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been a critical mass of editors who know that Wikipedia is not the right place to add interesting bits of personal, but unpublished, knowledge.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@hackish.org wrote:
From: Mark delirium@hackish.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale) To: wikien-l@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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