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Jimbo welcomes your comments and updates – he has an open door policy. He holds the founder's seat on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees. The current trustees occupying "community-selected" seats are Doc James, Pundit and Raystorm. The Wikimedia Foundation's Lead Manager of Trust and Safety is Jan Eissfeldt.

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Any scientist tpw?

MIT Phd says an algorithm screwed up the vote, or what are they saying? Here is the video. I have no clue - but start about 14:00 into the video where it gets really bizarre!! If it was coming from anybody other than MIT PhD, I wouldn't bother sharing the link. Atsme 💬 📧 20:31, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

This guy here?--MONGO (talk) 20:39, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

So he's not credible, then? What about the other people in that video? Same song, second verse? Ha!! Atsme 💬 📧 20:44, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

• Could we please limit the conspiracy-theory mongering to Discord or Parler or something? --Floquenbeam (talk) 21:12, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
• No, I'm gathering ammunition so I can debunk this crap when people send it to me. Hey - how about AGF? Atsme 💬 📧 21:14, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
  • Uh huh. --Floquenbeam (talk) 21:17, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
    • Yeah, uh huh! Atsme 💬 📧 21:23, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
  • If you were really gathering ammunition to debunk the video you could have started with a Google search and found this article. 2605:8D80:624:4FB9:A7FA:B9AB:F390:1E25 (talk) 21:33, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
    • IP, you just provided a link to an unreliable source to discredit another unreliable source, and you're questioning me? Now that's rich!! Next time check WP:RSP for Medium. One would naturally think someone with 4 degrees from MIT would have some credibility, or do his politics disqualify him? Atsme 💬 📧 21:51, 16 November 2020 (UTC) (edit conflict) of no consequence.
      • The election was a referedum on one man, not an ideology, hence the results for the President vs the anticipated results for the House and Senate and it has little to do with algorithums or hanging chads or methane gas or sasquatch or alien abductions.--MONGO (talk) 21:37, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
      • Whether someone with degrees has credibility depends on what the degrees were in and what the discussion is about. Getting a PhD doesn't automatically mean someone is smart or worth listening to. The article I linked to lays out how your article failed, mathwise. That simple, high-school level math is either wrong or it's right. Using an article that's not a RS to debunk a video that's not a RS sounds right to me. 2605:8D80:624:4FB9:4E89:3807:B040:F227 (talk) 22:04, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

CaptainEek, I take it you're saying the algorithm theory smells fishy? . While I was at MIT, the advanced technology blew me away, but if MIT is awarding doctorates to any old discredited conspiracy theorist, who the hell can we trust? Atsme 💬 📧 22:08, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

I wish I was CaptainEek but I'm not. I'm just an IP. Getting a PhD, especially from MIT, is a lot of work but doesn't preclude the person from being a conspiracy theorist. 2605:8D80:624:4FB9:ED8C:C02:2B3A:FB45 (talk) 23:42, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

• I'm a "scientist tpw", and my opinion is that you don't need to be a scientist, or to hold a Ph.D., to recognize this as obvious misinformation. (YouTube has even helpfully flagged it as such). It requires only a very rudimentary degree of information literacy. Aside from the questionable use of Jimbo's talkpage to spread election-related misinformation, there are implications for our work as Misplaced Pages editors—if we are manifestly unable to distinguish credible from non-credible sources, then that calls into serious question our ability to edit responsibly and productively in topic areas beset by misinformation. MastCell  02:07, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
  • I was just wondering how a PHd guy from MIT could be so wrong. Just goes to show that academics aren't infallible. Atsme 💬 📧 02:50, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
    • @Atsme: The clue is in the fact of how much of a big deal he makes of having a PhD from MIT, as if this means everything he says is true. It's also not accurate to describe Ayyadurai as an academic since he does not work at a university and never has done (only studied). SmartSE (talk) 11:53, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
      • Thank you SmartSE - I was using it more in the sense of #5 in Wikitionary but having said that, the unassuming internet surfer can easily be thrown-off by the Feb 2012 article in Smithsonian wherein he is referred to as "a visiting lecturer now a professor at MIT". Now I understand why he's a former MIT professor. Anyway, MONGO answered my question at the get-go, and I got a bonus prize from Johnuniq & WilyD, so now I can intelligently respond to the unknowing/misinformed spreaders of conspiracy theories who keep sending me trash iMessages, most of which I've been able to answer on my own. The MIT connection initially threw me for a loop, so now I'll retreat and go lick my wounds. Happy editing! Atsme 💬 📧 13:50, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
• An easy-to-follow rebuttal is here. The original video takes certain election data regarding Trump and plots the results from some simple calculations. The resulting curve slopes downwards which, according to the theory, shows fraud. The rebuttal shows two major blunders in the analysis. First, if you repeat the calculations using data for Biden rather than Trump, the result is a graph which looks exactly the same as Trump's. Second, looking at the arithmetic behind the calculations shows that the result has to produce a graph sloping downwards. Johnuniq (talk) 06:05, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
  • Yeah, that it's symmetric is pretty clear that it's not diagnostic. The plot only shows that people who live in Republican-leaning areas were more likely to vote Biden+R(congress, senate) than Trump+D(congress, senate), and people living in Democratic leaning areas were more likely to vote Trump+D(congress, senate) than Biden + R(congress, senate). This is pretty intuitive when you consider that Trump and Biden get more publicity than local congresscritters, and thus people are more likely to have an opinion about them beyond "Generic Republican/Generic Democrat" than they are about the candidate for congress. I'd expect you'd see the same thing for every American election in the last few decades. WilyD 07:48, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

