The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
As other have pointed out, wikipedia has to deal with lots of bad edits from people who are not motivated by a pursuit of facts or truth.
To deal with this, they've come up with a set of policies that the editors seem to enforce fairly rigidly. This does an okay job of preventing the wackos from taking over. Unfortunately, since the editors often lack the subject expertise to distinguish cranks from experts, these policies end up making it harder for experts to contribute in some cases.
I'm not saying experts can't write encyclopedia articles; I'm saying, credible experts don't use them as venues for research.
The only thing they're not welcome to do is to cite their own expertise instead of actual sources.
I'm sure this would lead to arguments about how to verify expertise, but even if it only started with unimpeachable credentials that would seem like a start. Tell me very clearly who is providing the commentary, and I can decide myself if it's credible.
I feel like I'm rambling a bit, but really this seems like a wasted opportunity. Why recreate Wikipedia from whole cloth when it already has so much? I suppose that given the way it's licensed, you could always fork it...
The true waste would be taking valuable research and synthesize and hiding it in an encyclopedia. Pokemon aside, most new knowledge that merits inclusion in Wikipedia deserves its own independent source.
It goes research -> authorship of secondary source (journal article, book, magazine article, whatever) -> citation in encyclopedia.
And that's really all that happened here: someone tried to skip the middle step (notably: they tried to skip it while authoring the secondary source --- the author of this article published an authoritative text on the Haymarket Riot later on), and Wikipedia called that out.
Then I suppose I'm also frustrated at Wikipedia's lack of ambition. To strive toward that benchmark and not past it seems, as I said, wasteful.
One of the things that fuels this feeling for me is the work of people like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think there is a role for experts to address the public directly, rather than their peers. To be sure, it can get very messy, as some of the most vocal cranks think they are experts and seek every possible venue to espouse their nonsense, but they do that anyway. I'd love to see the bar lowered for scientists to contribute to works that are easy to access via the web and written for a lay audience, without having to start and maintain their own blog.
Wikipedia is one of the most ambitious projects on the whole Internet. It is the world's most ambitious and most expansive encyclopedia. It was created entirely out of donated time using the Internet. It is hard to take seriously any argument that says Wikipedia is unambitious.
There's a whole rest of the Internet for you to build other ambitious knowledge projects on; the rest of the Internet also doesn't demand that you redefine the concept of an encyclopedia to do it.
This is incorrect. The definition of encyclopedia has nothing to do with 1) primary vs. secondary sources, nor 2) a survey of said sources. Consider "The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences", which contains links to primary sources. Consider the "Encyclopedia of Physics", which is certainly not a review of existing secondary sources. The "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" (from the 1970s) contains new research and essays about the people and themes in science fiction.
"Encyclopedia articles are the worst way for them to address the public."
When one of the first things that the public does is to consult Wikipedia, then a Wikipedia page is one of the best ways to reach people. If the information on the page conflicts with the primary sources, then the weight of the secondary sources should be diminished in favor of the secondary sources which are in agreement with the primary sources.
Your statement here is also wrong even on the surface. Stephen Barr (to pick one of many specific examples) is a researcher on grand unified theories, and he contributed the article on grand unified theories to the Encyclopedia of Physics. You saw elsewhere in this thread that Mandelbrot contributed the "fractal" article to Encarta. The Wikipedia page for "Encyclopædia Britannica" even says "Britannica's authors have included authorities such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Leon Trotsky".
Why would he or the other expert contributors have done that if doing so is the "worst" way to reach the public?
The obvious conclusion is that your views of how encyclopedias work is wrong, in that it does not agree with numerous real-world examples. Hence it is you who have redefined "the concept of an encyclopedia."
I think you've missed my point with regards to experts writing in encyclopedias. I didn't say they can't; I said they probably shouldn't, as it's a waste of their time. Of course, if Britannica is paying you to, different story.
A reference to a primary source would be, for example, a reference to Newton's "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" or to Darwin's "On the Origin of Species". An article on the history of evolutionary thought would be remiss if it does not include Darwin's book and instead only referred to books discussing Darwin's work. Like the children's game "telephone", only relying on secondary (and then tertiary, then quaternary) sources can amplify noise.
You then asked about "examples of original research published in the Encyclopedia of Physics". There are two different types of research involved here. One is "original to the field of physics". Physics has a well-established mechanism for publishing and disseminating work, and that is not an encyclopedia.
The other is the research needed to reconcile and synthesize multiple viewpoints into a well-constructed whole. A non-fiction piece for the New Yorker likely entails new research (even an interview is new research), and that's the type of research which goes well with an encyclopedia. Take a look at Wikipedia's entry for "History of the Encyclopædia Britannica" with comments like "40,000-word hagiographic biography of George Washington" and "Dr. Thomas Thomson, who introduced the first usage of chemical symbols in the 1801 supplement". Thomas Young translated the Rosetta Stone and in his WP page is written "[s]ome of Young's conclusions appeared in the famous article "Egypt" he wrote for the 1818 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica."
