> Here are the drawbacks I see to using the "cur" download of Wikipedia:

> 1) The purported "neutral point of view" is subject to systemic bias.
> The process supported by Wikipedia biases the content toward people who
> are able and willing to contribute under those circumstances.  It's not
> clear how to go about identifying this bias let alone its impact.

> 2) If a snapshot of the "cur" downloads is delayed, it will be subject
> to gaming by people who submit changes to articles that have a
> Kolmogorov complexity that is known to be low just to the gamers.
> Wikipedia keeps prior archives of the 'cur' downloads and it is
> unlikely anyone has gamed the system so far but now that we've broached
> the subject there is the potential that future versions of the 'cur'
> downloads will have been so-gamed.

> 3) The entire history of edits is about a factor of 10 larger than the
> current version.  This would be a superior corpus for the purpose of
> ferreting out how various points of view bias content -- and be very
> relevant to epistemology, social and political sciences -- thereby
> creating a superior AI capable of considering the source of various
> assertions.  If this really is beyond the capacity of computers that
> would be available to viable contestants then it might be necessary to
> defer use of that larger corpus until more capacity or more funding for
> the prize is available.

> For a discussion of the downloads see:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Weekly_datab...