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> an editor [...] stated he could only allow changes to the "facts" if my SO could point to an online source (a credible one he said).

That's plainly false, how many Wikipedia articles have (annoying, I'll admit) offline references to books, papers, and other things that are only available under specific terms and conditions, typically after some payment? You don't have to own anything's copyright to reference it. (In many jurisdictions you'd also be allowed to publish excerpts as fair use, that would make this easier but that's not a prerequisite here anyway.)

And does Wikipedia even have an approval system? I thought either you have permission to edit a page or you don't (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19&action=e...). This whole situation sounds quite odd.

Not that I haven't dealt with overzealous page protectors myself that have some "I did a million-and-one edits and am holier than thou" status and will revert anything that changes their perception of the world. I don't disbelieve the situation in general, just those details seem odd to me.

> That's plainly false,

Thanks for denying experience. You could have said: "That should not be the case."

But yet he kept denying changes.

> offline references to books, papers, and other things that are only available under specific terms and conditions, typically after some payment

I was talking about birth certificates, official but personal documents, things like birthday greetings personally signed by Erich Honecker, a Radio interview done in the 70ies at a GDR radio station were only one last tape of the recording exists in family archives.

Nothing of that is anyhow publicly available.

Whenever we proposed changes we were shut down by this person. They felt (or were - I have too little insights into the hierarchy of Wikipedia and don't want to actually) to be righteously empowered to change back any change were one could not provide citable proof. And that is actually a point I agree with.

But he also was not willing to accept/provide a way to proof how "facts" in the entry were wrong.

If they were missing I wouldn't have an issue. But they were already wrong in the cited source and we had the original documents to proof that. He just wasn't willing to look at them.

> > That's plainly false

I think this was referring to the claim by the other editor - that he "could only allow the changes if ...", was false. Not to your whole comment

> Nothing of that is anyhow publicly available.

Therein the problem.

Your situation sucks, and I'm genuinely sorry about it.

But I'm not sure I can think of a way to change that policy that would be a net win overall.

If anything I feel like you're more collateral damage of copyright law than wikipedia policy here, but I understand that even assuming I'm right about that, that doesn't make the specifics sucks any less.

Bah.

> Thanks for denying experience

That's not what I meant. Was already thinking whether this was clear enough or if I should edit... apparently I should have edited. Apologies.

I meant it the way that pxeger1 mentioned in their sibling comment: the person denying your (SO's) edits was saying something that is clearly not true.

Thanks for clarification. Very much appreciated.

Since this person is family, you can issue a publicly-available statement, e.g. on a website, and it will most likely qualify as a reliable source by Wikipedia's policies. The point is that Wikipedia must never be a primary source for what it writes about; it just always be able to point at a source for what it says. Wikipedians' job is to broadly evaluate and curate sources, not guess at the truth of any individual statement.

Yeah I could do this. But I could also just accept the fact that Wikipedia isn't even willing to delete contested information when offered proof.

I don't need the facts to be in the entry. I don't care. I only care about the fake facts in there and ask myself how much of the rest of Wikipedia is also riddled with falsehoods and nobody would want to remove that if shown actual state documents that show what is wrong.

I did not want it to become a primary source. I just hoped they would remove information that has new evidence not known to the original source.

There are problems with the approach of requiring third party reputable sources, for example the problems you are running into. There are associated costs, some published information will be wrong. There are also problems with the alternatives - e.g. primary sources providing motivated misinformation or volunteer editors being fooled by bad sources.

It's easy to find problems with wikipedia's current model, but harder, I think, to argue that their model is the wrong choice.

Evaluating the quality of a source was one of the most difficult and also most important skills we were taught in university.

Do I still get it wrong. Oh dear, yes. Did I learn how important it was? Oh yes.

I especially learned to qualify what I wrote and to mark when a source could not perfectly be trusted, but the argument/point of view was interesting to discuss nonetheless.

Why can't Wikipedia at least either remove false information once provided credible sources. Or at least somehow mark the relevant section/parts with a disclaimer so that readers are at least aware that something might be suspicious.

Could it be gamed? Weaponized? Probably. Would it be helpful to readers? Maybe.

But how is the current situation better?

If they don’t have a reliable source for the incorrect fact, it should be removed.

If they do have a “reliable” source for the incorrect fact, could you write to that source and get it corrected there?

As I have just written in another comment:

But they were already wrong in the cited source and we had the original documents to proof that. He just wasn't willing to look at them.

To add to that - the source is a digitized out of print book that will probably never have another edition or printing.

I could start a website or create a blog post with parts of the proof documents and maybe even sound snippets from an old interview (and part of old Stasi documents as well to make the point and that to be referenced by Wikipedia as a new source.

But why would I need to go to these lengths if I could provide proof to Wikipedia more easily if they wanted and have them at least remove the wrong parts. Even if they would not include the corrected things.

I feel your frustration but I don't think I want a Wikipedia with secret citations and an editor voucher system. Such a scheme would not be in the spirit of Wikipedia, which is nominally supposed to be verifiable and editable by any reader, and could only reinforce the gatekeeping mentality of its editors.

Get a quasi-referencable source like a Forbes blog written, and later refer to it.