Or take Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. The entire encyclopedia was written by Asimov, who commented "I alone have done every bit of the necessary research and writing; and without any assistance whatever, not even that of a typist." Right there in the text it says "research."
Do you think these examples of the research which goes into encyclopedia articles aren't actual research? If not, why not? Or are these simply not encyclopedias?
As to "if Britannica is paying"... do you think Harry Houdini, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud, Henry Ford, Leon Trotsky, Arthur Eddington, Lord Kelvin, Humphry Davy, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Malthus, and yes, even Isaac Newton, were contributors to EB mostly because they were being paid for their work? Most certainly not! (How much would Ford's time cost?) From what I've read, other factors were because they wanted to contribute to a collection of knowledge, and because of the prestige.
Meanwhile, the author of this article did original research, generating knowledge that was not only new to the field but that actually contradicted the field's best known sources.
Wikipedia (justifiably, but not particularly gracefully) told him "go write a journal article and then come back and cite it". Which is what he did.
This makes sense for a variety of reasons, some of them having to do with the charter of an encyclopedia, others simply as a matter of pragmatism: 9 times out of 10, when someone contributes original research to Wikipedia, their work is crazy.
My point though was nothing to do with Wikipedia's policies. It was to your incorrect definition of what it means to be an encyclopedia. You've said:
- "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It's a terrible place for original research." I showed several examples of original research done for encyclopedias. One was the first use of the element symbols now used in every chemistry book.
- "everyone's understanding of what an encyclopedia (ANY encyclopedia) is" ... "is not a place of first publication for new research findings." In addition to the previous comment, this view falsely separates the scholarly research which goes into producing an encyclopedia from the scholarly research of any other field.
- "Wikipedia should do what encyclopedias do best: to wit, experts should conduct research to generate new primary sources or write books to generate new secondary sources." I gave a long list of encyclopedia articles across several encyclopedias written by acknowledged experts on the specific topic. Traditional encyclopedias often ask experts to do this. Wikipedia is in the small minority.
- "An encyclopedia is a survey of existing secondary sources". I gave many examples where encyclopedias references the primary sources, and pointed to encyclopedia articles which are not a survey of existing sources.
- "[Experts] shouldn't address the public by writing encyclopedia articles". Excepting that experts do address the public by writing encyclopedia article, and have been for centuries.
- "Encyclopedia articles are the worst way for them to address the public." Excepting as Wikipedia shows, encyclopedias are often one of the first places people turn to for information, so it's a very good way to address the public.
- "Experts shouldn't want to write encyclopedias." Except that some encyclopedias are written by experts. Do you think the "Encyclopedia of Magnetic Resonance" was written by non-experts? (Hint: "The existence of this large number of articles, written by experts in various fields, is enabling the publication of a series of EMR Handbooks on specific areas of NMR and MRI.")
Your statements are definitely contra-factual to how other encyclopedias work, as you make statements for which counter-examples are easily found. Your understanding of the goals and purpose of an encyclopedia seem based solely on your understanding of the goals, purpose, and operation of Wikipedia.
Do you have any evidence to back your claims? Otherwise I must conclude that you don't know what you are talking about.
What I say is that original scholarly work includes developing new synthesis of how to interpret existing information. This new work definitely has a place in (some) encyclopedias.
Ha! I just looked up the Wikipedia article on "Encyclopedia." It agrees with me, saying "The second half of the 20th century also saw the publication of several encyclopedias that were notable for synthesizing important topics in specific fields, often by means of new works authored by significant researchers."
That directly and explicitly counters your argument that encyclopedias categorically do not have original content.
Nothing in what I said was meant to suggest changing much less gutting Wikipedia. It was to say that the concept of an encyclopedia is very broad, and includes both Wikipedia and encyclopedias with policies which are directly counter to some of Wikipedia's policies.
It's not like it wouldn't be available elsewhere, right?
It goes research -> authorship of secondary source (journal article, book, magazine article, whatever) -> citation in encyclopedia.
Conventionally, sure, but Wikipedia would seem to offer an opportunity to fix the shortcomings with that system.
Why do you care so much about secondary sources? Because they're vetted. Why is that important? Because primary sources can be taken out of context, because people can't parse them out correctly, etc.
I would submit that both of those things are no longer safe assumptions.
Secondary sources can be fabricated whole-cloth and appear legitimate (entire industries, such as some branches of SEO, do exactly this) when they are not, and can even cite Wikipedia themselves. So, secondary sources aren't these bastions of truth that they seem to be.
The idea that primary sources aren't usable to the populace is also old. It's trivial these days for a user (who cares even the tiniest amount) to run a search and contextualize a source. If Crazy Eddie's Account of the Haymarket Riot is, after a fast search, the only one that has Xenu interfering then maybe it's not a credible account, yeah?
Moreover, having so many eyes seeing the same citations and clicking through them increases the likelihood that somebody who actually does have expertise in the matter can comment usefully.
If you can't trust the great unwashed masses to search out the truth of things given primary sources, why do you think giving them prechewed knowledge is any better?
