Moving the needle on perceptions of shooting
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to perceptions of target shooting recently. Living in the anglosphere, those outside the target shooting fraternity are often “informed” about firearms and related issues from US-centric news. Usually following a Bad Thing happening stateside. This - quite understandably - influences the perceptions of the general public, even though firearms policy in the USA is a gross aberration which is broadly irrelevant to the rest of the developed world (except as a bad example). British shooters have far more in common with our French and German counterparts than US gun… err… enthusiasts.
Indeed, I have seen it argued that the NRA of America is the biggest threat to shooting sports in the UK (and indeed the broader anglosphere). It is hard to disagree when one considers the impact someone like Wayne LaPierre can have on a poorly-informed audience when they are picked up on international news spouting truly objectionable nonsense.
To that end, I became a little frustrated at the way in which search results often conflate shooting bodies. For instance, a search on google.co.uk for “National Rifle Association” would correctly return “nra.org.uk” as the top search result. But the “Knowledge Panel” to the right is then populated with data for the NRA of America.
This is because Google leans heavily on Wikipedia to populate the knowledge panel, and the Wikipedia article titled “National Rifle Association” relates to the US organisation. The appropriate wikipedia article is “National Rifle Association (United Kingdom)” - but Google apparently gives more weight to an exact text match for the search term. This is not entirely surprising nor even unreasonable. But incorrect for a UK user on google.co.uk. Bing.co.uk suffered the same problem, as did DuckDuckGo and Ecosia with regionalisation set to UK. This shouldn’t be difficult for them to fix by using Wikidata to link a web domain to the appropriate wikipedia article. But apparently none of them do.
The question then was, could I change this? Could I nudge the needle to make the NRA of America less prominent in search results when searching for other NRAs? Not maliciously or making it needlessly difficult to find information on the NRA of America, but as a corrective in cases like this where they are given undue weight in the UK (and other English-speaking countries) by their prominence/notoriety in Wikipedia and the mass media.
Step 1: Ask search providers not to
The first and most obvious thing was to submit polite feedback along the lines of:
“I was expecting the knowledge panel to relate to the top search result, particularly on a localised site such as google.co.uk.
If the top result is nra.org.uk then the panel should display data for that entity.”
This is just a note to the operators that perhaps their algorithms have a blind spot.
Step 2: Propose changing the article titles on Wikipedia
I’ve been sporadically active on Wikipedia for over a decade, quietly maintaining the articles for the British NRA, NSRA as well as for various British world class shooters.
I popped into the Talk for the offending article and proposed that it should be retitled “National Rifle Association of America”. The page “National Rifle Association” would then point at the disambiguation page, which is basically a list of organisations with “National Rifle Association” in their name. I noted that the current arrangement doesn’t really comply with Wikipedia’s article title criteria, nor WP:GLOBAL policy and that using such a generic title for an American organisation potentially represented US-centric bias (which Wikipedia is consciously trying to avoid).
The proposal was well received by some but on balance rejected, mostly on the grounds of WP:COMMONNAME - the contention that most people searching for “National Rifle Association” were looking for the US organisation. I disagree, but respect the consensus (of… mostly American users). What I did note however was that although the article relating to the NRA of America has the title “National Rifle Association”, the pages “NRA” and “National Rifle Association of America” both redirect to it. I wondered if algorithms made any distinction between direct links and redirects.
Step 3: Edit Wikipedia to make the “of America” more explicit
Wikipedia has a “what links here” function built in, so you can easily see what other articles link to a given page.
I started searching for direct links to “National Rifle Association” which would be more appropriately use the full “National Rifle Association of America”. After pushback on a couple of articles I developed a policy of only editing links in articles of international or non-US scope. No-one could really complain about full-naming the NRA of America in an article about Australian politics and avoiding confusion with the NRA of Australia. By contrast, I left links alone on articles relating to American individuals, politics or organisations where “of America” might be reasonably inferred through context. I was also able to clean up references to magazines such as “American Rifleman”, correcting tags like ”|publisher=National Rifle Association” to include “of America” (their proper legal name as a publisher).
Step 4: Housekeeping in Wikipedia/data
Wikidata is a sister project to Wikipedia, which originated as a way of linking articles across different language versions of wikipedia - e.g. the English, French and Spanish articles about a particular subject.
Since its foundation however, Wikidata has become a powerful data store for objective, relational data. For shooting athletes, Wikidata can store data such as their ISSF and IOC profiles as well as storing gender, nationality, etc in a machine-readable format (e.g. “nationality: British”, “sport: shooting” is much easier for a computer to parse than “Jen McIntosh is a British female sport shooter”).
