In a message dated 4/7/2008 11:57:14 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, snowspinner@gmail.com writes:
Actually, and this is my complaint, we currently demand that a person *unskilled* in the art be able to do it.>>
-------------------------------------------------------------- That might be a change. I do recall debating the exact language of that section several months ago. I drifted away from some policy pages for a bit.
I'm sure the argument would be something like "If you cannot convince the reader that your ...deduction... follows, then you're not very good at writing" ;) Sort of an antagonistic approach, but perhaps reasonable in some regard.
If you are having a particular issue, with a particular article, I'd like to see it, to get a feel of the underlying philosophical issues more concretely. It's sometimes hard to argue hypothetically, the cognitive dissonance compels me to spend days writing up position papers for WP.
Will Johnson
**************Planning your summer road trip? Check out AOL Travel Guides. (http://travel.aol.com/travel-guide/united-states?ncid=aoltrv00030000000016)
On 4/7/08, WJhonson@aol.com WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
That might be a change. I do recall debating the exact language of that section several months ago. I drifted away from some policy pages for a bit.
I'm sure the argument would be something like "If you cannot convince the reader that your ...deduction... follows, then you're not very good at writing" ;) Sort of an antagonistic approach, but perhaps reasonable in some regard.
If you are having a particular issue, with a particular article, I'd like to see it, to get a feel of the underlying philosophical issues more concretely. It's sometimes hard to argue hypothetically, the cognitive dissonance compels me to spend days writing up position papers for WP.
It's not a problem with a specific article so much as a problem with a specific attitude that gets brought up, often at AfD, that seems to me uniquely pernicious as it is based on the substitution of an ostensibly mechanical, automatic standard for one based on judgment and subtlety. This sort of wikinomic has always been a problem, but is becoming more and more of one. While it certainly cannot be legislated away, we can, at least, take the tools used to bludgeon discussions away from articulate and careful discussions among passionate, knowledgeable editors (i.e. how articles are actually written) and towards a game where you get your way not by persuading anybody, but by going "A ha ha, you only have one independent source."
The idea that we can come up with a set of rules that can be applied reflexively to two million articles is insane. What we can do is say "Look, you really shouldn't have anything in an article that isn't part of a mainstream point of view. Please be sure to edit articles with that in mind." And then trust our editors to, you know, think, discuss, debate, and come to a consensus.
Can we legislate away the Taylorized killbots who would rather treat Wikipedia as the hot new thing in MMOGs? No. But we can at least stop privledging such approaches in our core policies. Right now bizarrenesses like "interpretations and summaries must be clear to a non-specialist" and "all statements must be backed by sources" - things that have no relationship to any reality of research as it is taught or understood - rule the day.
-Phil
On 07/04/2008, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
It's not a problem with a specific article so much as a problem with a specific attitude that gets brought up, often at AfD, that seems to me uniquely pernicious as it is based on the substitution of an ostensibly mechanical, automatic standard for one based on judgment and subtlety. This sort of wikinomic has always been a problem, but is becoming more and more of one.
And the reason it's a problem is editors who are bright but are unschooled in joined-up thinking, who (usually unconsciously, some consciously) don't like the idea that judgement takes time and effort to learn, and jump at the promise of a mechanised substitute. Because it clearly works *up to a point*. (Which is what I mean when I say it's at best training wheels for beginners, even if it's no way to do serious work.)
While it certainly cannot be legislated away, we can, at least, take the tools used to bludgeon discussions away from articulate and careful discussions among passionate, knowledgeable editors (i.e. how articles are actually written) and towards a game where you get your way not by persuading anybody, but by going "A ha ha, you only have one independent source."
Yes. The level of clue-hostility is quite remarkable. Encyclopedia writing should not be an exercise in bureaucratic box-ticking.
Can we legislate away the Taylorized killbots who would rather treat Wikipedia as the hot new thing in MMOGs? No. But we can at least stop privledging such approaches in our core policies. Right now bizarrenesses like "interpretations and summaries must be clear to a non-specialist" and "all statements must be backed by sources" - things that have no relationship to any reality of research as it is taught or understood - rule the day.
