Knuth's opinion on Knuth's opinion was reverted from Wikipedia as uncited | Hacker News Reader

Knuth's opinion on Knuth's opinion was reverted from Wikipedia as uncited

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49 pointsgritzko48 comments

The story is incorrect. Knuth's comment was not removed because it was uncited. It was removed because Wikipedia has a policy that articles should not mention Wikipedia unless there's a good reason for them to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Self-references_to_av...

There was a time years ago when every time some public figure mentioned Wikipedia, that fact itself would make it into their Wikipedia article. That was lame. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia about Wikipedia.

When User:Staecker removed Knuth's comment, it was with the edit summary "rm self-reference" which is shorthand for "removed unneeded reference to Wikipedia", and has nothing to do with the quote being uncited.

And I have to say that this is a good thing.

If you're going to attempt to write a serious encyclopedia article about Knuth, trivia like his opinion of Wikipedia has no place.

Not necessarily. He's one of the leading figures in CS, his opinion on major projects like Wikipedia strikes me as significant...

What does Wikipedia have to do with CS? What does Knuth's expertise in algorithms and typesetting have to do with Wikipedia?

And, it was uncited. If Knuth wants to have a documented opinion on WP in the WP, he should write a page on his own site and cite it. WP isn't a primary source.

> WP isn't a primary source.

That's sounding more and more like an obsolete policy.

Why? What encyclopedia is a primary source?

How on earth can an outsider know that? So, skipping some steps, that leads us to a conclusion that the Wikipedia's grows has stopped by design. Namely, because the administration prefers to have some kind of "Better Britannica" ("better" means "bigger" in this case) and anything beyond the borders of that vision is unwelcomed.

It's mostly common sense. A sensible guide is: would an article on the same subject, but hosted on a different site, mention Wikipedia?

Sorry for the emotional response. I agree. But more or less that confirms a point: contributing to Wikipedia became a complex business; thus, the growth predictably stopped.

the growth predictably stopped

While none of the comments or OA itself come out and say it, there seems to be an implicit assumption that this is bad. However when I go to wikipedia there is an article about anything I want to look up. It seems like the low-hanging fruit is gone, so shouldn't we expect that it would slow down? Once there is a critical mass of editors it makes sense to slow it down and keep the bar high for contributions. It's far from perfect, but isn't it better than "grow grow grow"?

Agreed, more editing does not eaqual more quality, or vice versa. This leveling off (or even contraction) may be a normal stage in the maturity of Wikipedia.

A bigger problem, I think, is that many articles reach a high level of quality, and then suffer a succession of edits that clutter up or otherwise reduce the quality of the article. Wikipedia needs a way to fight this article entropy.

A similar story about Betrand Meyer:

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?BertrandMeyerAndWikipedia

Personally, I think Wikipedia (if you can refer to such a collection of volunteers as if it had one mind) is in the right in both these situations.

One thing I think people forget, is that if you make a rule it has to apply to everyone, not just the people you (dis)like.

I completely agree. I equate it to coding standards. Whether I indent with two spaces or four doesn't really matter until both get mixed into the same code base. The point is not that these rules are arbitrary, but that they are standardized. The same goes for the color of code samples in Wikipedia articles: no matter what article you are looking at, the code will look the same.

"A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain." Lazarus Long

Wikis aren't committees, but while in some ways they are better, in others they are worse, it's a toss up.

This is fine. I can make my reverse DNS be knuth.standford.edu also.

All Knuth needs to do is to publicly write about his opinion (perhaps on his website). Someone will read it, someone will add that to Wikipedia with a link, and everything will be perfect. It's less effort on his part, and it ensures that Wikipedia maintains some level of accuracy.

Technically, you cannot make knuth-pbdsl5.Stanford.EDU resolve back to your address. But that is not about the technology. The point is Wikipedia does not have its own fact-extracting workflow, so they are piggybacking on whatever is available, e.g. the press.

A bit tangential to the issue, but it makes me wonder what it gonna do when the anticipated "death of the press" occurs. Refer to opinion blogposts?

The "press" has been deteriorating into opinion and spin, so I don't think we'll notice much difference between the "opinion blogposts" and "the press." There won't be any single event that future generations could say "here is where the press died" any more than one can definatively state that "this was the event where the Roman Empire fell."

True that, but the worth of printed word was varying like that for eternity. But at least there always was a score of quality publications which try to separate opinion, reporting and analytics into separate columns.

"All Knuth needs to do is to publicly write about his opinion (perhaps on his website)."

Bzzt. Wrong.

Knuth needs to write his opinion on his web site, and then a mainstream media source needs to report that Knuth wrote his opinion on his web site. If a mainstream media source reports something that contradicts Knuth's word, then that report, and not what Knuth himself wrote, will be considered "correct" for Wikipedia.

Bzzt. Wrong.

Since when are we on a game show here?

If the WSJ had an article that reads "Knuth says Wikipedia is junk", well that would be a problem. But in the absence of such an article, his personal web site would suffice as a source.

Knuth needs to write his opinion on his web site, and then a mainstream media source needs to report that Knuth wrote his opinion on his web site.

I believe wikipedia policy says that self-published sources can be accepted if there is nothing better.

If a mainstream media source reports something that contradicts Knuth's word, then that report, and not what Knuth himself wrote, will be considered "correct" for Wikipedia.

Yes and no. Biographies of living people have a special caveat that editors should err on the side of removing disputed material.

