ExpertIdeasBot

Overview

We are a group of researchers at the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Our research aims at discovering ways to motivate academic researchers who can be considered domain experts to provide feedback about Wikipedia articles in their area of expertise. The goal of the bot is to make the process of posting comments on article talk pages easy for users who are not familiar with Wikipedia markup language. The users who have access to this bot are experts in different scientific fields such as psychology and Economics and the purpose of the comments left on the article talk pages are providing information on how the article can be improved. To avoid the abuse of the bot, all the comments provided by experts will be verified before submission to Talkpages. Since the messages from this bot are individual messages from real people, we do not want to skip any message even if it is related to template pages, we would like all messages to be delivered.

Function details

The bot is part of an experiment in which we are going to send emails to academic researchers who have published a number of research papers in various domains to review specific Wikipedia articles related to their domain of expertise. Once the experts provide us with their comments about the content of these articles, our ExpertIdeasBot will post these comments as new sections to the corresponding talk pages. All the new sections which are going to be created will have the following format:

Dr. ...'s comment on this article

Dr. ... has reviewed this Wikipedia page, and provided us with the following comments to improve its quality:

....

.... ....

....

We hope Wikipedians on this talk page can take advantage of these comments and improve the quality of the article accordingly.

Dr. ... has published scholarly research which seems to be relevant to this Wikipedia article:

• Reference : .......

ExpertIdeasBot (talk) 03:58, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Then the bot will add the Talk page and also the corresponding Wikipedia page to my watchlist, so we will be able to observe the active Wikipedians’ reactions to the experts’ comments, which will help us to realize:

1. if these comments really help Wikipedians to improve the quality of these pages or not.
2. other factors that we can add to the experts’ comments to help Wikipeidians.

I.yeckehzaare (talk) 17:06, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Connecting academia and Wikipedia

@I.yeckehzaare and Rostaf: I just happened to stumble upon this bot via its recent post to Talk:Black market. What an interesting idea! In the organization I work for, the Wiki Education Foundation, we've been talking about the ways we might be able to do more to connect experts from academia to Wikipedia.

Since we grew out of the Wikipedia Education Program, the way we've most actively tried to bridge the two domains is by supporting instructors and students as they work on Wikipedia for a class assignment. Moving forward, we'll continue to develop that program but will also be working on other approaches beyond the classroom. For the project I'm working on now, I'm exploring ways to engage the existing Wikipedia community of active editors -- ways that will likely take advantage of the institutional relationships we've formed through the classroom program.

I wonder if you've considered getting the Wikipedia community more actively involved with the process this bot facilitates? For example, allowing for bidirectional communication and/or collaboration in some way. If that's something you've already explored (or even if it's not), would you be up for chatting sometime? On-wiki works, but if you prefer, my email is ryan [at] wikiedu [dot] org. Thanks very much. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 03:36, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

Water resources

I am sure that this bot is well intentioned but I have some significant reservations about its use. It is unclear how the "experts" are selected and whether they would be deemed to be experts by a wide consensus of academics and professionals in the relevant field. This may sound jaundiced, but my brief involvement with Wikipedia has shown significant evidence of academics using Wikipedia for self promotion and, in particular, self promotion of their own particular view of the topic. The comments provided by the expert on the Talk:Water resources page do not appear to be partisan or biased which is good. However, the message is very difficult to extract since the differences suggested are not highlighted in any way and I guess most editors will simply regard this as too hard. Perhaps some refinement in formatting to make the output more useful and the inclusion of a link to the authors work or CV so that a realistic judgement might be made to evaluate the likely quality of the proposal. Regards  Velella  ^{Velella Talk}   23:27, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

@Velella, Dear Velella,

I appreciate your concern about the importance of these comments. Our system identifies an economist as an expert in a field, if they have at least 6 English publications in the :specific field of expertise. At the end of the post, after his comment, you can find a citation to his relevant publication to the Wikipedia article.

Please let us know about your ideas and suggestions to improve our Bot.

Thank you, I.yeckehzaare (talk) 11:23, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

Give more visibility to the project

I've just learn about the ExpertIdeasBot from its post at Knowledge economy. I was wondering why some "Dr Khumalo" was posting a review to the article writing in the third person, and asked myself whether this doctor was a Wikipedia editor or what.

I've managed to reach this talk page to read about the bot purpose, but it was not at all obvious how to arrive here. I'd suggest that you place at the bot's page the content of the #Overview section above, and include a link to it in the message of the reviews posted at the article, something along this line:

• Dr. Khumalo has reviewed this Wikipedia page on behalf of the Carnegie Mellon, Michigan and Pittsburg universities...

or

• Dr. Khumalo has been contacted by the ExpertIdeasBot and provided us with the following comment...

This would allow readers of the articles talk pages to learn the reason why that long review has been posted in such impersonal way.

