In a message dated 4/7/2008 11:49:51 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
snowspinner(a)gmail.com writes:
Which I'm not advocating. I'm saying that we need to understand that
the relationship between a summary and a source is not 1:1, and that
any summary is going to introduce material that is not from sources.
Such information cannot simply be cut out of the process - it needs to
be carefully engaged with. Sources are vital, but we cannot pretend
that an article is simply a natural and obvious extension of its
sources.>>
-----------------
Sure, provided that the additional information is simple infererence,
observation, deduction, with which a person "skilled in the art" would in general
agree. We already cover this.
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In a message dated 4/7/2008 11:39:30 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
snowspinner(a)gmail.com writes:
I mean, I'm not asking "how did we come to care about verifiability." That's
obvious. I'm trying to figure out if there was *ever* a consensus to drop
the notion of accuracy.>>
----------------------------------------
Ok we can discuss that, but first discuss how "accuracy" is different from
"verifiable and credible" ?
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Sure, but if James Joyce really is "one of the most significant writers of
the 20th century" then we should have no problem finding a source which states
that.
Remembering that we don't give credence to expert editors because they
*know* details they can ramble off, but rather, because they know where *to look*
to find the sources.
We, are not sources. I wouldn't support any position that claims that we,
as editors, are also sources.
Will Johnson
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In a message dated 4/7/2008 11:21:49 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
snowspinner(a)gmail.com writes:
The issue is that presenting that research is always somewhat original -
that is, the statement "This presentation of statements is substantively
equivalent to the statements in this source" is not a trivial one - it's an
argument that does not come directly and transparently from the original
source. Summary is original research.>>
-------------------------------------------------------------
We specifically cover summary in our policy language.
That is, we specifically allow it, as part of the editorial process.
Thus, even *if* you'd consider the process of summarizing to be OR, we allow
this particular form of OR.
Will Johnson
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In a message dated 4/7/2008 9:15:41 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
snowspinner(a)gmail.com writes:
Is anyone aware of a discussion to this end that I am not? Is there
actually a point where we clearly and deliberately decided that the
goal of Wikipedia is not accuracy?>>
-------------------------------------------------------
Those of us who watch the NOR and V pages, generally agree with the
understanding that what we strive for, are statements of fact which cite sources, and
where we have two statements with conflicting facts we cite them both.
So "she had a 38 inch bust per Playboy, but Newsweek claims it was only
37"... and so on.
We are "accurate" only in-as-much as we can cite to a source, thus
"verifiable".
I don't see any need to say a word about "Truth" or "truth" for that matter.
Maybe you could re-state your argument.
Will Johnson
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In a message dated 4/3/2008 11:24:51 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
wikipedia.kawaii.neko(a)gmail.com writes:
I have seen fair share of article butchering through mass
redirectification.>>
--------------------------
Could you put this in language my third-grade intellect can understand?
Do you mean something like gutting an article with a simple redirect to
another article?
Wouldn't the article history contain the original article, that could be at
least saved to user-space?
Will
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In a message dated 4/7/2008 12:03:29 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
snowspinner(a)gmail.com writes:
just so obvious that
it's not worth anybody's while to publish a book saying it, because
everyone would go "Yes, of course, we knew that.">>
--------------------------
And we already state that things that can be stated by simple inference or
observation don't require a source. "This is a picture of a cat" does not need
a source, "this is a picture of a cat that was just sold by Barbra Streisand
on Ebay for $50,000" does need a source.
Will Johnson
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Because this is a definite case where TL, DNR is a reasonable
response, I encourage people who are less interested in the full
analysis to skip to the few paragraphs following the line "If the
sources cited do not explicitly reach the same conclusion, or if the
sources cited are not directly related to the subject of the article,
then the editor is engaged in original research."
As a counterpart to my line-by-line reading of WP:V, I've had a look
at NOR. It is, for the most part, and mercifully, not as bad as WP:V.
That said, it still has some serious problems, including what is
probably the worst sentence ever put into a Wikipedia policy.
But for the most part, unlike WP:V, it doesn't need a top-down
reconsideration, except in one area - it fundamentally misunderstands
the relationship between sources and research. But even this can
probably be solved through addition rather than deletion.
In any case, the specifics (again, cross-posted to WT:NOR):
* ""Original research" is material for which no reliable source can be
found. The only way you can show that your edit is not original
research is to produce a reliable published source that contains that
material."
