Mark,
I agree that "verifiability, not truth" has done a good job in keeping out
original research of the kind you describe. I just think that the situation
with regard to OR is no longer what it was five years ago -- there has long
been a critical mass of editors who know that Wikipedia is not the right
place to add interesting bits of personal, but unpublished, knowledge.
When I started editing Wikipedia, I had to think long and hard about that
sentence, "verifiability not truth", and I appreciated the insight. I just
think its time has come and gone, and that it does more harm than good now.
A.
--- On Thu, 12/5/11, Mark <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
From: Mark <delirium(a)hackish.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale)
To: wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Date: Thursday, 12 May, 2011, 22:15
On 5/11/11 2:40 AM, Andreas Kolbe
wrote:
A while ago there was a discussion at WP:V talk
whether we should
recast the policy's opening sentence:
"The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is
verifiability, not truth—
whether readers can check that material in
Wikipedia
has already been
published by a reliable source, not whether
editors
think it is true."
(As usual, the discussion came to nought.) That
sentence -- whose
provocative formulation has served Wikipedia well
in
keeping out original
research -- is a big part of the problem.
I think that sentence serves a good purpose in the
*opposite* direction,
though. An opposite common source of Wikipedia-angst is
people who have
good first-hand knowledge that something is both true and
notable, but
sadly, lack any good sources to back that up. So it's worth
emphasizing
up front that our criterion is verifiability as a
descriptive matter,
not truth and notability in some sense of absolute truth.
So, some
legitimately interesting and important stuff may be
excluded, at least
for now, because it hasn't been properly covered in any
source we can
cite. We just aren't the right place to do original
research on a
person, music group, or historical event that the existing
literature
has somehow missed, *even if* it's a grave oversight on the
part of the
existing literature. I wrote a bit more about this
elsewhere:
http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html
But it does get more problematic in the opposite direction,
as you say.
I see the motivation there too: there is a sense in which,
if something
is being discussed a lot, it becomes something we have to
cover just by
virtue of that fact. Meta-notability is also notability, so
it would be
absurd imo to claim that [[Natalee Holloway]] shouldn't be
covered.
Regardless of your opinion on the merits of her media
coverage, she
received such a large amount of it that her disappearance
is an
important event in early-21st-century popular culture.
Heck, if we
wanted *absolute* and philosophical rather than descriptive
notability
standards, I would delete almost every article on a
21st-century noble
family as irrelevant nostalgic garbage (should anybody care
who's the
pretender to the French throne?).
As one of the replies to your post notes (sorry, I seem to
have
misplaced who it was by), one of the problems is more
pragmatic. Perhaps
we *should* cover some such figures, but only in a limited
sense. But
once we have an article, there's a slippery slope where
everything
tangentially related now can flood in. Perhaps that's what
we should
tackle, though. Is it possible to improve our methods of
keeping
marginal junk out of an article, while stopping short of
entirely
deleting and salting the article?
-Mark
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l