graph, even though the city's status is in fact intensely contested. The author, Mark Graham from the Oxford Internet Institute, argues that as much information and sources are stripped away, it can easily lead to less transparency on where information comes from, and a lack of context when interpreting it.
“ | ... because of the ease of separating content from containers, the provenance of data is often obscured. Contexts are stripped away, and sources vanish into Google’s black box. For instance, most of the information in Google’s infoboxes on cities doesn’t tell us where the data is sourced from. | ” |
Following the launch of the Wikimedia Foundation's annual English-speaking fund-raising drive this week, The Washington Post published a piece (December 2), commenting that the language of the banner may well lead readers to think ...
“ | ... that the world's seventh-largest site risks going dark if you don't donate. In reality, that couldn’t be further from the case | ” |
“ | At other nonprofits, of course, even those in the media space, fundraising drives rarely provoke such contempt | ” |
Discuss this story
Error: "several Labour defectors". None of these Labour MPs have defected (yet). You could call them "rebels", except even that doesn't really work, as while the Labour leader implored people to vote against the government, the Labour party allowed a free vote. I'm not sure, therefore, how you fix this, but the current wording is really very misleading indeed. --Dweller (talk) 15:40, 9 December 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]