You propose that an encyclopedia should, if it can, also set out to be a sprawling "book about everything"; a primary source when experts debate on its pages, a secondary source when an expert decides to write an encyclopedia article instead of a book, and a tertiary source the rest of the time.
The two goals conflict. You can't be an effective prose survey of the existing literature when any given sentence in any given article could be original research. The whole point of an encyclopedia --- a prose survey of literature --- is that you don't have to check every sentence to see if it comes from a reliable source.
I'm not proposing that encyclopedias writ large could/should/would do this--I propose that Wikipedia specifically do this.
I claim that Wikipedia is considered an encyclopedia as that is the closest idea in mainstream use of what it is--and that now it's time to evolve further to better human understanding. There's no ambition--to use phrenology's phrasing--in doing anything less.
10 years later their site was not a footnote or a parable about Internet hubris. No, it was a resource that is in some ways better than the Encyclopedia Britannica in scope, in depth, and in some cases even in quality.
It is a breathtaking achievement. Our daily reaction to it (and pretty much everything else on the Internet) is a crystal clear metric of how jaded we are. How extraordinarily lucky we are to be living in a time where someone like Jimbo Wales can (by the standards of history) more or less pull something like Wikipedia out of his butt at random on a whim.
I think people need to get over what else Wikipedia could be.
If you're right, there's an easy (and productive) way to prove your point: take the Wikipedia database, which is provided to you and to the public under extremely permissive licensing, and build the site you want Wikipedia to be. Based on your comments on this thread, I suggest the name of your site not include the string "pedia". Maybe you want to build "Wikijournal of XXX", or "The Wiki Transactions On XXX".
Seriously. If that dude can make a Wikipedia simply because he got bored publishing web photos of boobs, anybody can do something similar. Get to work, and stop arguing with the encyclopedians.
1. The Internet is bigger now. Being an average-sized fish in a small pond is not the same as being a small fish in an enormous ocean. Back then, being a professional blogger was actually doable and you could trivially game search engines and ad networks. The Web as a whole has a lot more resistance now.
2. There is already a Wikipedia now; there wasn't one when Wikipedia started.
3. Google wants to have Wikipedia's babies. Google does not want to have your babies.
4. An improvement that would be a great boon to an existing product is not necessarily a sufficient basis for a completely new project, particularly given the inertia outlined in the above points.
Overall, your contention here reminds me of suggestions like "If you don't like the law, go start your own country."
It is much harder to make a new encyclopedia now, but that's not what I'm suggesting 'angersock should do, because he doesn't like encyclopedias.
Again, my issue isn't with encyclopedias--it is with the waste of potential for what Wikipedia has become.
There is no reason to go to all the effort of forking Wikipedia just to prove a point, and asking me to do so is absurd.
Let's ignore hosting. Let's ignore bandwidth. Let's ignore the amount of time it would take to duplicate that information. Let's ignore several "easy" (read: inconvenient to your argument that "you can just magically fork the datas!") issues I would encounter pursuing your suggested course of action.
From a practical standpoint, Wikipedia has become the place where normal people get information. It is the cache of human knowledge that is first hit when somebody wants to learn something new. I'm not talking about where you turn, or where I turn--I'm talking about Joe Blow. It seems to consistently be in the top few results for any search on a topic.
Ignore the encyclopedia bit. Ignore what it claims to be. Ignore even what it is. Pay attention to how it is used.
The de facto use of Wikipedia goes something like:
1. Person wants to know about concept X.
2. Person searches for X, probably gets a Wikipedia article.
3. Person reads article on X on Wikipedia.
So, it would seem that currently Wikipedia's use is to provide knowledge about X. The end user doesn't give two shits about the process that put that information there; or how reliable it is; or whether it is sourced primarily, secondarily, or made up entirely.
The end user just wants knowledge.
So, either one believes that Wikipedia has perfected the accomplishment of that mission (in which case I think you are obviously wrong), or one believes that Wikipedia has the capacity to be improved to meet that goal.
Are you going to take a hard line that Wikipedia is perfect in its accomplishment of its de facto use case? Are you going to argue that good is good enough?
EDIT: I'm not going to launch into how wasteful it would be to split up mindspace/SEOspace by creating another wiki. Suffice it to say that a mree policy change on Wikipedia could accomplish all this, while in the forking case you'd have all those "easy" problems to solve, plus promotion to get people (and lots of them!) involved, plus making sure people don't just default to Wikipedia anyways, etc.
Late: I modded you up from grey; couldn't disagree with you more, but that doesn't make you crazy.
Anyways, would you mind elaborating on your disagreement? I'm pretty sure it's a fundamental difference in views that we'll have to agree to disagree on, but I'd like to know if you find my reasoning suspect. Thanks!
(as for the crazy: I don't mind being unpopular, provided I can justify my position--that's why good discussion [as we've had here] is so helpful.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia
In contrast, this sentence does appear: "The second half of the 20th century also saw the publication of several encyclopedias that were notable for synthesizing important topics in specific fields, often by means of new works authored by significant researchers."