Yep. It's like a first attempt at the *concept* of properly sourced writing by bright kids ... who bitterly resist people pointing out to them that, actually, people have been doing this sort of thing for a living for hundreds of years.
(If you go to WT:V now you'll see someone quite literally arguing that this is an open source project therefore all past rules don't apply. What?)
- d.
On 4/7/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
And the reason it's a problem is editors who are bright but are unschooled in joined-up thinking, who (usually unconsciously, some consciously) don't like the idea that judgement takes time and effort to learn, and jump at the promise of a mechanised substitute. Because it clearly works *up to a point*. (Which is what I mean when I say it's at best training wheels for beginners, even if it's no way to do serious work.)
Yes - it's worth noting that many of the research practices espoused by Wikipedia on WP:V and WP:NOR are the sorts of things that are taught in high school, where the "every statement that has ever been thought by anybody other than you has to be precisely sourced" thing is taught.
It is not taught (at least by any remotely intelligent teacher, which, admittedly, is far from coextensive with the set of high school teachers) because it is true or good practice - it is taught because high school students *honestly do not understand the basic idea of citing a source yet*. But what it produces is not good writing - it produces writing at a level which can be further improved to good writing.
(And notably, high schoolers intuitively grasp that they are not engaged in good writing, because the moment they're not being watched by a teacher they will revert to more normal writing, which, while often not good, at least eliminates some of the artificially imposed badness of high school writing).
The problem is that Wikipedia needs to be better than high school writing. And thus it needs to have a more intelligent relationship with the idea of what research is, what summary is, and what the relationship between a source and a presentation of information is. Right now V and NOR present viewpoints on these topics that are not merely poor policy or unwise, but are *wrong*. That is, they make claims that are explicitly contradicted by the basic rhetoric and composition curricula of major universities.
-Phil
On 4/7/08, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/7/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
And the reason it's a problem is editors who are bright but are unschooled in joined-up thinking, who (usually unconsciously, some consciously) don't like the idea that judgement takes time and effort to learn, and jump at the promise of a mechanised substitute. Because it clearly works *up to a point*. (Which is what I mean when I say it's at best training wheels for beginners, even if it's no way to do serious work.)
Yes - it's worth noting that many of the research practices espoused by Wikipedia on WP:V and WP:NOR are the sorts of things that are taught in high school, where the "every statement that has ever been thought by anybody other than you has to be precisely sourced" thing is taught.
WP:V has been written and maintained by a number of people with PhDs and other higher degrees, both in the humanities and the sciences, so it's wrong-headed to talk in terms of it being appropriate for high school students, as though we're too stupid to know how to do good research. :)
What it's appropriate for is a bunch of often anonymous people writing an encyclopedia for a massive audience -- a far, far bigger audience than any traditional academic could dream of -- composed of kids, generalists, specialists, and their mothers and their grandmothers.
The position we have to adopt is basically that of the teacher, but not teachers who want to imprint their personal views on their students. We are teachers who want to create [[Autodidacticism|auto-didacts]] -- people who can teach themselves.
We want to be questioned, we want to be challenged. That's a fundamental part of the revolutionary nature of Wikipedia. The expert is still respected, but he's no longer on a pedestal, where what he says goes just because he went to Harvard or Oxford. We want to know who his sources are, and who his sources' sources are, and on and on down the line, so our readers can make up their own minds.
An article that provides that for people is a really useful resource. An article that offers a Wikpedian's original research isn't, even if happens to be accurate.
Sarah
On Apr 7, 2008, at 7:42 PM, SlimVirgin wrote:
On 4/7/08, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/7/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
And the reason it's a problem is editors who are bright but are unschooled in joined-up thinking, who (usually unconsciously, some consciously) don't like the idea that judgement takes time and effort to learn, and jump at the promise of a mechanised substitute. Because it clearly works *up to a point*. (Which is what I mean when I say it's at best training wheels for beginners, even if it's no way to do serious work.)
Yes - it's worth noting that many of the research practices espoused by Wikipedia on WP:V and WP:NOR are the sorts of things that are taught in high school, where the "every statement that has ever been thought by anybody other than you has to be precisely sourced" thing is taught.
