On 13/03/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/14/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
It is increasingly common that subjects of articles wish to interact directly with us and tell us that their article is wrong in some way. It is, in my opinion, silly for us to reject even harmless corrections on the grounds that they cannot be traced to a reliable source. If
It's also silly for us to object to Joe Smith fixing his birthday on [[Joe Smith]] while simultaneously complaining that people don't seem to realise that people can edit the encyclopaedia themselves. See the other topic, about the history tab and the edit button being invisible.
Wikipedia itself becomes a primary source in the process of someone commenting on "their" article, what is the problem with that from a purely factual point of view? Depending on the nature of the statement, such comments could be either incorporated as corrections (date of birth) or attributed statements (".. denies that he ever had sexual relations with that woman").
You mean, if Joe Smith deletes "was seeing Jane Bloggs" from his article, we can then add "Joe Smith denies being in a relationship with Jane Bloggs" with a link to the diff as the citation for the denial? How pervertedly weirdly plausible.
...). No, just like any credentials verification, WMF shouldn't be involved directly. But while I generally fully support the need for good sourcing in any article, I often find it absurd how people who point out simple corrections are treated.
Simple corrections from the source itself should just be accepted.
I do this all the time! The problem arises when the (honest, good-faith, probably correct) correction sent to us doesn't have a cite, but the existing detail does, because it's a common error or a misconception or a differing interpretation or just one of IMDB's bizzare glitches being quoted as gospel. Then we either balk at doing it, or we do it and it gets reverted with a mistaken cite.
Two anecdotes.
a) A man was listed as being born in X, New York. He was actually born in Y, New York, but for some reason the other one comes up a lot (I think he went to school there), and a cite can be found for it but not for X. Mentioned in passing only, nothing significant or depending on it... but still just about citable.
b) A man whose deathdate was invariably wrong - he committed suicide, and the newspaper obits got slightly confused and gave the date of discovery whereas he had actually died the previous afternoon. Later obituaries, in scholarly journals and the like, were generally correct.
In a), I corresponded for a bit with the guy's son via OTRS when he was wondering why his correction didn't seem to take; he was very gracious about it, and was quite happy to accept that by our policies we were going to have to live with yet another report printing the wrong one, but nonetheless it seems silly.
In b), a friend of mine was somewhat annoyed that we had 'picked' the wrong one, and I offered to look into it for her. I eventually got the correct date in with a clarifying footnote clarifying; the crowning piece of evidence in the little 'duelling citations' battle on the talk-page was that I'd turned up a letter to a newspaper from a relative of the subject which mentioned, in passing, the correct deathdate - it seemed fair to accept that where sources differed, going to a source as close as possible to the subject seemed the most accurate.
These are, really, absolutely harmless corrections to make - there was no significance to whether b) died on August 6th or 7th, there was no contentious debate over a) and his claimed "hometown affiliation". Simply little details that most sources get wrong, which we are in a position to report correctly - and, perhaps, explain the error if appropriate.
I really don't see anything wrong with me footnoting a) as "was born in Such-and-Such<ref>Personal correspondence with the Wikimedia Foundation, June 17th, reference ABC1234567</ref>. Yes, we could ask them to issue a rather dull press release, or write a blog post, or (in one case I recall) update the details on their myspace page. But no reasonable academic or reporter objects to incorporating corrections of trivial, non-contentious details from those who know about the article; why should we?
Anything vaguely controversial we should ask for something on their website we can link to. Ie, if we have a semi-reliable source saying someone was in the IRA, and they privately claim they weren't, we should at least ask to see a public declaration that they weren't. Then we can publish as "The Camden local paper says that he was in the IRA<ref.../>, a claim which he denies strongly<ref.../>
Mmmm... matters of denial or interpretation are probably over the line I'd like to draw this at, but YMMV.