Wiki workshop 2019
Last week, May 14, saw the fifth incarnation of the Wiki workshop, co-located with the Web Conference (formerly known as dubdubdub), in San Francisco. The room was tight and very full - I am bad at estimating, but I guess 80-110 people were there.
I was honored to be invited to give the opening talk, and since I had a bit more time than in the last few talks, I really indulged in sketching out the proposal for the Abstract Wikipedia, providing plenty of figures and use cases. The response was phenomenal, and there were plenty of questions not only after the talk but also throughout the day and in the next few days. In fact, the Open Discussion slot was very much dominated by more questions about the proposal. I found that extremely encouraging. Some of the comments were immediately incorporated into a paper I am writing right now and that will be available for public reviews soon.
The other presentations - both the invited and the accepted ones - were super interesting.
- Timnit Gebru talked about the limitations of AI and when it can backfire
- Jure Leskovec spoke about their work on discovering hoaxes in Wikipedia automatically, and how bad humans are at this task (the algorithm detected 86% of hoaxes, humans 66% - random would be 50%)
- Neil Thompson gave a talk on how much Wikipedia shapes science, based on a super interesting experiment
- Erica Kochi talked about UNICEF’s innovation lab
Thanks to Dario Taraborelli, Bob West, and Miriam Redi for organizing the workshop.
A little extra was that I smuggled my brother and his wife into the workshop for my talk (they are visiting, and they have never been to one of my talks before). It was certainly interesting to hear their reactions afterwards - if you have non-academic relatives, you might underestimate how much they may enjoy such an event as mere spectators. I certainly did.
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