Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

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Physicist here: I stopped making contributions to Wikipedia after a few edits and reversions, I stopped too. Furthermore, the danger that something I'd put a lot of time into could be replaced meant that it's not worth sinking a lot of time into it. The citation policy makes a ton of pragmatic sense, and I understand why it's there. It's an unfriendly way to meet the Wikipedia community. (an alternative way to address a "citation needed" concern is to presume that the editor is correct, and go looking for the citation)

In addition, I'm not aware of any way to be compensated, even by citation, for putting time and care into Wikipedia. As academics, we give a lot away for free (want to know some of our most-clever trade secrets? Just read our papers, where we detail everything we do so you can replicate it), but our compensation ultimately comes from what we can show others as our contribution to society. To anyone considering me for a job, promotion, or tenure, a well-written introductory article on precision tests of gravitation isn't worth a hundredth of one precision test of gravity published in Physical Review Letters.

For a single contributor, Wikipedia is ephemeral, but the academic literature is effectively permanent.

(an alternative way to address a "citation needed" concern is to presume that the editor is correct, and go looking for the citation)

You mean, "hey, I wrote it, you go look it up if you don't believe me?" Down that path lies madness. And Fox News.

Academics aren't supposed to have "trade secrets" by definition, because that impedes the teacher and researcher's motivation. Historically, anyway, by my understanding.

I don't think that's what is meant by "go looking for the citation."

I read it more as "by being an expert in this subject I know this is true; by being an expert in this subject I also probably don't have time to find the journal that has the article in question, cite it per Wikipedia's rules, and put it in the article."

Frankly that sounds like a great task for editors that aren't subject experts. Maybe the expert can say "this is missing knowledge, this is where I think a citation should be or what to look for" and the non-expert can do that.

Will wikipedia accept a citation like:

[1] Widely-known result, probably in Jackson's Electrodynamics

as enough of a citation to placate the reversion police?

I read it more as "by being an expert in this subject I know this is true; by being an expert in this subject I also probably don't have time to find the journal that has the article in question, cite it per Wikipedia's rules, and put it in the article."

Really, a "P.S. I'm an expert" policy?

Yes, I think you'll find that's explicitly what I'm advocating.

Maybe there's some sort of verification. Maybe experts get limited to their subject area. Maybe we just have to (gasp) assume good faith on the part of the editor and trust that they are experts in what they claim.

But I'd happily accept the edits of five "experts" if it means that someone that published with Erdos sticks around to edit.

I completely understand if that's not what Wikipedia wants. But I also think it's the wrong decision.

One of the great things about Wikipedia is the ability to follow citations and read the original material.

To allow "expert opinion" without opening the floodgates to everyone with an opinion would require some kind of validation, which is probably as much, or more, work as citing sources.

Wikipedia could add a category of academic editors whose identities have been verified in some way with their institutions, and who meet some definition of subject area expert. These editors would be given a presumption of innocence by other editors, so their changes should be researched for citations, rather than reverted.

> by being an expert in this subject I know this is true

Anyone can make that claim; if not forced to cite sources, many will who aren't.

Sure, and if the claim is actually controversial (someone says "I don't think that's true) we need higher standards. But I see stuff reverted without anyone willing to say "that sounds wrong".

I think it should be, no sources, no argument required to cut it. What can be asserted without evidence can be removed with discussion.

If you do remember a journal article, it's perfectly fine to put in an incomplete citation with a note, and someone will fix it up. <ref>Einstein's paper on foo (FIXME: fill out this citation)</ref> or something is typically sufficient for someone to track it down. It's not sufficient to just say that you know it's true, though, for good reason; a lot of "common knowledge", even among scientists, is incorrectly or imprecisely remembered. Typically we are most reliable in our specific sub-specialty, where we actually will have no trouble coming up with sources off the top of our heads (in my very specific sub-sub-specialty, I could rattle off sources for almost anything without even needing to look them up). Outside our sub-specialty, we may remember some things but not 100% reliably, and often based on obsolete or incomplete knowledge (e.g. a course from university years ago) that someone familiar with the literature would be able to do a better job of covering. Hence the importance of referring directly to sources, not only to cite them, but to make sure the information is actually in those sources precisely as remembered. To me, "I know X is true, but I don't know where you can verify that" is a bit of a red flag, typical of e.g. something someone vaguely remembers from med-school or undergrad, rather than something they really have a solid handle on.