This is important because people do cite Wikipedia and there is more than one instance of a "fact" appearing in an article and later being cited to a secondary source that cites... you guessed it Wikipedia. :)
The important step that publishing material adds is peer review. An editor might have excellent credentials but other editors are not equipped to peer review their material.
FWIW I don't agree it is an unnecessary repetition of work; the published material is likely to be much more than a summary, with reasoning, and so is adding significantly to the body of work on the topic - which WP can then summarise :)
Well, yes, but even Wikipedia tells people not to use it as a source, but to follow the links in the article to the sources. That's one of the reasons why sources are supposed to be important.
I should also add, Wikipedia is the only place I've had a discussions with response times measured in years. That is certainly something unique.
This is a limitation for physical encyclopedias because paper, and even more so shelf space, are expensive so some facts have to be prioritized over others. And you can't easily make corrections to a book after it is printed and sold, and since research never stops a paper encyclopedia will frequently be out of date, thus it can never be that accurate - so why expend a ton effort to make it more accurate in the first place?
Electronic encyclopedias, like Wikipedia, don't have the same inherent limitations. Wikipedia just happens to have re-created them for the same reason electronic calendars by default show you one month at a time, even on the 30th and 31st, rather than a chunk of next and last months.
The reason so many people are so motivated to complain about Wikipedia and all it's limitation is because everyone intuitively can sense there ought to be a better way.
1. Notability of facts is a red herring. Text is easy to compress and storage space is cheap.
2. The need to summarize topics is a red herring. Having a summary "front page", or "top", or "above the fold" etc, combined with more in depth, detailed sections, is a standard way of organizing information on the web. An electronic encyclopedia really ought to use that kind of presentation strategy.
3. Primary sources, new research and minority opinions would naturally be part of the lengthy, detailed version of a topic.
And if you want to go completely crazy you could do things like allow voting. Allow people to sort what the default view is by general popularity.
Even crazier, sort by popularity based on experts opinion, work out a way for experts to electronically sign or approve articles, and allow people to choose a set of "experts".
Go totally bonkers and verify the experts so that someone could choose to see the top evolution articles as rated by Richard Dawkins.
Or alternatively re-crate all the limitations of a physical set of encyclopedias.
Wikipedia is not a storage locker for the sum of human knowledge, its an encyclopedia, which is a place where laymen go to look stuff up.
However, how many people are going to write about the subject in the OP? Textbooks (another tertiary source) continue to repeat things that have been known (and even rigorously proven and published) to be false by experts 30 years later.
Maybe it's just an inherent flaw in tertiary sources, but I'd like to see people at least try to come up with a way to fix it.
Er, you realize how poorly this reads to the uninitiated, right?
Experts shouldn't want to write encyclopedias. There's a reason you can't cite them --- not Wikipedia, not Britannica --- in real work: they're encyclopedias. They're not just tertiary sources; they're among the least prestigious of the tertiary sources.
I had exactly this problem back in 2007 when I spent some time on Wikipedia. It frustrated the hell out of me, but when I calmed down, I realized that even if WP worked exactly the way I had wished it did, contributing new research to WP is a waste of my time, and the alternative, contributing citations to published sources, is dreary work indeed.
The best advice I can offer a subject matter expert uninitiated in Wikipedia that wants to contribute to Wikipedia: write a book.
Encyclopedia of Physics (3043 pages)
Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology (912 pages)
Encyclopedia of Magnetic Resonance (6490 pages)
Encyclopedia Of Philosophy (6200 pages)
The Gale Encyclopedia of Nursing and Allied Health (6200 pages)
The Merck Index: An Encyclopedia of Chemicals, Drugs, and Biologicals (2564 pages)
Encyclopedia of Biological Chemistry (3000 pages)
Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications (139 titles in that series, at about 500 pages per title = 70,000 pages).
The Film Encyclopedia (1520 pages)
Encyclopedia of Horses & Ponies (384 pages)
The Kentucky Encyclopedia (1080 pages)
The Encyclopedia of the Swedish Flora and Fauna (100 volumes planned, and about 5,000 pages published so far)
Encyclopedia of Modern Coral Reefs (812 pages)
Encyclopedia of Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism (718 pages)
Encyclopedia of Geomorphology (1200 pages)
The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism (1349 pages)
Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (17,616 pages)
Encyclopedia of German Literature (1136 pages)
The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature (1772 pages)
The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization (2790 pages)
Encyclopedia of Aerospace Engineering (5810 pages)
Encyclopedia of Quantitative Finance (2194 pages)
Encyclopedia of Analytical Chemistry (16,504 pages)
That's enough. Go to http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-WILEYEUROPE2_SEARCH_... and see the list of 436 encyclopedias written by experts as published by a single company. Now add the CRC press (another 200+ titles), Oxford University Press (95 titles), and so on.
How did you ever come to the conclusion that "experts shouldn't want to write encyclopedias"? If you still believe that, then what are all the above experts doing wrong?
