[WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale)

[Andreas Kolbe]

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place to add interesting bits of personal, but unpublished, knowledge.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 at hackish.org> wrote:

> From: Mark <delirium at hackish.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale)
> To: wikien-l at 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
> 
> 
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