Wikipedia is great for a low level consensus, but if you actually know anything about many of the subjects it’s hilariously bad.

So Gell-Mann Amnesia applies there as in most other journalism.

This is an unfortunate situation for sure, but I think I still agree with how they responded. What if they had accepted your evidence? The page still has no publicly visible references, so I (the user) have to just take the editor's word that the article is correct - I have no way to verify that information myself.

I agree. They could however remove the wrong parts.

This way they would not have the user need to trust unverifiable claims but also protect the user from learning falsehoods.

Yeah, I think that's a fair criticism.

What do you want Wikipedia to do in that circumstance, though? Just accept uncited facts based on the promise of someone on the internet? The problem with your SO's relative isn't that Wikipedia is doing something incorrect, it's that the historical record is wrong. And that sucks, but it's not something an encyclopedia is going to be able to solve. That's why we have historians.

They could see the evidence and remove the contested source. In this case they would remove a part from the entry. People wouldn't learn falsehoods. I think this would at least be better than knowingly spreading fake knowledge.

I would have welcomed that approach. And applauded them. But once he decided to let wrong facts stay as part of the entry this was a lost cause to me.

As said. I would have been more than fine if they had just deleted these parts.

Now more than ever, Wikipedia must be publicly verifiable. That means that any claim can be checked by anyone with an Internet connection and a library card. Imagine if contested articles contained controversial facts on the basis of secret evidence? The editor made the right call.

But if the editors receive proof that a statement article is wrong, but that information can't be published on the Internet for copyright or other reasons, that means it is proven that the source of the information is wrong, so that source should be removed as unreliable at least in this case. If the rules of Wikipedia don't allow unsourced information, they don't prevent removing incorrect information that has been shown to be incorrect. So they could nuke the bad information. If, after that, nothing is left, they can remove the entire article.

The problem is that results in some users with privileged knowledge and other users without. The OP has been using language like "they" to refer to editors as some unified, privileged bloc but that is incorrect, and part of the issue. (If they have found some specific users to be "gatekeeping" content, that is a problem and there exist mechanisms to redress that[0].)

Ultimately, if the OP wants "the editors" to see information to add to the article, they will effectively be publishing the information publicly, since anyone can be an editor, and there is no mechanism for protected sources that are available to only some special cadre.

That breaks the Wikipedia model -- in article namespace, everyone should be able to review the same source information. The concept here is called "verifiability" for a reason. Wikipedia's strength is that you can ultimately go check and confirm the source.

By writing articles from privileged information, Wikipedia effectively becomes a primary source on a subject, which is a big no-no for an encyclopedia in general, and for Wikipedia specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research

It can be frustrating, but it is a necessary minimum. As to perceived accuracy, Wikipedia has a General Disclaimer[1] for a reason.

If this all makes you less trustful of Wikipedia... good! I can't speak for every wikipedian, but I personally welcome skepticism and encourage users to verify anything they have doubts on.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Access... specifically allows the use of sources that are hard to access. The rule here wasn't that it couldn't be used because it was hard to access, but that it couldn't be used because it wasn't published at all.

Furthermore, any sane editor would allow use of this information under Ignore All Rules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules ), which is specifically there because sometimes the rules don't produce good results.

There is no particular group who are "the editors". You are "the editors". So am I, and I have no idea about this situation. That's why articles need publicly-accessible sources.

Now, if there's something in the article that is (1) wrong and (2) unsourced, then that should be removed from the article. (And if someone re-adds unsourced material to an article, then there are process to deal with that). But if there are no public sources for information it does not go in the encyclopedia.

Thanks. Exactly my thought on a valid approach. One not taken by this person in this case.

> the documents cannot be published online without breaking copyright laws

Can you not excerpt them to the point that the quotes would qualify for fair use? Another option is contacting the source that was cited and see if they'd post a correction.

The other side of this is that family members aren't unbiased parties, so any facts they want corrected really need to be from verifiable sources--sources better than whichever source was already quoted.

At Wikipedia's scale, the red tape is more of a safety harness than anything

This seems like something the Commons Volunteer Response Team (VRT, previously OTRS) can help with. You can send them the documents and they can vouch that they say what was claimed, but without having to publish the material against the licence.

I have used this for license confirmations, not for fact checking, but they do Biographies of Living Persons work so they might be able to help.

Wikipedia's whole system is not designed for interested first-party to intervene. They do ALL. THE. TIME. but it's not built for that.

At this point you need to fight fire with fire. Everything you know that is factually wrong needs to be investigated; are there credible sources for those lies? Can those sources be discredited?

It takes a mountain of work to fight casual lies, unfortunately.

This is unfortunate, but what can Wikipedia do.

They can’t allow you upload your own proof, and then have citations on Wikipedia pointing to Wikipedia.

The only way they can really do it is to insist on citations to reliable sources. That sucks when there is nothing true about it out there, but without those rules you could just write anything at all , they need some rules.

Moat of it is outdated.

I think of wikipedia as the old encyclopedia books where they are just snapshots of reality.

You think the facts on the page should change because "trust me bro"? Come on. I don't know you from Adam.