You do not follow my argument. It's not that "experts should want to write encyclopedias", it's that experts do write encyclopedias. This is not a disagreement in our viewpoints, it's an observation that your statement does not fit observed facts.
You believe "experts should do what experts do best, and Wikipedia should do what encyclopedias do best: to wit, experts should conduct research to generate new primary sources or write books to generate new secondary sources, and Wikipedia should continue finding secondary sources to summarize." This also shows that you believe the goals of Wikipedia are aligned with that of encyclopedias in general.
I've listed two dozen titles of encyclopedias written by experts and links to several hundred more. Quite obviously one of the things that experts do is write encyclopedias!
This means that your philosophical view regarding encyclopedias is very different than that used a large number of other encyclopedia projects. Granted, individually each of those projects is smaller than Wikipedia, but collectively they far surpass the amount of content in Wikipedia.
I cannot have the dialog with you about the article we're commenting on until you acknowledge and understand the big difference between the Wikipedia model and that of most other encyclopedia projects.
Once you do that, you'll understand autarch's original observation "that wikipedia attempts to substitute policy for expertise." With that understood, it's easy to consider how an encyclopedia maintained by domain experts would not have the same deference to secondary sources (and avoidance of primary sources and new research) as described by this article.
Thus, if 100 articles said X (the 100 articles being correlated by citing each other), and new, better research said Y, Wikipedia would wait until it's 101 v 100 before making an edit.
After the book was published, the editors should have allowed a dissenting opinion to at least gain a sentence, especially when backed with official records.
They do that because their job is to survey the sources.
More importantly, they default to the majority of the sources. They don't adhere to it. Part of the job of editing an encyclopedia is appropriately weighting sources.
The author of this magazine article is in the medium term going to get the Wikipedia article he wants, because the source he ended up creating is more authoritative.
That's presuming a great deal, don't you think? Besides, the format of Wikipedia isn't so much that an expert would need to write an entire encyclopedia as it is that they can contribute their knowledge of a tiny slice of the domain to an article.
Don't get so bogged down in the definition of encyclopedia--hell, almost all of those are printed on paper or optical media, so I guess Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia either, and so we shouldn't limit ourselves.
Now here comes 'angersock, for whom that's not good enough. "No, it's not enough that I have the whole Internet to build a new site on, and the whole Wikipedia database to seed it with; no, I want the people working on Wikipedia to build the thing I want, and stop concerning themselves so much with that whole encyclopedia thing".
I'm caricaturing, I know, but really, I don't get where you're coming from here.
Contrary to some of the replies your comment has received, I agree that Wikipedia is a tertiary source, and it is not a place of first publication for new research findings. That's what Wikipedia is, because that's what Wikipedia says it is,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not
This is consistent with everyone's understanding of what an encyclopedia (ANY encyclopedia) is, as you point out in your further replies to comments.
Indeed an expert in some subject should spend time building up primary and secondary sources, and leave compiling useful reference works like encyclopedias to people with editorial experience who are familiar with the good secondary sources on various subjects. But of course one problem with Wikipedia today is that volunteer editors of Wikipedia ("Wikipedians") are not selected, and by the way the project is mob-managed basically CANNOT be selected, for their editorial experience and familiarity with secondary sources. My first attempt to contribute to the Wikipedia project was to post some source lists (what a librarian might call "pathfinders") in user space
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...
and post links to those in article talk space so that editors could refer to good-quality secondary sources as they revised articles on controversial subjects. I can't say that those source lists haven't been used at all, but I can view the page access statistics for those source lists, and they are certainly underused by other Wikipedians. Meanwhile, there are whole broad topics on Wikipedia that are frequently subject to edit wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...
with sockpuppets and meat puppets continually reappearing to push fringe points of view. There is no sustained management response to this, despite the desire of the Wikimedia Foundation to improve content quality.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate...
After edit: I had earlier posted the same article that was submitted to open this Hacker News thread on my Facebook wall, and one commenter there recalled his experiences trying to correct blatant factual errors on Wikipedia, which eventually led him to the Lamest Edit Wars page in Wikipedia project space,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LAME
where one has to laugh to avoid crying.
Except that Wikipedia's own article on "Encyclopedia" says "The second half of the 20th century also saw the publication of several encyclopedias that were notable for synthesizing important topics in specific fields, often by means of new works authored by significant researchers. Such encyclopedias included The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published in 1967 and now in its second edition), and Elsevier's Handbooks In Economics[23] series."
The only rational course is, once it has been established that you're dealing with a crank, to completely disengage and smack them down with the official policy. (They never have any reliable sources/citations to support their edits.) It's tempting (since they are usually provably, mathematically wrong) to try to convince them of their errors, but experience shows that never works. I saw a lot of people just burn themselves out doing that -- in this case, expertise was being driven away by reluctance to rely on policy.