Although search engines do not release the specifics of their algorithms, we know they draw knowledge panel content from Wikipedia. It is safe to assume they also consider the world’s largest open knowledge graph when making recommendations.
Although the British NRA has a wikipedia page, a quick look at the corresponding wikidata page found it largely unpopulated. I added data like social media accounts, location, etc. I also discovered at this point that the NRA of Australia and NRA of New Zealand did not actually have wikipedia articles at all. I created a couple of short articles, and then populated the new, corresponding Wikidata objects. Incidentally to any antipodean readers - there is a lot more work to be done. Most of your shooting sport organisations don’t have wikipedia articles. Please create them, populate the wikidata entities and give yourselves half a chance when it comes to influencing search results.
From the outside, it is impossible to quantify what weighting this is given by search algorithms - but I am only trying to nudge the needle - so the confidence that “Result A” is the best result drops from (say) 0.97 to 0.95, and the confidence on “Result B” goes from 0.94 to 0.96 - overtaking A. In this case, by adding additional entries that contain “National Rifle Association” we are causing the algorithm to question whether a search string for “National Rifle Association” is actually seeking the article with an exact text match, or one of the (increasing) number of other articles that also contain the string. We’re fuzzing the signal-to-noise ratio away from the NRA (of America) towards all the other NRAs.
Step 5: Housekeeping Wikimedia
Just as the knowledge panels rely heavily on wikipedia for content, so too for the photos attached to those panels and in image results. When housekeeping the wikipedia articles I made sure that the articles had a logo attached. However, this is more difficult in wikidata. Wikipedia hosts its own images and allows copyrighted images and logos under “fair use”. Wikidata cannot reference those images - to set an “organisation logo” value the image needs to be in Wikimedia Commons, another sister project for public domain images which has strict rules about only accepting un-copyrighted images. This is okay for simple logos (which can be trademarked but lack the originality to be copyrighted) or very old ones (such as the NRA “Sit Pet” logo which is out of copyright). However, for contemporary logos, the file needs a release from the owner. The NRA of New Zealand (for instance) could upload their logo and grant that release - I cannot.
What I could do though was give away some of my photography to Wikimedia Commons. By releasing various photos of Bisley and target shooting in general I can provide fodder to google image search and stop it falling back on resources from the NRA of America. This is not about flooding out the NRAoA, but redressing the balance - UK organisations have not published nearly as many images relating to shooting as their US counterparts, and consequently algorithms tend to find themselves drifting towards readily-available American content. That American-centric content won’t go away, but I can try and nudge it down the search results by providing more relevant material. I haven’t got a huge amount of material to offer at the moment, but this is a project for the summer.
UPDATE (7th Sept 2022): Since August, I’ve added a dozen or so photos of Bisley Camp, with more to come. Searching for “National Rifle Association” in Commons is now somewhat less US-centric, through there’s space there for much more historic and educational material, which I intend to work on sourcing.
Results
So, was it worth it? Did it change anything?
It’s hard to say. This is all very qualitative as we don’t know exactly how search algorithms treat and weight various data sources. We also don’t know how often they fetch and parse new dumps of wikipedia or wikidata, or how often the new graphs are fed into their search engines. I’ve been tinkering for a few weeks now and certain changes have become apparent. Others might appear in the future.
One thing that has definitely happened is that when searching “National Rifle Association” from google.co.uk, the knowledge panel has been replaced with an option (EDIT: Sometimes. It seems a bit sporadic). Google is now confused as to whether it should provision the UK or US data. This is a step in the right direction.
More prosaically, there are now articles for the NRAs of Australia and New Zealand (as well as the New Zealand Shooting Federation) - because I wrote them. This is a good thing in any circumstance. As is the improvement of the wikidata records for the various non-US organisations. For “uncontested” searches (such as National Smallbore Rifle Association) this housekeeping means the panels are now properly populated with the right logo and social media links. This is also a good thing in-and-of-itself.
Likewise adding the longer “…of America” links in Wikipedia may help clarify and remind readers that the NRA of America is specifically and uniquely American, and separate to its other namesakes. It is no bad thing that in citations, sources attributed to the National Rifle Association of America actually say of America rather than being abbreviated.
This is really soft, qualitative stuff but it’s well understood that “background noise” can dig into the subconscious. When people’s only exposure to firearms is through US news, they naturally develop an adverse reaction to “shooting”. Placing positive sports news in front of them and forming a subconscious distinction between the US and the rest of the world can only be positive.
UPDATE (7th Sept 2022): As of September, Bing manages to reliably populate the knowledge panel correctly. Success!
