[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Leadership (was NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors}

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Fri, 4/2/11, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
<snip>
> one of the problems I have with WP:WEIGHT is the way some
> people take
> a "percentage" approach to it. My view is that the amount
> of weight
> something has in an article is a function not just of the
> *amount* of
> text, but also how it is written (and also the sources it
> uses).
> 
> It may not be clear from the wording of policy, but if
> something is
> sourced to a lightweight source, then it should carry less
> "weight"
> (in the sense of being taken seriously) than something
> sourced to a
> really authoritative source. It might seem that this is not
> what
> WP:WEIGHT is talking about, but in some sense it is. Also,
> the wording
> used: if something is said in a weaselly, vague and
> wishy-washy way
> (*regardless* of the volume of text used), then that
> carries less
> weight than a strongly-worded and forceful sentence.
> Similarly, a
> rambling set of paragraphs actually weights an article less
> than a
> single sentence that due to the way it is written jumps up
> and down on
> the page and says "this is the real point of the article".
> 
> In other words, the *way* an article is written affects the
> weighting
> of elements within in, not just the volume. Which all come
> back to the
> tone used in writing, which often affects the reader more
> than the
> volume of text used. Ideally, a succinct, dispassionate,
> non-rhetorical tone will be used, and articles looked at as
> a whole.
> It is extremely depressing when arguments devolve into the
> minutiae of
> sentence structure in an effort to find a compromise
> wording. It often
> chokes the life out of the prose of an article.


That's a valid and subtle point. It's compounded by the fact that the more 
heavyweight sources tend to be more restrained in their tone, and the more 
lightweight sources, more shrill and emotive.

NPOV as presently defined does not help us there: we are duty-bound to 
reflect the shrill voices in their shrillness, and the authoritative sources
in their restraint.

I don't see this changing unless we can see our way clear to assigning more
weight to authoritative sources, instead of the simple dichotomy of "not
reliable"/"reliable", where everything on the "reliable" side is given
equal weight, regardless of whether it is a gossip site or an authoritative
scholarly biography.

Andreas