I am not quite sure about this. In my view Wikipedia tries to negotiate a middle ground between all the different people who think they have a claim on the "facts" or "truth". Just imagine Charles Murray presenting his research that the economic problems of America's working class are largely its own fault, stemming from factors like the presence of a lot of lazy men as a fact on Wikipedia. (Quote from: http://chronicle.com/article/Charles-Murray-Author-of-The/13... - currently most popular Cronicle article). I truly believe that people have most of the time good intentions with their edits, but there are a lot of different versions of "truth" around - especially in Social Sciences.
As ZeroGravitas points out, consider the case of a crank who links to his own blog as a source, and that blog post cites primary evidence. The Wikipedia editors now have a job that is identical to academic peer-review. I don't think that should be their job.
From reading that, it appears that there was just a misunderstanding -- all the author had to do was link in the wikipedia article to the reliable sources. Instead, he linked on his blog to the reliable sources.
To me, this simple misunderstanding pretty much makes the Chronicle article lose all credence -- if I'm reading a wikipedia article and I find a factual assertion dubious (or just wonder where it came from) I don't want a link to some blog (especially since it appears that I can't even read the link -- I get some sort of login page). Instead, I want the link (or reference) to the original sources. For factual disagreements, any sort of primary or reliable secondary source is more than sufficient to have resolved this.
Then why have editors? God forbid that, if you take on the mantle of vetting articles, you actually exert some intellectual effort.
Wikipedia is not a place for original research for exactly this reason. Once something has gone through peer review, and is published somewhere, then it can be used in Wikipedia. I think that's reasonable. Wikipedia editors are then relying on a particular subject's community of experts instead of having to be those experts themselves.
I think it's also important to note that this model is the same as any other encyclopedia.
It's trivial to get people to check over claims, and you have a place to discuss issues (Talk pages), and the person doing the research can cite their references right there and get called out on it if they don't.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It's a terrible place for original research.
I'm not completely versed in the Byzantine system of Wikipedia, but the whole thing is based (somehow) on seniority, right? It would seem, then, that the system would self-select for people who spend more time on Wikipedia than doing useful research, right?
The WP admin community is a shark tank. Admins could try to use their status to thump people around article talk pages, but --- and this isn't an exaggeration --- there are at least 2 other admins watching commit-by-commit what any given admin does, looking for some policy slip-up they can use to incite drama.
In practice, in the vast majority of articles, there is no seniority. At best, a person with a demonstrated history of building and grooming an article over a year or so might expect some deference when newcomer attempts a dramatic change. That deference is a good thing, and has nothing to do with adminship.
The wording of many articles seems to be the result of a carefully applied 'truce' between long-standing edit warriors. Once applied, they tend to unite using terms like 'stable' or 'consensus'. These editors do effectively have "seniority" on that article and the ability to reject changes.
Then a random newcomer bumbles in and unwittingly disturbs the balance, and everyone unites against him. This is what I suspect happened to the author of the piece more so than goofing his citations.
I understand it is the current tradeoff for something as great as wikipedia. But that doesn't mean the criticism is invalid.
Wikipedia is a terrible venue to correct "popular misconceptions". If a misconception about the evidence against the Haymarket Anarchists is indeed embedded into the best known books about the event, the correction of that misconception merits more than a sentence or two in an encyclopedia!
And indeed the author here agrees, because he went on to write an authoritative text about the event, which will be cited by the encyclopedia.
I think it uncontroversial to claim Wikipedia is a knowledge base with a bias toward stability of mature articles over correctness. It's a tradeoff.
I believe your argument is that it is the right tradeoff. That may be true, but that opinion fails to be properly cited, and does not have a large body of secondary sources backing it up. :-)
What does matter is if you can source everything you write to a 'reliable' source; and if you can write clearly.
Obviously, in practice this is not the case. Anon editors are often treated like dirt; people making 15,000 twinkle edits feel as if they should have some extra power or consideration. And there's a bunch of meta stuff which is, frankly, toxic and probably doing a lot of harm.
I'm not even sure the guy isn't a crank, but if he isn't he needs to understand that Wikipedia needs a system that takes cranks into account. If he's simply a false positive on the crank detector because it turns out that everyone else is actually wrong about this historical event then he'd have to demonstrate that the cost of false positives outweigh the good to effect a change, not just go in a huff because his pet subject isn't presented in the way he would like in Wikipedia.
His opinion in this matter isn't as relevant as the fact that he cited actual testimony. That alone should lend enough weight to the edit that it should not have been reverted simply b/c of the Wikipedia "undue weight" policy.
Actually if you look at the page, he only cited his own blog post. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_af... (His blog post cited those other sources, but that doesn't really add to WP.)
To say a fact is subjective to popular, to say nothing of demonstrably wrong, opinion is the completely antithetical to the goal of being an encyclopedia.
Regarding what I consider to be "trivially true" is true. The show trials article itself does not contain a single example of a U.S. court case where the prosecution has "gone to court with zero evidence to present".
If you come up with a new theory that disagrees with scholarly/scientific consensus, an encyclopedia is not the place to publish it. You publish it in a journal; if it becomes a consensus, or at least generates significant serious response in that community, then it will be documented in an encyclopedia.