Certainly reliable sources are our best practice, and are the simplest
way to show that something is not original research. But I know of few
areas that have reliable, encyclopedia-like published sources that
cover their details to the degree we want to. Certainly my field,
literary studies, has a mass of conventional wisdom that is passed
around via oral tradition, not written tradition. There are topics
that we unquestionably should have articles about that one cannot
write a general overview of without relying on that oral tradition.
And we should not consider that original research - generally speaking
it's the opposite - the stuff that is part of the oral tradition is
often the most obvious and basic stuff that is just so obvious that
it's not worth anybody's while to publish a book saying it, because
everyone would go "Yes, of course, we knew that."
* "Article statements generally should not rely on unclear or
inconsistent passages, nor on passing comments. Passages open to
interpretation should be precisely cited or avoided"
Oh dear. Now, admittedly, part of my objection here is that, as a good
and mainstream literary scholar, I have no idea what a passage that is
not open to interpretation would be. Assuming a passage is written in
language, it is open for interpretation, and for all but the driest
technical literature this opening is significant.
* "Drawing conclusions not evident in the reference is original
research regardless of the type of source."
And here we get the sentence that most of our actual practice falls
into - not evident to who? We have articles on very hard, very
technical topics in multiple fields. How are references in these
fields meant to be used? The problem here is *not* the lack of a clear
standard, but rather the word "evident." We would do better even with
"If the cited source does not clearly support the claim being made, it
is original research."
* "For that reason, anyone—without specialist knowledge—who reads the
primary source should be able to verify that the Wikipedia passage
agrees with the primary source."
This is very possibly the single worst sentence ever enshrined as
Wikipedia policy. This sentence is where the first and third problems
I identified come to a terrible head. Because secondary source
publication is generally a commercial act, what gets published in a
secondary source is heavily determined by what is financially viable.
That is a very, very different concern from what is useful or
important. As a result, primary sources are vital to research - not
just scholarly research, but all research. And this becomes even more
true as you get to more and more specialist topics - this sentence
effectively guts our coverage of science and mathematics.
Let me be clear here, and using a credible expert (my wife, a PhD
student in chemistry). It is simply not possible to write an article
on [[Single molecule magnets]] from overview-providing secondary
sources. Any such article would be badly out of date. Specialist-
requiring primary sources are *necessary* to write these articles.
* "All interpretive claims, analyses, or synthetic claims about
primary sources must be referenced to a secondary source, rather than
original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors."
Secondarily, this sentence sets up a distinction that just makes no
sense. taking a topic from my field this time, yes, secondary sources
exist and are plentiful on [[Jacques Lacan]]. But the good ones are
hard too - often just as hard as Lacan's primary texts. Nothing is
gained by limiting "interpetive" claims (which, again, I think is a
deeply meaningless term) to primary sources only - it's an arbitrary
distinction that requires arbitrary source usage that, more to the
point, is not in line with respected practices or with how people
actually use sources.
This points also to an issue about credentialism. The current policy
is all but anti-expert. That is, it basically requires that articles
be written either by people who do not know the material or by people
who are going to act like they do not know the material. This is *not*
what our anti-credentialist position started as, and it's a terrible
evolution of it. The original concept of our anti-credentialism was
that you could replace a process of credential verification with a
high-speed (i.e. wiki-based) open peer review process. That is, a mass
of people whose credentials you don't verify can, if given the proper
tools, provide as good a peer review as credentialed experts. But this
does not assume non-knowledgeable participants - it merely says that
we don't check the credentials. The assumption can safely be made that
if somebody is editing an article in good faith, they know stuff about
the topic. That doesn't eliminate the need for sources (any more than
it does in academic research), but it does mean that this "articles
must be able to be written by a non-specialist" policy is, frankly, an
idiotic poison.
* "If the sources cited do not explicitly reach the same conclusion,
or if the sources cited are not directly related to the subject of the
article, then the editor is engaged in original research."
This bit, and really the whole section it's in is where the policy
most falls apart. What it's trying to do is clear - and the plagiarism
example a bit further down is (mostly) spot-on. (It's not unreasonable
to mention the Chicago Manual for context there - it's the explicit
conclusion-drawing that is a problem)
But as it stands, this sentence describes a research practice that is
impossible. The idea that it is possible to simply and unambiguously
transport conclusions from a source into a piece of research would be
rejected by any credible school of teaching research skills that I am
aware of. It is, frankly, the rhetoric and composition equivalent of
spontaneous generation.
