On Jan 25, 2007, at 11:58 AM, Bogdan Giusca wrote:
Thursday, January 25, 2007, 6:25:38 PM, Ken wrote:
WP:CITE and WP:RS are unreasonably easy to abuse
What you call "abuse", others call improval of the sourcing and of the verifiability, and of therefore the credibility of Wikipedia.
From my experience on Wikipedia, almost all the criticism on the Reliable Sources requirements comes from people who edit mostly articles on anime, webcomics, furry subculture, internet memes and the like.
This just isn't true. There are plenty of reliable sources issues to be found about academic topics, particularly in the humanities. For example, it is mind-wrenchingly difficult to write a sourced article about [[Jacques Derrida]]. Why? Because one either has to frame his thought in terms of mediocre primers on his work like _Derrida for Beginners_, or one has to try to use the academic debate surrounding Derrida, in which case all of one's sources are aimed at an expert audience and there's no good foothold to explain the basics of Derrida's thought. Furthermore, one is left in a position where clueless political attacks on Derrida get disproportionate time, because lots of people can understand Ann Coulter and thus can add citations to her, but a lot fewer people can understand Julian Wolfreys and add citations to him.
There's not a good solution to this from within a source-paranoid culture, because the way to write a decent article on Derrida is to have three or four people who work with Derridean thought write it up, bash out compromises on wording among themselves, write brief bits that explain major debates about Derrida's thought where they can't agree on a generally applicable way of presenting something, and then to have a references section that points to some major work on Derrida. And if someone comes along and says "Dude, this article is crap. Here's a bunch of citations that show that this article totally misrepresents Derrida," we work from there.
But there is no good way to write an article on Jacques Derrida that is both a good introduction for a layperson and sourced at every turn.
I'd be similarly shocked if one could write a good article on high temperature physics or group theory while being totally dependent on published reliable sources, because those sources were never written for the purpose of being used to explain the concept to novices.
Those areas are not the core of an encyclopedia and protecting those areas should should not result in the compromising the rest of Wikipedia.
We can't have two sets of rules: one for cruft and one for the rest.
Nobody is proposing two sets of rules. What people have frequently proposed is that the rule should be "everything must be sourced to the recognized standards of reliability for that subject," and understanding that the standards are somewhat less rigorous in popular culture.
I'll also note that, contrary to popular rhetoric, [[WP:RS]] does very little to help fix pokecruft, because nobody can make a serious argument that Pokemon episodes are not reliable sources for information about what happens in Pokemon episodes. (At least not one that has ever gained any traction, and thank God for that, because it's a damn silly argument that has nothing to do with reliability and everything to do with frantically trying to build an idiot-proof wall against pokecruft by any means necessary, without regard for whether the wall makes sense.)
In fact, I suspect we'd have an easier time getting historical out-of- universe information if we let people who knew stuff about the history of Pokemon write articles without demanding they go back and figure out where exactly they read every single fact they're trying to include.
Put another way, the demand that every piece of information has a source means that we get a preponderance of information that's low- hanging fruit - that is, information that is easily found online and easily understood by anybody. That does not coincide well with information that is good.
Again, this is essentially a design problem. [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] fail to consider that they need to be implemented by casual volunteers who are working out of good will. They'd be great policy if Wikipedia were written by paid experts and people who devote huge amounts of time to the project. (Which is who they were written by) But they're crap for someone who finds a problem on a page they're looking at and wants to fix it. Which is the vast majority of our editors.
This is the key problem. [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] were not written with our actual userbase in mind. They are useful only to people like us - that is, people who are obsessed enough with Wikipedia to join a mailing list for discussion of it. That's not most of our editors.
Here's what we need. Picture Susan. Susan is a 40-year-old stay at home mother who majored in English, and still has a fondness for Jane Austen. Susan, one day, is browsing the Internet and reads our article on [[Pride and Prejudice]]. She sees an error. In five minutes, her kid is getting off the school bus.
We need a policy that lets Susan fix the problem and then go meet her kid at the bus without having her change reverted.
-Phil