If every single crank theory was accepted into Wikipedia, you'd have a wiki consisting entirely of holocaust denialism, homeopathy, Electric Universe, and woo-peddling. Wikipedia is not in the business of deciding what's true and what isn't; that's what the academic community is for.
Of course the Wikipedia admins were buttheads and weren't constructive at all.
Well, not necessarily. Unfortunately consensus is hard to change, even if it's wrong.
But you still have to try. If everyone who thought the consensus was wrong edited Wikipedia to reflect their opinion, the result would be a less accurate encyclopedia.
For example, a lot of publications have been made about Newtonian physics. I mean a lot. We're going all the way back to Newton here. And yet, from the perspective of a 1940s Einstein it would appear that Einstein is definitely correct, going purely by the academic and secondary source community. The problem is just the proliferation of years and years worth of outdated information on Newton.
In other words, maybe Wikipedia would benefit from a decay mechanism? Newer academic publications would earn proportionately more worth and newer scientific consensuses would be favored stronger than old ones.
This isn't a change to the fundamental policies of Wikipedia, it only makes it a more timely encyclopedia with a smaller reaction loop. Given the constant realtime editing happening every day, this seems more appropriate for Wikipedia than, say, Britannica.
Consider the case in point. The myth the Chronicle author was refuting was a political myth: that the Haymarket defendants were innocent men railroaded by a biased prosecutor who was not "credible." This myth had been repeated by generations of pro-labor historians with a big ol' axe to grind.
As for the anti-labor historians? Oh wait, there aren't any anti-labor historians. At least, if by "historian" you mean "individual funded by the US Government to teach history." Thus, Wikipedia is simply recording in its pages the depressing result of a political power struggle in academia.
Now that labor has become the establishment, an honest historian who is not pro or anti labor, just interested in the past, can discover from primary sources that gee whiz, the prosecution actually had a case. It's 2012 so he won't be purged for this. On the other hand, it's not clear how he's supposed to purge all his axe-grinding colleagues who continue insisting that the sky is green.
Academia is just a thing called "academia." Science is just a thing called "science." The Soviet Union had both. Ours are better than the Soviet Union's, but they're still de facto government agencies. Jeebus didn't come down yesterday and make our government systematically infallible.
Imagine Wikipedia in the Soviet Union. Would you want it to be a crowdsourced version of the Great Soviet Encylopedia? Or would you want it to do a little better?
Wikipedia has done a great job of being a tertiary source, mostly. That doesn't mean it can't have higher ambitions for the future. When I stop being a child, I put aside childish things. It's childish to assume that "reliable sources" are reliable just because everyone says they are. Is Wikipedia all grown up now? If so, maybe it should at least think about starting to address its utterly circular definition of a reliable source.
If there is no conceivable mechanism to distinguish between homeopathy and medicine, how do our existing mechanisms work? Are these mechanisms unique? Are they perfect? Can they be duplicated, improved, advanced?
Outside of the hard science "truth" is a very negotiable subject. Just imagine how difficult it would become to find the "truth" between the opposing parties around the currently most popular The Cronicle article ( http://chronicle.com/article/Charles-Murray-Author-of-The/13... ).
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Wikipedia should be more like GitHub.
And at what point do you judge the point of view too marginal to be worth a fork?
The point behind NPOV is not to avoid showing any opinion - but to show a balanced set of opinions, giving most exposure to the most widely accepted ones.
In practice Wikipedia has already been "forked" by some POV's. For example Conservapedia, I believe, is quite active. It would certainly be interesting if someone put together a tool to compare several different Wiki's articles side by side.
(FWIW I think we treat marginal issues very badly by stamping them out of content at every opportunity. Case in point is the 9/11 article which for a long time resisted mentioning that conspiracy theories about the atrocity existed... even to the extent of rejecting a "See Also" link to the article on the topic.)
This "inertia" is nicely described by the histogram of new admins. Those who seized power in the middle of the last decade are running with it. (5)
(1) http://gwen-gale-heidi-wyss-tinpot-auteur.blogspot.com/
(2) http://english.sxu.edu/sites/kirstein/archives/1443
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gwen_Gale
(4) http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/271257
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Successful_requests_f...
If the author was essentially trying to unwrite the popular account, rather than supplementing it with a well-sourced minority view, the wiki editors actions become far more understandable.
Also, if he were throwing his credentials around as a substitute for clear and concise citation, the wiki editors' actions, again, become more understandable.
It is a bit of an odd process but, basically, "Good Article" consists of a semi-formal review of the article by an uninvolved editor to assess it for neutrality, completeness and language (etc.).
"Featured Article" is a more involved formal review involving multiple editors. It's those that get then picked for appearance on the main page.
The intended progression for an article is supposed to be something like: Peer Review, Good Article review, Featured Article review.
(Agreed over GA, wasn't intended to belittle it!)