WP:V has been written and maintained by a number of people with PhDs and other higher degrees, both in the humanities and the sciences, so it's wrong-headed to talk in terms of it being appropriate for high school students, as though we're too stupid to know how to do good research. :)
I remain agnostic about how WP:V and WP:NOR were formulated - I note merely that they present a viewpoint of research that is, by current prevailing standards, wrong. It seems to me that they got wrong not because somebody stupid went and changed it but because careless editing over years caused the pages to drift from sane to wrong, but the point remains - they are simply wrong.
We want to be questioned, we want to be challenged. That's a fundamental part of the revolutionary nature of Wikipedia. The expert is still respected, but he's no longer on a pedestal, where what he says goes just because he went to Harvard or Oxford. We want to know who his sources are, and who his sources' sources are, and on and on down the line, so our readers can make up their own minds.
Wikipedia's quest is to present the ur-source from which all knowledge depends through a process of recursive sourcing? That's new...
An article that provides that for people is a really useful resource. An article that offers a Wikpedian's original research isn't, even if happens to be accurate.
Well, it's still useful. The problem with an article that offers accurate original research is that it's not presenting a NPOV perspective. Our articles shouldn't say what "is" about the world - they should provide attributed accounts of the important accounts of the world. Which, to say again (and hopefully this time it will stick and people will stop responding to claims I'm not making), we strive to provide accurate information, but the only information we strive to provide is accounts of what other people think.
-Phil
On 4/7/08, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
An article that provides that for people is a really useful resource. An article that offers a Wikpedian's original research isn't, even if happens to be accurate.
Well, it's still useful. The problem with an article that offers accurate original research is that it's not presenting a NPOV perspective. Our articles shouldn't say what "is" about the world - they should provide attributed accounts of the important accounts of the world. Which, to say again (and hopefully this time it will stick and people will stop responding to claims I'm not making), we strive to provide accurate information, but the only information we strive to provide is accounts of what other people think.
It's not just a question of failing NPOV. An article full of OR fails on every level.
We were discussing Kant's [[Critique of Pure Reason]] on WT:NOT. It's pure OR. Only one secondary source cited for one small point. Otherwise, it's a Wikipedian's (or several Wikipedians') understanding of Kant, apparently based only on their reading of the Critique itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason
Most of it is probably right, but because it's OR, it's close to useless. Someone knowing nothing about Kant will be mystified, and there's no attempt to make it even a little clear for someone at that level. Someone knowing a little about Kant is left not knowing how to find out more, or how to find out whether the WP article is an accepted interpretation. Someone who knows a lot will have no interest, because there's no complexity.
There's no context, no history, no understanding shown of why Kant felt the need to write it, no information about its reception or its influence. No information about what the key points are, and how different people have interpreted them, and why those are the key points, and who the key people are.
As accurate as it might be, it fails in its mission to be educative.
Sarah
On Apr 7, 2008, at 10:19 PM, SlimVirgin wrote:
We were discussing Kant's [[Critique of Pure Reason]] on WT:NOT. It's pure OR. Only one secondary source cited for one small point. Otherwise, it's a Wikipedian's (or several Wikipedians') understanding of Kant, apparently based only on their reading of the Critique itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason
Most of it is probably right, but because it's OR, it's close to useless. Someone knowing nothing about Kant will be mystified, and there's no attempt to make it even a little clear for someone at that level. Someone knowing a little about Kant is left not knowing how to find out more, or how to find out whether the WP article is an accepted interpretation. Someone who knows a lot will have no interest, because there's no complexity.
There's no context, no history, no understanding shown of why Kant felt the need to write it, no information about its reception or its influence. No information about what the key points are, and how different people have interpreted them, and why those are the key points, and who the key people are.
As accurate as it might be, it fails in its mission to be educative.
Indeed. It does so for several reasons, though.
1) It is terribly written. 2) It is woefully incomplete, with no context, connections with Kant's larger project, history, mention of the significance of the two editions, etc. 3) Is horribly POV in that it glosses over the existence of debates about any of the points 4) Makes no effort at explanatory summary, targeting itself entirely at people who are already familiar with Kant's work.