"Biographies of living people have a special caveat that editors should err on the side of removing disputed material."

Oh, there are plenty of policies. Just try getting them enforced when a couple admins decide that they want an article to be a particular way (as has been known to happen with such articles).

I hate to say it, but an IP is not as authoritative as a quote. I dunno what to say.

My thoughts exactly... even if it's him, it's still both uncited and "original research". If Knuth put up a page on his website, he could then link to it on Wikipedia and the edit would stick.

So basically the one person that knows the most about the subject at hand can not be trusted to edit wikipedia directly, but must go a longer roundabout way?

Yes.

"The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, or the material may be removed." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

Without that policy, Wikipedia's "anyone can edit" policy could probably never have produced the best content site on the web. Just compare http://everything2.com/

That's the policy. Because making exceptions for 'the one person who knows the most' doesn't scale.

That probably makes sense. They should remove the "wiki"-part of the name, though.

Exactly!

I think they have lost the way. And it has started affecting the project.

Hell, the way things work these days, he could leave a comment on a popular news aggregator:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_(programming_language)#c...

or even just a post on twitter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leave_This_Town#cite_note-1

How authoritative do you think a quote is? People are misquoted all the time.

Wikipedia's policy is to not allow original ideas or opinions, even if it's from the subject of the article. This is fairly uncontroversial compared to some of the other things, like restricting edits to logged-in users.

Perhaps edits could be signed with a person's public key (verifying that it was them posting), thus making that edit, in and of itself, the primary source that the [following] edit can cite? It makes sense to rely on our IRL trust network to verify claims inserted by anonymous IP addresses, but when an actual, verifiable identity comes into the mix, that process should be short-circuited.

Wikipedia generally discourages edits by the subject of the article anyway. This policy is designed less for the likes of Donald Knuth and more for the likes of the borderline-notable people of the world who might be tempted to use wikipedia as their own CV.

And even if they did use it for their CV, so what? Who really cares? Does that really hurt wikipedia?

Unless the information is clearly (1) false or (2) not in a neutral point of view, then it's perfectly good information about the subject.

I would care and yes, it would hurt wikipedia if people were allowed to add information about themselves which was not 'notable'.

Well this argument is as old as the hills (or more accurately about as old as the first reverted edit on wikipedia) but personally I'd much prefer a wikipedia which only contains notable information to one which contains all sorts of random information.

Now, I don't run wikipedia, but thankfully the people who do run wikipedia happen to agree with me on this point and decided long ago that only notable and verifiable information would be included. I'm really not sure why people continue to argue the other way.

Besides, who's gonna verify all the information I write about myself?

A person's opinion is not really one of the things I'd trust them with. Think about a politician's official opinion on X vs his actions.

Not to mention this could well have been one of Knuth's students or acquaintances. Like others pointed out, the same opinion posted on his website would have had much heavier weight. "Citation needed" was by far the correct reaction.

One thing that slowed down WP was the suddenly perceived need for adding references ... unrequired for years. So a lot of effort got turned into improving the quality and reliability of millions of already-existing articles.

A lot of people didn't have the know-how or time to do that. Locating reliable and authoritative references can be very time-consuming. (Google Books has helped a lot!)

Despite that, and despite many articles being combined with others , millions of articles have been added in the meantime. I don't understand any concern about this process: it's all healthy. For the subjects I dig into, it's reliable 90% of the time when I check it out.

Most comments are discussing the specifics of this event -- and of course Knuth's edit was problematic by a number of established WP policies.

But are there other policies which could capture this sort of primary-source contribution/correction?

Could primary sources and original researchers prove their identity/credibility and provide reliable material directly to Wikipedia?

Would such alternate policies be a good idea -- and maybe even necessary, given trends in media?

It's convenient to rely on the traditional informational middlemen -- news media and scholarly publishers -- but that world is shrinking, and lagging all the topics Wikipedia could usefully cover.

Given the degree to which established academics disagree with one another, often in a vituperative and acerbic manner in public, I'm not sure having direct contribution from 'experts' will improve anything.

An encyclopedia is a tertiary source and Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. That means Wikipedia is not a repository for primary source material (that would be Wikisource), and nor is it a place to publish secondary source material. As a tertiary source, it is there to report and summarize the state of the debate between published, verifiable secondary sources.

That's the traditional, official-doctrine view. But you're still citing what is rather than what's best. Maybe the working definition of 'encyclopedia' needs to change.

No previous encyclopedia welcomed all editors, or changed second-by-second, or had so many articles, or enjoyed the benefits of mass digital storage and instantaneous global networking.

Maybe the next steps in redefining a reference encyclopedia will be just as beneficial as the steps taken so far. Someone needs to try to find out.

Nupedia::Wikipedia as Wikipedia::TBD

It's comforting to see that even demigods get it wrong sometimes. Knuth shouldn't have used Wikipedia as his blog.

I looked at the edit in question. He didn't just add in his opinion on wikipedia out of the blue, he corrected a misstatement of his opinion by someone else.

In the end, the whole sentence was removed by a third party on the grounds that Knuth's opinion on wikipedia really doesn't matter enough to be part of the Knuth article anyway.

Someone else started it, but Knuth continued it. So two people made mistakes. It's understandable and I might do the same in his situation (once I'm important enough for an article, of course). But it's still against policy and if it continued some people's articles would read like blogs.

That's a fairly stupid characterization of what happened.

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