• Thank you, Johnuniq!! And WilyD!! The lightbulb finally came on thanks to your responses. Humbly speaking, I was hoping to avoid late night research by asking an expert, especially considering the extent of my diagnostic ability is using a thermometer to check the kids' temperature, a food thermometer to see if the turkey is done, and a stethoscope to listen for gut sounds for a colicking horse. Johnuniq, your rebuttal is exactly what I was hoping for, and why I came here. WilyD, your explanation being that it's symmetric not diagnostic is the icing on the cake. MONGO already pointed me to the guy's WP page, so I now have the perfect cocktail. Having been in a self-imposed quarantine on Bonaire since February, I've lost touch with the goings on in the US, but I've always been of the mind that the only stupid question is the one you didn't ask. I guess that's outdated now. You've restored my faith in our community and that it hasn't reached the point of rating contributors similar to the way we're rating RS, or worse, that we're entertaining the thought of establishing a mathematical intelligence requirement before one is allowed to ask a question here. You both exemplify what being an administrator/good faith editor is supposed to look like, and I thank you for that. It's simple...AGF. Atsme 💬 📧 13:50, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

  Atsme, a bigger issue to dismiss is Benford's Law. Sir Joseph 14:47, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, that particular example of misapplying maths to promote conspiracy theories has already been amply dealt with: 109.159.88.9 (talk) 18:12, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Rudy Giuliani earns $20,000 per day defending trump, so there is a lot of money to be made if you can fool Trump and his supporters into believing that you have a good argument. Count Iblis (talk) 05:18, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

It's easy to convince those who oppose but harder to exhort those who support - and a good reason to have a valid argument, which I now have. Atsme 💬 📧 12:04, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

In the spirit of teaching people to fish, there are a number of information-literacy toolkits available on the Web that can help you sort through these dilemmas in the future. For example, the News Literacy Project has some useful resources and frameworks that can help you distinguish credible from non-credible sources of information. While it's encouraging that other editors were able to walk you through debunking this particular piece of nonsense, that's not really a scalable solution given the sheer amount of partisan disinformation out there. In an ideal world we would recognize obvious misinformation as such before posting it to high-traffic Misplaced Pages pages, so hopefully those resources will help. MastCell  20:48, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

Between your sneering and passive-aggressive insults hard to take you seriously. But you had to get your jabs in right? Oh, how administrative of you...most impressive. By reliable sources do you mean ones that get sued because they jump to conclusions just cause some smiling white boy isn't wearing their idea of a politically correct hat? Or spend all their time slanting any piece of news in such a way that someone is equated with a man that authorized the systematic murder of millions? Sanctimonious much?--MONGO (talk) 22:36, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

I guess you recognize sneering and passive-aggressive insults because you hand them out yourself? ;)

Being able to think critically is an important life skill. Part of thinking critically is being able to identify sites that are more likely to peddle misinformation. Atsme brought an easily-debunked video here and did not look for or evaluate debunks herself. There's nothing wrong with not knowing how to search for or evaluate contrary texts, but her repeated mentions that the video author held PhDs from MIT and apparent disbelief that people who hold advanced degrees from MIT could also be conspiracy theorists does not demonstrate critical thinking.