Good initiative, keep the bot working! Diego (talk) 15:44, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Dear Diego, Thank you for your feedback. Looking at the end of the post, you'll find ExpertIdeasBot's signature. That signature includes two links, ExpertIdeasBot (talk). Having these links, one can directly come to these pages. I'll appreciate it if you let me know why you think we should repeat the same information on top of the post. In addition, in order to learn more about the expert who has commented on the page, you can check out the citations to related publications of the expert at the end of the comment. I.yeckehzaare (talk) 16:04, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

My concern is that the links at the signature are a totally non-obvious and insufficient way to discover the project's description - primarily because they're hidden at the end of a long post, and because they have zero information scent about the content situated at the other side of the links (it isn't self-evident that a Wikipedia username leads to an explanation about an automated project, and the explanation of the project is two pages away if you happen to click on the bot's name instead of the "talk" link).

Also, knowing what articles an expert has written doesn't explain why s/he has written a review of the Wikipedia article in that field, and might confound editors into thinking that they can contact that expert directly by addressing comments to them in the article's talk page (which isn't true). In short, the bot's posting process doesn't provide enough context about the way the review has been processed.

The most likely process that an editor must follow in order to find this project's description is as follows:

1. Know that there exist bots at Wikipedia performing automated tasks on behalf of their creator (many editors are not aware of this, in particular those academics that would most benefit from this project and who tend to ignore the finer details of Wikipedia maintenance).
2. Figure out that the message was posted by a bot, by noticing that the word "bot" appears as part of the poster's username, located at the bottom of a long post.
3. Follow the link in the bot's name trying to read its description, and finding that the bot has zero documentation at its user page.
4. Come up with the idea that maybe the talk page may contain some discussion about the bot's behavior, and clicking it with the hope that it's not merely a blank page nor contains irrelevant chitchat.

Those are the reasons why I think the signature at the bottom is not enough to learn about this project in the common case. The descriptive link I suggest at the top would bypass all this burdensome process, providing explicit and direct access to the explanation in an accessible place, without requiring that the reader possess obscure knowledge about Wikipedia administrative processes. Diego (talk) 11:11, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Also, I would concentrate all relevant descriptions of the review at the top, rearranging the post into this format to show all provided context at first glance: Diego (talk) 11:59, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Dr. ...'s comment on this article

Dr. ... has been contacted by the ExpertIdeasBot to review this Wikipedia page, and has provided us with comments to improve its quality.

Dr. ... has published scholarly research which seems to be relevant to this Wikipedia article. We hope Wikipedians on this talk page can take advantage of these comments and improve the quality of the article accordingly.

See Dr. ...'s review and relevant scholarly research below:

....

....

POSSIBLY VERY LONG TEXT GOES HERE

....

....

• Reference : .......

ExpertIdeasBot (talk) 03:58, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Diego, thank you so much for your comprehensive feedback. The research group will meet in a week and will discuss your suggestions. I.yeckehzaare (talk) 16:49, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

This is an excellent project, and I'm very glad it has been undertaken! I'm editing some articles to respond to some criticisms offered by the experts. I had a similar reaction to the format of the post, especially since people who go around using a title like "Dr." are often inflating their own credentials in an effort to be taken seriously. I like the proposed new format; using someone's full name on first reference would also make sense. -- Beland (talk) 05:29, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

ExpertIdeasBot abuse

Regarding this 'expert opinion' posted at Talk:Full-reserve banking.

Ralph Musgrave is unaffiliated with any tertiary or other institution, and has no published peer-reviewed papers. See his self registered repec page. He writes a blog pushing full reserve banking [1]. His "MPRA Paper" is essentially self-published by uploading to an open access website. The site essentially accepts any paper as long as it is of an 'academic' nature, and fully downloadable. To put it bluntly, Musgrave is a fringe activist using Expertbot to give a veneer of credibility to his non-mainstream views.

This is a case of ExpertIdeasBot abuse. Please tighten your process for creating posts. At the very least, ExpertIdeasBot posts should be restricted to faculty from universities or other research institutions posting in their field of expertise. LK (talk) 03:03, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

LK, thank you so much for your feedback. We are actually contacting a large number of domain experts and, considering our human resources, it is not practical to verify all their expertise manually. To address this issue, our system uses publications listed on RePEc to verify each expert's expertise. However, as you mentioned, there might be RePEc profiles that do not accurately reflect their expertise. That's the main reason that we do not directly edit the Wikipedia articles based on the comments we receive. ExpertIdeasBot posts them to the corresponding Talk pages, so that active Wikipedians on those pages can verify them and address them in the main articles based on Wikipedia norms. Please let me know in case you have further suggestions for the verification process or approaches to reach Wikipedians to address the comments in the articles. I.yeckehzaare (talk) 03:21, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Helpful rewrite was offered, but is it reusable / free / public domain?