In any case, as an academic myself, I find it weird that we, of all people, would find ourselves "too busy to reference" or something. That's an attitude one finds among students asked to write papers, but academics do not have problems peppering supporting references all over the place; it's basically second nature. Some academics even get in arguments with book publishers because the publisher always want to remove the "clutter" of too many citations and footnotes that intimidate the general reader...

> Frankly that sounds like a great task for editors that aren't subject experts.

I disagree. Hunting citations doesn't take specialized knowledge, but it does take time. I doubt that the ratio of editors to article churn would sustain them being responsible for hunting citations.

I think that's really the core of most issues with wikipedia: neither side has the time. Individual contributors don't have the dedicated time to comply with all quality-control policies themselves, and editors are spread too thin to provide any feedback beyond quoting chapter and verse.

And we don't have trade secrets, that's why ISL followed it up with this:

> want to know some of our most-clever trade secrets? Just read our papers, where we detail everything we do so you can replicate it

ISL was pointing out that many other professions have a lot of field specific knowledge with which they can charge people money to access. Academics print all of the information for basically free. So we already give it away for free, we don't have the time or patience to give it away free to somewhere that's not going to keep our work.

I think you have an interesting point about recognition for your work. It seems to me that Wikipedia's back end is ferociously clunky and outdated, there is no easy way to show all contributions made by a specific user, for example. If you compare this to a system like GitHub or one like StackOverflow, the deficiencies are obvious. Us programmers can easily point to our contributions to open source projects or our general knowledge through pointing at our profiles on those sites. A software overhaul to make Wikipedia more social, easier to edit would also go a long way.

Wikipedia has a user contributions page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:User_contributions

Please come back and make suggestions on Talk pages, rather than directly edit. There, you can actively discuss, cite sources (your own and hopefully others), and make real contributions which will last. Experts have a special kind of conflict of interest: their possible bias when directly editing. Discussing will moderate and ameliorate that bias, before it gets into the article. This approach will help as science advances and understanding deepens and changes: recent advances in physics prove this. We need your help; just not in direct editing. Your contributions in Talk will be real and welcomed (and maybe disputed, but never deleted) by our more experienced, sane, editors. (typo corrected)

If that's true, then incumbent Wikipedians need to take it upon themselves to communicate that to newcomers directly, and not in a random comment in Hacker News.

Probably the easiest way to do that: If someone makes a substantive edit that isn't obviously vandalism, but doesn't quite meet Wikipedia's standards, then don't just undo it wholesale. Instead, temporarily pull it off the main page and into a back-end discussion. And then immediately contact the author with an explanation of what's going on and what they can do to get the changes reinstated.

Frankly, I'd rather not have the Talk page or the "editors", and a lot more actual data input.

The barrier for entry to writing articles has to be way, way lower than it is; it shouldn't require a negotiation with a bunch of self-important petty bureaucrats.

What those self-important guys (they're mostly guys) miss is that the best is the enemy of the good. Their misguided approach to quality actively prevents improvement.

Outside the high-edit-count word-shufflers, I'd classify contributions to WP in four buckets: (a) substantial contributors who know a lot about a little and are able to significantly add or improve content; (b) trivial fixers, who fix grammar / spelling mistakes, or otherwise make tiny casual edits; (c) mindless vandals, who work some adolescent scrawl somewhere in the text, with varying degrees of visibility; and (d) the really sneaky stuff; well-written fakes, PR companies, reputation massaging, etc.

The guys in (a) need to be preserved at all costs. I think the editors are concerned about (d), but the trouble is that they're doing it in a rules-bound way, but because knowing the rules and right WP:INCANTATIONS is a source of power, the rules become a thing in themselves, rather than a last resort for eliminating (d).