But this isn't even right, because Wikipedia is a not an encyclopedia. It's like Johnson & Johnson saying Q-tips are for applying makeup or detailing cars and shouldn't be put in the ear. 99% of people who buy Q-tips put them in their ears. 99% of true claims on Wikipedia are contributed by experts and are either unreferenced, cite a source that doesn't really support them, a source at the other end of a broken link that nobody's read, or a source that doesn't meet the guidelines this historian was held to. Career editors spend more time checking for citations than checking citations. And they spend more time checking for citations when they personally don't believe a claim. The policies are applied hypocritically, with the result that opinions of non-experts outweigh the opinions of experts. The only thing limiting the damage has been the relatively small number of career editors. With massive decline in casual participation in recent years, this balance is starting to shift. I just noticed recently that career editors have started to tag mathematics articles.
We should be honest that the encyclopedia contrivance is really just a way to avoid flame wars, and is an imperfect one, especially when editors 'merge with their cover story' and blindly enforce it. Wikipedia will be its best when it is recognized for what it is: a truth engine, a first source, and a very important public good.
Editing Wikipedia needs to be about more than writing long policy documents and bludgeoning contributors with them. It is an important form of scholarship. The project could benefit greatly by a reputation model more subtle than "barnstars", such as [1]. But a fancy reputation model alone isn't enough. The culture of Wikipedia is in trouble and needs to be revitalized.
I don't know what that is, but I think if it ever existed it would be in the service of something foul and malign.
Humans have facts. Humans have evidence. Humans even, in mathematics alone, have proofs. Humans do not have truth. Woe betide anyone who thinks we do.
1. It is a decent repository for bare facts that can be easily verified elsewhere, but assembled there in convenient form. E.g. if you need to know the population of Nepal, Wikipedia article about Nepal is a good way to go, even though multiple other sources are available.
2. It is a decent source of links for more complex material - e.g., if you want to get a quick idea about what suprematism is, without knowing anything about it, and how to start researching the topic, you can use Wikipedia article, extract such keywords as "visual art", "Malevich", "russian avant-garde", etc. and take it from there if you're interested.
3. It is a somewhat useful, but a dangerous source about any concepts that are in any way controversial - you should verify all claims and read all links, but you can use it as an assembly of links and keywords, without assigning too much importance to any narrative.
4. It is absolutely useless for understanding any seriously controversial topic, as at best controversial articles would selectively present facts, reflecting biases of the writers, at worst - explicitly promote specific approach to the topic, which will be ruthlessly enforced by either the mob of opinionated editors or the wiki bureaucracy masterfully exploited by biased insiders.
To the defense of Wikipedia, some mainstream encyclopedic sources, especially ones published in non-free countries, suffer from even worse bias problems. I don't think there's a solution for this, except using one's own mind and take everything told to you with a grain of salt and check it when possible. Obviously, the topic described in the article falls into the third or fourth category, and so expecting Wikipedia to have anything but bare facts (like dates when it happened, names of the participants, etc.) right would be a bet, and not a safe one. In most cases it'd be whatever the random Wikipedia "guardian" or anonymous mob of agenda-bearers wants it to be. Sometimes the experts make the fuss that hits some popular media and particular article gets better, but most would give up and decide not to waste their time.
In specific cases it might seem stupid, but I think in general it makes sense. It goes hand in hand with the "no original research" policy.
(Like everything in wikipedia that policy can be misapplied by small minded people, though.)
But let's be careful about wording. It obviously shouldn't happen in an encyclopedia. But it obviously should be happening. And it did. He went on to write an authoritative secondary source and the article is sure to reflect it.
While I agree that the wikipedia gestapo are often overzealous with reverting good edits - it basically requires a case-by-case basis of deciding what 'facts' are, which is never easy. If his 'primary sources' are better than the secondary sources that say the opposite, then talk sense to the person who is doing the reversion, or raise it with someone higher - don't just continuously attempt edit-wars...
I am reminded of the "paradigm shift" approach to the history of science, as flawed as it may be to some (look it up, sigh, on wikipedia). It implies that the dominant point of view is held as fact until a preponderance of evidence shifts the minority view from "flawed" to "edge cases" to "the new paradigm". Then it cycles again. What was the sworn truth with history behind it is now the "old paradigm" and disregarded.
For wikipedia, I've never felt there to be a requirement for "article completeness", just an eye to be "well rounded", and so it often feels that whatever the dominant paradigm is currently will be the primary driver of inclusion and presence in an article.
Wikipedia is in that interesting tension between sticking to it's original mission, which was pretty wonderful, and potentially becoming more, but at the risk of becoming useless. For all it's flaws, I still think the world is better with it than without it, and at some point, I suspect a way to let folks contribute more original research and have it coexist on wikipedia will evolve.
Hypercritical #53: Brad Pitt Gets to Contribute http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/53
Google's Knol would have avoided a bunch of procedural mess, but it's been shuttered. http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/23/googles-knol-the-monetizabl...
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/google-announces-plans-to-s...
that mentions Google abandoning Knol.
That's why history books in middle school are completely screwed up with lies. You can't empirically test history. If wikipedia is to survive it will have to make a principled stand against official propaganda machines, official government sources and popular truth, myth and political agendas.