Todd Allen wrote:
On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 1:43 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
On 4/7/08, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
When the issue of Wikipedia's
"unreliability" comes up, I like to
point out that we can't, don't and have never promised "reliability"
-
what we are, in fact, is *useful*. (I make such a bold claim based on
our horrendous mainstream popularity. Hands up all the old hand
encyclopedia nerds here who thought it would get this far this quickly
...)
Indeed. We are useful. And I am hard pressed to believe that if you
asked a random, non-wonk user if our usefulness to them was based on
the fact that we are generally accurate, the answer would be "yes"
almost all of the time.
To dismiss accuracy as some philosophical technicality is to deny the
reality of why people look things up in encyclopedias.
Naturally we strive to be
accurate, but the judgements of accuracy and
usefulness are for outsiders to make. The obsessive-compulsives need to
abandon the notion that they are the guardians of accuracy.
Ec
I think you have an excellent point here, and this brings us back to
the previous point: Which one of us decides what is accurate? Why
should any of us be doing that? In the absence of a different source
offering a counterargument, what you are left with is "This is wrong
because I say so," and allowing that is simply not sustainable,
especially for contentious areas. Rather, we simply say "Source X says
Statement Y", cite Source X, and leave it to the reader to research
and decide what to believe about Statement Y. Citation and attribution
are the keys. -Regardless of the truth of Statement Y itself-, so long
as Source X really did say Statement Y, that line is both accurate and
verifiable. We are not and should not be making judgments as to the
validity of the claim, simply reporting that it was made.
More problematic are the situations where Source X making Statement Y
justifies Claim Z by our editor. I'll grant that editor the good faith
that he actually believes this, but that is not enough to support his
peculiar logic. A similar kind of argument comes up when an editor
treats any criticism as a personal attack.
Or to put it more simply, if the New York Times
reports that the moon
is a large pink beach ball, it is both accurate and verifiable to say
"According to the New York Times, the moon is a large pink beach
ball." The Times' hypothetical claim is ludicrous, but our statement
that they said so is simple fact. And it is left to the reader to
believe or not believe the claim, we are simply and accurately
reporting that it was said and who said so.
I agree there too. The determination that a source is "reliable" just
adds another level of uncertainty. Where is the meta-reliable source
that establishes the chosen source as reliable. I'm well aware, for
example, that we have many editors who believe that parapsychology is
pseudoscience. But when somebody cites "The Journal of Parapsychology"
it should be enough for the claim to speak for itself without going
through the whole argument again about why parapsychology is
pseudoscience. We still preserve the fault line, but make it clear that
the fault line is not a product of our judgement.
Ec