Indeed, the opposite is increasingly widely accepted. One of the major
composition texts these days is called _Everything's an Argument_, and
makes the case, essentially, that one cannot organize information
without advancing an argument. Research is always an interpretive and
synthetic process, and any presentation of research advances a
position. The position our articles try to advance is a NPOV position,
but it is still a position. NPOV is not "No point of view."
Given all of that, this phrasing of the policy is untenable and
inaccurate. The section should be heavily cut down, and coupled with a
section that needs to be written. That section must explictly accept
that the basic act of organizing information into a NPOV presentation
is an act of synthetic research. Connections, interpretations, and
organizations are going to have to be introduced, not all of which can
be drawn straightforwardly from reliable sources. It should openly
acknowledge that determining what the best NPOV presentation and what
the most significant viewpoints are is hard and requires a process of
open and good faith communication among editors. How to write an
encyclopedia article is not something that can be determined
mechanically or obviously by an absolute standard or by outsiders
brought in to mediate or intervene.
* "This is welcomed because images generally do not propose
unpublished ideas or arguments, the core reason behind the NOR policy. "
This is not true. Or, at least, it's no more true of images than it is
of words. This section is a frankly bizarre hedge, and a weird moment
of liberalness in the policy where none is warranted - especially
because the use of images to subtly advance points of view is one of
the most insidious and subtle problems we have in this area.
The policy ought to be something along the lines of "images are used
to illustrate aspects of the article. Images that are modified or are
structured so as to clearly imply or argue for a position are a subtle
form of original research that must be watched for."
As I said, the policy is, largely, better than WP:V - it has only two
egregious problems, both of which are closely related - its
bewildering sense of "self-evident" sources, and its deeply flawed
belief about the transparency of assembling information into a
tertiary source. This can largely be fixed by new language and by
careful rephrasing, but it is a fix that is desperately needed, as
right now this page provides bad advice that is not and cannot be
usefully applied towards writing an encyclopedia, and that should
frankly be largely, if not totally, ignored by responsible editors.
-Phil
Reply to reply.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
Date: 6 Apr 2008 23:04
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Random "how the world feels" from London PM
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
On 06/04/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/04/2008, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > * They really want machine-readability from Wikipedia. The infobox
> > templates on Wikipedia are getting there. Mostly what they need is
> > standardisation (is the image called "image", "Image" or "Img"?), and
> > a base template that's {{Persondata}} or a reasonable approximation.
> > This is a matter of parser-functions in the template wikitext on the
> > 'pedia, but it's something someone needs to take on as a project: to
> > re-plumb the templates without breaking the nice exposed external
> > interface. Who knows parser-function code and is feeling ambitious and
> > patient?
> Is it worth getting Wikipedia to use Semantic MediaWiki? It would
> allow for much more powerful machine-readability than templates, but
> probably has hundreds of obstacles to trip over to get there.
Template standardisation struck me as a *feasible* way to the same
thing. It has the advantage that consistency would appeal to the sort
of geek who's happy to code parser-functions. And users are fine with
templates taking parameters and hiding the horrible plumbing behind a
nice interface.
The big problem I can see with Semantic MediaWiki is that it involves
horrible new wikitext syntax ... although if that can be hidden inside
the template code, all the better.
- d.
On 07/04/2008, Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Alas, that may mean it's a bit at odds with the wysiwyg ideal of 'hide
> those awful templates'.
> To the extent that templates are things like infoboxes, those *can* be
> sensible separated from body text and handled easily. To the extent that
> references, formatting, and data relations are extensively embedded
> *into* body text, that's where things get a bit ugly.
Yeah. When I say "templates" above, I meant "infoboxes" - which I
wasn't much of a fan of until it clicked that they were in fact
machine-readable information. (Presumably for the Opera project and
suchlike, we can have a "display=no" parameter.) References are a
whole other spitball of sheer joy ...
Infoboxes are a start on machine readability. Some short articles, the
entire content can basically be encoded in the infobox. If only RamBot
had done that for US places in 2003.
I suppose I should cc large chunks of this thread to wikien-l, this is
really the technical end of "editorial".
- d.