User talk:Sean.hoyland

Khirbet 'Ein Karzaliyah (Arabic: خربة عين كرزلية), Jordan Valley: December 2013 - January 2014

Id'eis (Arabic: ادعيس), Jordan Valley: May 2014

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Regarding your comments in the Arb discussion, which is already giving me a headache, and from which I hope to stay away as much as humanly possible, despite my temptation to do otherwise. This is slightly inspired but some of the debates in and around the discussion, so credit goes to whoever wrote the ideas first :) Maybe this is both overcomplicated and a bad idea, but what about a “content board”, with elected 5 editors, 2 from each ‘faction’ and one uninvolved administrator, which can be involved to litigate complicated content decisions (as in, writing sentences for the article). The board would require a 4/1 majority for the content they create, and the solution would be subject to a yes/no RfC, with the special alteration that consensus against is required to prevent implementation. The voting requirements might help remedy this real-world problem, the fixed balance would make sock-puppets significantly less effective, the bickering about RfC options might be lower than it is now, and it gets additional legitimacy in case of media scrutiny. In addition, this sort of process is almost impossible to disrupt, because much of the “outrage”-based issues are harder to apply against a panel, the benefit to impacting voting for members of the panel does very little because the desired balance is already set, and trying to sock-puppet your way into consensus against a solution (instead of a no-consensus or normal talk page disruption/edit warring) requires a lot more effort. The only problem I still have is how to figure out who can vote for and be a member of each “faction”, particularly with those editors (to be fair, pretty rare in this area) without at least a mild POV. The main draw-back is speed, but many of those edit wars are months or years in the making, so I’m less concerned about that. What do you think? FortunateSons (talk) 16:42, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I have a bad ideas machine in my head that never shuts up, a constant intrusive stream of 'what if...' nonsense, with a good original idea that actually works about once a decade. I look forward to age quietening it down. So, it's always a relief to look at someone else's bad ideas. However, on first read, I think this might be a good idea. I'll have a proper look tomorrow. Sean.hoyland (talk) 17:53, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, you got one too? Always nice to meet members of the club.

Thank you very much, I’m looking forward to it! FortunateSons (talk) 17:59, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like I'll need to let this marinate for a while. Sean.hoyland (talk) 09:13, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Don’t worry, I’ll be spending the next days running through multiple cities, no problem at all if it takes a while :) FortunateSons (talk) 09:19, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No pressure at all, but do you have any new thoughts? Or are we taking more about a Dry aging-timeline? ;) FortunateSons (talk) 13:43, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

My mind is very slow. I got stuck on the '2 from each ‘faction’'. This started me thinking about the potential effects of skewed editing being both allowed and common. Then I got stuck on thinking of editors with opposite valence in PIA as conjugate pairs, and the set of conjugate pairs making PIA into a kind of autocatalytic set where the fixing someone else's bias involves creating a disposable account and it never ends. None of this is helpful at all. I like the idea of a content board to decide complicated content decisions when discussion start to strongly resemble an ant mill. But I don't like the idea of elevating Wikipedia's apparent acceptance of bias, and 'factions', to even higher levels. This is because it's probably one of the main drivers of instability in the topic area. I get stuck on what seems like an inconsistency to me. On the one hand we have the code of conduct that doesn't allow "systematically manipulating content to favour specific interpretations of facts or points of view", and on the other we have reality where "systematically manipulating content to favour specific interpretations of facts or points of view", whether intentional or unintentional, is pretty much standard operating procedure for many editors, especially socks, in the topic area. If there were a content board, I think it might be better if the members were disinterested, and only focused on policy compliance, if that's even possible. And media scrutiny isn't a factor for me because it's not part of the content decision procedures. Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Sean.hoyland (talk) 15:06, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You: “my mind is very slow”

Also you: provides high-level analysis based on a variety of risks, factors and ethical evaluations ;)

Memes aside, I understand what you mean (after reading about the Autocatalytic sets). I’m glad you like the idea for the envisioned use case in general. Based on the Zionist boards/subreddits/discussion spaces I occasionally read, the common sentiment seems to be that en.wiki is hopeless pro-Palestinian, and that joining is either hopeless or to be considered the sort of partisan work where deception is acceptable or even desirable. That perception may or may not be true, but as long as it exists, it’s likely that we’ll get many pre-jaded editors from the pro-I side, and to the best of my knowledge, the same dynamic exists in pro-P spaces as well. Anything to point towards for the benefit of “proving lack of bias” might be a good way of avoiding that flavour of disruption, with the same applying to media scrutiny, where I consider a negative perception of wiki to be harmful to its encyclopaedic purpose (and to our ability to attracting skilled and motivated volunteers).

The unfortunate issue with creating a “disinterested” board is that they may not understand some of the more complicated nuances of any specific decision, and why certain phrasings are basically a provocation for one or the other group of editors. That is an issue that can be remedied through excellent knowledge of the underlying material, but I haven’t encountered anyone who has thought and read in depth about the topic and remained unbiased, but perhaps that’s just the size of my sample.