That's not an OR problem. That's a shitty article problem.
Have a look at the article on the Critique of Judgment. It's still flawed - and I'll admit, a good chunk of the article is my writing (now some four years old, and done while I was still editing from an IP - I wouldn't even have noticed it if it weren't for the fact that one of the examples is one that I am, as far as I know, the only one that uses). There are some idiosyncrasies on display, to be sure. And I wrote it from my knowledge of the Critique - I didn't even work primarily from the original text. I just went with what I remembered of it. And mercifully, a lot of people have added to it since my rather terrible earliest version (which you can see at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Critique_of_Judgement&oldid=34...) .
But I think it's a much better example of what's going on. Yes, the summary of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment needs more perspectives and commentary - it's shameful that there's no Adorno addressed there. And the off-handed comment about Hannah Arendt needs expanding. (Also one of mine. Mea culpa.)
But the article, as it stands, is far from useless. It needs improvement, and sourced, NPOV material is what it needs most direly. And it could stand to be de-jargonned a bit. But it is, to my mind, clearly a reasonably useful article. And, more to the point, I do not think that an article that had the same relationship to a wealth of secondary sources would inherently be any clearer or better-written. Its main advantage would be a better meeting of NPOV.
But, reading it, I am genuinely hard-pressed to argue that it is unhelpful or that the correct course of action is to remove information from it as original research. Indeed, as bad as the Pure Reason article is, I don't think deletion as OR is helpful there either.
Which says a lot, I think.
-Phil
On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 3:13 AM, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Yes - it's worth noting that many of the research practices espoused by Wikipedia on WP:V and WP:NOR are the sorts of things that are taught in high school, where the "every statement that has ever been thought by anybody other than you has to be precisely sourced" thing is taught.
It is not taught (at least by any remotely intelligent teacher, which, admittedly, is far from coextensive with the set of high school teachers) because it is true or good practice - it is taught because high school students *honestly do not understand the basic idea of citing a source yet*. But what it produces is not good writing - it produces writing at a level which can be further improved to good writing.
(And notably, high schoolers intuitively grasp that they are not engaged in good writing, because the moment they're not being watched by a teacher they will revert to more normal writing, which, while often not good, at least eliminates some of the artificially imposed badness of high school writing).
The problem is that Wikipedia needs to be better than high school writing. -Phil
Phil, I hope when you say "writing" you mean something deeper than writing. Because I am convinced that the only people who care about the quality of writing on Wikipedia are a subset of those of us who write Wikipedia. Everyone else comes here for easily accessible and moderately reliable information, and doesn't care how badly-written it is, as long as its reasonably accurate and adequately laid-out.
RR
From: WJhonson@aol.com> Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2008 15:17:25 -0400> To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] While we're at it, NOR line-by-line> > > In a message dated 4/7/2008 11:57:14 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, > snowspinner@gmail.com writes:> > Actually, and this is my complaint, we currently demand that a person> *unskilled* in the art be able to do it.>>> > > --------------------------------------------------------------> That might be a change. I do recall debating the exact language of that > section several months ago. I drifted away from some policy pages for a bit.> > I'm sure the argument would be something like "If you cannot convince the > reader that your ...deduction... follows, then you're not very good at writing" > ;) Sort of an antagonistic approach, but perhaps reasonable in some regard.> > If you are having a particular issue, with a particular article, I'd like to > see it, to get a feel of the underlying philosophical issues more > concretely. It's sometimes hard to argue hypothetically, the cognitive dissonance > compels me to spend days writing up position papers for WP.> > Will Johnson> > > > **************Planning your summer road trip? Check out AOL Travel Guides. > (http://travel.aol.com/travel-guide/united-states?ncid=aoltrv00030000000016)%... _______________________________________________> WikiEN-l mailing list> WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
_________________________________________________________________ �Ѵ������ٻ��ء���ҡ�Թ����ſ���ͧ�س��������� Photo Gallery http://www.get.live.com/wl/all