Thanks for your interesting and valuable project. Dr. Subhash Ray offered a helpful rewrite of an article, at Talk:Data envelopment analysis. I think the document sent is very good and would like to make use of it in the article. However the document he posted is not clearly in the public domain, nor explicitly licensed for free reuse. That means I would have to carefully rewrite it, rather than take sentences and notation directly. Can the author, or your bot, state that such offerings are in the public domain or have some identifiable license? The document does not have his name as author, either. It is tricky, therefore to cite him, although there is a way and I can do that. -- econterms (talk) 18:36, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

econterms, Thank you so much for your helpful comment. Although we have received a lot of positive feedback from Wikipedians, there are still many aspects of the project that we need to improve. Because of having many comments from domain experts, it is not possible for us to proofread them one by one. That's why we did not ask the experts to directly edit the Wikipedia articles, but we posted their comments to the corresponding Talk pages, so that Wikipedians interested in those pages can take advantage of those comments and address them in the main Wikipedia articles. The other advantage of this approach is that Wikipedians are more familiar with Wikipedia norms and can address the comments in the articles in such a way that they follow the norms. I.yeckehzaare (talk) 17:04, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

I think you missed Econterms' point, the essence of which is his request "Can the author, or your bot, state that such offerings are in the public domain or have some identifiable license" so that editors can more or less copy-and-paste from the expert comment into the article. I second econterms' request! Loraof (talk) 21:37, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Untitled

Please just ban this bot. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bohan (talk • contribs) 15:26, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

Bohan Why? Please let us know about your concern and we'll try to address it. I.yeckehzaare (talk) 17:04, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

You and your bot are wasting my time

I watch talk pages so that when an issue comes up, I'll give it my attention. Today I find my attention is being wasted by this:

Dr. Takeuchi has reviewed this Wikipedia page, and provided us with the following comments to improve its quality:

   Well written.

We hope Wikipedians on this talk page can take advantage of these comments and improve the quality of the article accordingly.

If the reviewer has no suggestion, I would very much like to not hear about it from you! Dougmcdonell (talk) 00:12, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

I have not seen any examples so far of useful input from this bot. --Jonathan G. G. Lewis 09:59, 12 February 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jonazo (talk • contribs)

Proposed deletion

This bot has not made an edit since 2016, and the operator, User:I.yeckehzaare has not made an edit since 2017.

Before I start the wheels turning to have this bot deleted, does anyone have a reason why it should be retained? --Guy Macon (talk) 15:50, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Guy Macon I developed this bot for a study to motivate domain experts (Professors and researchers) to evaluate and comment on Wikipedia articles. We've already finished the study. We may run another study in the near future, but for now, we're not gonna use this bot for a while. --I.yeckehzaare (talk) 17:22, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Time for deletion

OK, then we can certainly delete this. Do not abuse wikipedia again. Wild experiments like this are not welcome. Bohan (talk) 04:24, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Bohan Have you seen more than 1,000 Economics Wikipedia articles that are improved because of the comments from ExpertIdeasBot? I suggest you be more careful in choosing words that you use to communicate with other Wikipedians. I don't understand in what sense my bot has "abused" Wikipedia. We have received many thank you emails from economists and Wikipedian over the past years because of the comments from ExpertIdeasBot that significantly improved some of the popular articles. I have no objection to deleting the bot, but your message don't accept being accused of abusing Wikipedia. --I.yeckehzaare (talk) 19:59, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

User:I.yeckehzaare Sorry, but while I can respect you as a human being, I do not have to show any respect to a bot, that would be absurd. This is the bot's fake-user talk page. My point of view is that Wikipedia should restrict automated edits done by software to the bare minimum needed for maintenance, mechanical changes, and the software should be controlled by Wikipedia and agreed by its staff.

(talk page stalker) @Bohan: why are you coming to this page repeatedly, over the course of years, for years after this bot has made any edits at all, and continuing to leave messages? No comments will be removed en masse, no accounts removed, this page won't be deleted. "Deleted" for a bot just means deactivated. As it hasn't edited since 2016, that's a rather meaningless thing to, for some strange reason, repeatedly revisit. There will be no actual deletion here because that's just not how Wikipedia works. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 00:00, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

User:Rhododendrites Thanks for clarification about the bot having been idling for years already, I'm happy to hear that. If you need an "explanation" about my (twice?) repeated requests, it's simple: I don't know about the internal workings of those bots or wikipaedia itself, however, I do know I've repeatedly come across edits made by this bot, over the course of years. Please remember that we're talking about a bot, a fake user, not a human being. So, please adjust your view and actions accordingly.

Helpful comments

Hi, just a note to mention thanks for helpful comments from experts via this bot on the inflation targeting and monetary policy articles. Whizz40 (talk) 21:44, 10 May 2020 (UTC)