People not being able to think critically is concerning for society as a whole, because those people can be manipulated. It's also concerning for Misplaced Pages because misinformation should not have a place on Misplaced Pages and it's up to editors to keep misinformation out. 2605:8D80:627:BB4B:FB46:3E25:A9E:93B8 (talk) 00:00, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

My question was a simple one..."MIT Phd says an algorithm screwed up the vote, or what are they saying?" I said it was bizarre!! Smithsonian said the guy was an MIT professor at one time!! I came here because I was seeking advice from my expert colleagues (programmers, etc.) to explain the algorithm. I thought maybe Jimbo knew enough about it to explain. I have always trusted Jimbo's judgment - and in fact, have his quotes in several places at the top of my UTP. All the other BS about my motives, and me not understanding RS, etc. is just pure BS. I don't need a lecture about RS - I know RS - it was my career for 35+ years, and I've been involved in enough GAs/FAs (promoting/reviewing) to know WP standards. Please, put the politics aside - I don't give a crap about the politics. I already got the answer I needed so hat this frigging discussion! It's frustrating when people either cannot comprehend or purposefully distort a simple question because their political biases have blinded them, and they go off on a tangent instead of answering my question. Give it a rest. Atsme 💬 📧 00:29, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

I think it's because people are starting to get very tired of having to rebut tinfoil-hattery peddled by self-professed experts on social media, who turn out inevitably to either be non-experts, or actually qualified people who are posting delusional nonsense. I am in the UK and we get a large amount of this regarding COVID. The problem generally is that many of them are superficially believable, but when you drill down you find there's nothing there. Some of them are not provocateurs but people who genuinely believe what they are posting, but in the end the final product is the same. Black Kite (talk) 00:36, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

For someone who is not up to speed on algorithms looking at a YouTube video by a former professor at MIT who has 4 degrees, one in computer science, is not quite the same as John Doe spewing crap on FB or Twitter. But I understand what your saying, and I appreciate your comment Black Kite. Hopefully, you will hat this discussion. Atsme 💬 📧 00:45, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Related Articles

@CaptainEek, "Misplaced Pages doesn't use algorithms" is untrue; regular editors often aren't aware of it because we tend to work in the desktop view. When using the mobile version of the site—as more than half our users now do and the proportion is steadily rising—readers are served with algorithmically-generated "you might be interested in…" links whenever they visit an article. (They're not very apparent when viewing the mobile view on a desktop computer, as the links are tucked away below the references, but they're very in-your-face when reading Misplaced Pages on a phone where the body text is mostly collapsed by default so the lead paragraph, a bunch of collapsed sections, and the algorithmically-generated links are all a reader sees when visiting a page.) The algorithm generates some fairly goofy results—e.g. at the time of writing the suggestions on Jimmy Wales are Bomis, Larry Sanger and Nupedia but not Misplaced Pages, on Coronavirus it suggests three strains of coronavirus none of which are the strain 99.9% of visitors are going to be searching for, on Black people it serves up a couple of antiquated racial slurs—but the algorithms are definitely there. ‑ Iridescent 10:36, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

I wasn't aware of that, I will look into it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:32, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

If it's any help, the documentation for this particular extension is here. As far as I know, it was imposed by the WMF rather than anyone asking for it; what discussion there was was at Meta:Talk:Requests for comment/Related Pages. ‑ Iridescent 13:58, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Iridescent, Oh wow, I didn't know that either, thanks for mentioning it... CaptainEek ⚓ 18:53, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

For what it's worth as a data-point, two of the three "related articles" to my BLP are about people I'd never heard of. They're American lawyers, as am I, but I'm hard-pressed to see what else relates the three of us. (To be fair, the third related article is more sensible, as I'm cited in it a couple of times.) Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:03, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Brain dump:

• Foundation project page: MW:Reading/Web/Projects/Related_pages and Flowtalk MW:Talk:Reading/Web/Projects/Related_pages
• Software/Technical page: MW:Extension:RelatedArticles
• I helped the team draft a "feedback only" Enwiki RFC WP:Related_Pages_extension/RfC with responses on the the Talk. The language and style of the RFC is a bit wonky and not very effective. I was trying to get staff comfortable the idea of collaborating with us on an RFC, and I bent over backwards to draft for them whatever they wanted.
• The team's summary of feedback they received from multiple wikis.
• The project initially displayed non-free images. Resolved after objections from various editors, and after I cited the Board Of Trustees resolution on non-free materials. The resolution has a banner explicitly prohibiting staff from circumventing, eroding, or ignoring our limitations on non-free content usage. The PageImage feature can now be configured to include or exclude non-free images, depending on how the images are to be used.
• The project initially had a problem of displaying grossly inappropriate images. If the first image on the page was in a subsection it was often grossly unrepresentative of the article (wrong person or a random place or thing). Largely resolved by restricting PagesImages to only pull from the lead section.
• The project is both redundant-to and inferior-to our human managed related links. This was said by many community members, from multiple wikis. I don't think the team ever meaningfully addressed this.
• The software can select grossly inappropriate "related" pages. Our article for Hard disk drive was given a grossly promotional link to the Seagate Technology brand article. Video card currently displays a grossly promotional link to a specific Nvidia brand chipset. This can seriously undermine public perception of our neutrality. I also know of gross BLP violations and appalling political bias, such as giving a living politician a "related" link to a racist party or racist ideology - even when that person is not remotely aligned with the suggested article. Our NOTCENSORED articles can also pop up anywhere, I recall one of our language articles was given profane Related links. The team responded by creating a {{#related:articlename}} keyword we can use to override the software selections, but I rate this as utterly unresolved. The keyword theoretically allows us to fix any given page, but the software generates these links dynamically. Grossly inappropriate RelatedArticles can appear and change on any page at any moment. The problem is intractable, almost no one knows that it's possible to override it, and basically no one even tries to fix these cases. Noteworthy trivia: The #related keyword was used in the Wikimedia Foundation article, to setting related articles to iron law of oligarchy and Tragedy of the commons. There are over a hundred active page-watchers, and those Related Pages remained on the page 9 months before I found and reverted it. Either the Foundation is even more universally despised than I realized, or no one understands the #related keyword enough to revert vandalism that uses it.

Staff have good intentions but I'd say this is yet another case where they built something we never wanted, where they rolled forwards with deployment after ignoring significant feedback that it's not really wanted. Nobody has opened or suggested an RFC to try and get this shut off, but that might be because it's not visible on desktop. The fact that it's mobile-only means the product (and problems with the product) are pretty much invisible to most editors. I'd say that staff frivolously forking features as mobile-only is itself a problem, but that subject leads pretty far off the current topic. Alsee (talk) 03:23, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

 Comment: I don't want to be pedantic but Misplaced Pages uses algorithms all over the place to do things like convert inches to centimeters. What we are really discussing here is recommendation systems. Mo Billings (talk) 03:44, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

Iran's Rouhani Calls U.S. 'A Terrorist' After Rocket Attack on Baghdad Embassy Kills Child

That's quite a gem of a misleading title from today's Newsweek. Here's the article . BTW, Newsweek is an example of a previously reliable source that has become "not generally reliable" according to Misplaced Pages . Bob K31416 (talk) 19:16, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Seems like Wikipedians got this one right, and nicely illustrates the utility of WP:RSP for quick reference and summary of reliability. MastCell  20:11, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Anarchy on simple wikipedia, please explain yourself

Do you ever check what's going on there? There are mistakes everywhere! Those who get blocked here go over there. Did you have any role in creating that wiki? Why you never edit there? Why are you the cofounder of wikipedia afraid to be blocked there? Why do you allow things just to happen/click on their own over time across wmf? Majority being right does not mean they are right! I await your honest and detailed reply. --LjupcoSteriev — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.250.232.42 (talk) 19:04, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

Expecting a "detailed reply" to a jumbled rant with false implied premises/statements in most of the "questions" is a bit much. North8000 (talk) 22:48, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

Your email

Hi Jimbo

Thanks for the email you sent me this week with an update on the fundraiser. Always good to hear from you! Obviously my main contribution here is through writing content and adminning, but you've convinced me to pop a little donation over anyway. All the best to you and yours, and I hope you have a pleasant holiday season.  — Amakuru (talk) 10:53, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

just a second, why was previous edit reverted that antandrus and wikinger08 are doing huge problems to somebody named ljupco steriev but that name's privacy was not deleted?

where is fairness across wikingermedia, there never was, this is absolute culture occult of wikigerignorance, wikingerhypocrisy to say the least...

de.wikipedia.org/Benutzer:Wikinger08 ia described here: ｗｉｋｉｐｅｄｏｉａ．ｂｌｏｇｓｐｏｔ．ｃｏｍ/2020/11/wikinger-joins-forces-with-supreme.html