Regarding in effect rewarding factions, yes, that’s an unfortunate consequence, and one I wish we could avoid. I must admit to somewhat liking the “TNT-esque” idea about the topic area, but that’s of course easy to say as an alleged member of the faction with a current numerical disadvantage among the more active editors. Part of the issue is that people feel like they are not creating bias, but counteracting it, as well as the collective inability to agree on the same set of basic facts. In addition, actually sanctioning severely biased editors would rid us of many of the WP:Unblockables, which also happen to produce a significant percentage of the content. An argument can be made for a sort of Decimation targeted at the worst contributors on one or both sides, but that’s unjust, ineffective, or arguably both, if imposed as a meta-level punishment.

Not to add complexity to an already complex idea, but perhaps having a “binational” board (split 2/2) (Pun very much intended) and a neutral board with 3 editors, with majorities required in both, might alleviate the concerns about basically endorsing the bias? You have my gratitude for the detailed response!FortunateSons (talk) 16:03, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, the other thing that always confuses me is whether the so-called wisdom of crowds is a) real and b) whether it ever applies to PIA content (perhaps over long timescales). Sean.hoyland (talk) 15:46, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That’s a fascinating question. Unfortunately, I seem to be unable to come up with an answer that would be of any use. FortunateSons (talk) 16:04, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@FortunateSons I'm not Sean, but as someone stopping by with a different matter - if ARBCOM won't opt for my preferred solution, I actually think the above idea is one of the better alternatives I've heard. If Wikipedia can't get rid of the factions entirely and start from scratch, it might as well regulate them to its advantage. The Kip ^(contribs) 03:53, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much! I’m glad you like it! FortunateSons (talk) 07:51, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'd love to know more about the tool you used to do that analysis on Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Irtapil. RoySmith (talk) 01:33, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

RoySmith Me too. It's still a mysterious and confusing work in progress with highly questionable (or let's say unquantified) resolution and reliability for me. Broadly speaking, it looks at vector representations of stuff in the database. There's so much information in there that you can make various metric spaces then look at the relationship between vectors. Since these are quite high dimensional spaces, I have no idea what is going on in them...I can barely cope with 2 dimensions and get lost quite often. The Irtapil socks have interested me for a while because I don't really understand how it's making the connection. And I'm highly skeptical. The test dataset is relatively small, and results can be contradictory and clearly wrong in some cases. Still, it seems to be doing something, sometimes. Sean.hoyland (talk) 04:39, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I should also mention that it's not just vector representations of data from the database. I also inject a large number of synthetic signal and noise vectors into the spaces, often more than the stuff coming out of the databases. Broadly, you can think of the left side of the plot as information about signal and the right side as information about noise. Sean.hoyland (talk) 07:05, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't really understand what your thingie does beyond that it looks at various metrics and says how similar they are, so forgive me if this is a stupid, obvious, or way off base question: does the thingie work for smaller groups of accounts? Say I got a group of 20 or 30 accounts, and they're all similar but I want to know which are more similar to some than others, like whether they cluster into sub-groups, or which sock goes with which master. Can your tool help with that? Levivich (talk) 06:17, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe, it depends, but the problem is I don't really understand what it depends on. I do know that sample sizes and dimensionality matter a lot, in both directions, too little and too much. I don't know how much information is needed to produce sensible results. I don't have a clue. For example, I left something out of those ABHammad plots, the fact that some functions linked it to another of the sockmaster's accounts, Jujubird, even though that account only made 66 edits. Seems suspicious/too good to be true/a coincidence. I assume results for low edit count accounts are probably very unreliable. Anyway, I usually just try stuff and see what happens, so feel free to mail the account list and I can have a look. It's not really designed to look at clustering because I decided to focus on comparing a single reference account to all the others in the dataset, although I can probably see info for all accounts to all accounts comparisons if I look. It might help in my quest to discover the ignition temperature of my processors, which seem to get a bit toasty doing this stuff. Sean.hoyland (talk) 06:59, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Account created in 2009, had just three total edits in that 15-year span (including an ECR violation from March), and, as of today, has suddenly taken a great interest in making some rather POV edit requests on the talk page of Kidnapping and killing of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. My alarm bells are ringing - as something of the sock czar, what do you think? The Kip ^(contribs) 03:49, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Kip, I have no idea really with so few edits, but if I had to pick a potential sockmaster, I would probably pick this guy for the following reasons

• it's their MO
• the connection to Maryland at the time of that edit
• if you look at the timeline in the NoCal100 -> Fistook period there is a proliferation of socks, or at least detected socks (the time step might suggest lots of missed socks). Fistook registered on 2009-03-27. Mozumder registered the next day. Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:16, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure if I agree with that sockmaster - the POV in question appears to be the opposite, given that from NoCal's LTA page, they appear(ed) to be aggressively pro-Israeli and/or islamophobic, while the possible sleeper here is complaining of pro-IDF/anti-Hamas bias in the article (unless NoCal ever tried false-flagging). Appreciate the insight, however - I'll keep you in the loop if anything further pops up. The Kip ^(contribs) 05:25, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, opposite valence, but that could be just be kabuki theater. I'm skeptical of the dance with The Mountain of Eden, an account that I believe for technical reasons could possibly be a sock of Plot Spoiler (that registered the same day as their last sock Loksmythe was blocked). Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:37, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

<- Nableezy is the NoCal expert so might be able to shed some light on the matter. Sean.hoyland (talk) 09:56, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]