I'd much rather have a more complete, comprehensive WP than one that's even 90% correct.

New contributions to established articles should often be discussed on the talk page because of (a) though, and the fact that people sometimes just come in and start making major changes without looking at the work that's already been done is one thing that actively drives experts away. After a few history experts discuss the conflicting sources and an article reaches a semi-stable state after considerable discussion and additional research, someone will come in and make major changes to the article without reading any of that, usually based on an incomplete-at-best understanding of the historical sources, and sometimes reintroducing popular myths that had been previously removed after library research turned up good sources on the subject. Sometimes there are legitimate objections and an article should be changed. But also, sometimes, certain questions or disputes or uncertainties have already been discussed in previous versions of the article (often by historians who work in this field!), and it's worth understanding the work that's already been done to get the article to its present state, before rehashing the same issues.

A number of historians have given up on Wikipedia because it's too easy for people to edit articles without discussion. An expert will spend a bunch of time working out a solid, cited article that integrates the best current understanding, often in discussion with other people, then come back 6 months later and find their work has basically bitrotted. In which case, why bother doing the hard work of hashing out a good article in the first place? Some academics therefore prefer a much more bureaucratic encyclopedia model, where all changes must first be proposed and then vetted by an expert in the subject who "owns" the article; Citizendium and Scholarpedia are two attempts to build that model of encyclopedia.

In that case, would it not make sense to have metadata associated with a particular section, detailing the final consensus and how it was reached? Kind of like a comment describing a non-obvious section of code. Otherwise you have the equivalent of telling someone "Before you modify this code, look through the entire git history to see why it's the way it is today".

Yeah, there have been some discussions of that, but nobody has put together a MediaWiki plugin to do it afaik. Better annotation of regions in general is a longstanding wishlist, so discussions or even citations (or requests for citations) could be attached to a region of text. But then there are problems like how to handle annotations and arbitrary editing/splitting/moving of regions.

As a low-tech solution, you can actually put HTML comments in the source code, which people occasionally do, but it doesn't seem to be a very well-known option.  kind of things sometimes appear in the source. I haven't seen them used for longer discussions, though, just one-line "hey, watch out before you do X" things.

On contentious articles with a long history of debate people will sometimes write a summary on the talk page, so you don't have to read through the whole history of the discussion. On most articles, though, the talk page isn't huge, so I find it easy to glance at before making changes.

If you have a problem with experts disagreeing about facts, arguing over them, reaching a consensus, and then other "experts" starting up the argument again - it really sounds like you're doing a poor job of communicating the researched consensus in the relevant article.

When that sort of stuff happens, I think you should make sure the incorrect information is referenced in the article as a misconception, or just have the correct information associated with citations. False information should only be erased if it is not "in the wild", so to speak.

And they're both oh so successful, right?

Sure, Wikipedia isn't perfect. But I would question any method of evaluation that ends up preferring Citizendium to it.

First, I think Wikipedia is great. And I don't want to imply that the Talk pages are bad. But, I really find the Talk pages to be the most "inside baseball," almost inane, and just impenetrable thing on the Web. Might just be me.

Well you can keep his edit and send the guy a polite message that he ought to cite his sources soon or you'll remove what he added. I mean, at worst you'll just have an article without a citation for a short while, without driving people away. What you are doing right now is this:

          .-.     
          |U|     
          | |     
          | |     
         _| |_    
        | | | |-. 
       /|     ` | 
      | |       | 
      |         | 
      \         / 
       |       |  
       |       |
       FUCK  YOU

I agree with your comment, but the ASCII art is out of place on HN.

And your contributions can be even more easily ignored when they're made on Talk pages. If you provide useful information or links, you can expect it to be ignored. I ran a little experiment http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism#sins-o... where I provided high-quality RSs/ELs, and the uptake rate after a period of years ranged from 3-8%.

It would be cool to have a git flavoured wikipedia type thing integrated into jstor.

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