Sometimes we do, but sometimes we lose our nerve. Most of the arbitration committee are elected. Insisting on inclusion of unpopular points of view is not conducive to maintaining popularity. Announcing a high-minded principle is one thing, living by it - another. Fred On Jun 6, 2005, at 6:08 AM, Tony Sidaway wrote:

On 6/6/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport(a)bluebottle.com> wrote: Trust me, re-election is the last thing on my mind. It's just always been understood both among the arbitration committee and the community that the arbitration committee does not dictate content, because a) understanding the area involved to the necessary level is out of our league, b) concerns over ending up with OTPOV, as discussed elsewhere here, and c) a general unwillingness to spread past what we were set up to deal with - the worst users who were causing serious problems in the community. Fred has consistently tried to change this, but he's generally been opposed by the remainder of the committee, except for in one or two referencing-related cases. -- ambi

Fred Bauder said: Well the latter problem can usually be solved by someone with a library subscription. I'm loath to sanction anyone to rate the credibility of sources; rather we should continue to treat all sources with great circumspection.

On 6/6/05, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net> wrote: But when there is a source for some fringe idea at least we can attach the source, so people can judge the quality of that source themselves, rather then leave it 'some people'. Attaching sources doesn't require that we judge the sources, but our lack of judgement doesn't prohibit our readers from judging the source.

On 6/6/05, JAY JG <jayjg(a)hotmail.com> wrote: I think we're talking past each other here. Nowhere did I suggest that we need to include every idea, just that there is nothing about the fact that you can cite crazy people that lessens the advantages of citing sources.

Fred Bauder said: Then those websites and books are pretty good references for their opinions. I don't see a problem here. A flat earth society website is an excellent reference for a description of the views of that society.

The lunatic fringe are typically easy enough to deal with; it's the more subtle cases that are harder to judge. Why not bring up real-life, happening-today cases? For example, this sourced statement [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Banu_Qurayza&diff=14817484&am…]4816712], which was reverted from an article on the grounds that the author didn't have a Wikipedia article on him, one article editor had never heard of him [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3ABanu_Qurayza&diff=1481…]4816611], and another simply didn't feel he was "notable" [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Banu_Qurayza&diff=next&a…] Now, Tony, how do you deal with this? Is this published author notable enough to be quoted in the article? Jay.

Jimmy Wales said: Then I must have misunderatood the argument entirely. That is all they could possibly be useful for.> Absolutely. This shouldn't need to be stated. No one source can dictate the nature of reality.

On 6/6/05, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.org> wrote: I agree, that is a foolish metric. Now, if we have two equal sources (that is, roughly equal reliability and authority) for the same information we should choose the one which is more widely available (and of course, cost is a factor there). This is like the pruning I do on external links... sometimes I find places where someone has taken free content (Linux documentation project materials, for example), and place it on their blog or a site laden with advertising then linked it from Wikipedia. When I encounter those I change the link to point to the more authoritative source. This should not dissuade us from using a very expensive, very rare source, or even an advertising laden websource, if that is what is available for the information. That someone can verify its authenticity and authortativeness is the bar we impose. That said, it would be a shame if we wrote articles with only very expensive sources, but I don't think we are running any risk of that. :)

On 6/6/05, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net> wrote: A open invitation to original research would be a bad thing... but at the same time the prohibition against it denies the ability to print common sense to those in a field... Despite the handwaving claims to the contrary, it can be quite difficult (measured against the value of including the text) to find a citation for something that is common sense in a given field but not necessarily outside it. Fortunately, at least on en, we look the other way on original research unless there is a dispute. We need to start thinking about ways to include original research in a way which maximises the gains and minimizes the harms, and what sorts of research could be most easily included. I've been thinking about one such way which might be useful: Form a new project called Wikiviews. Wikiviews is a collaborative framework for conducting and collecting interviews with notable people. The wikiviews community would establish notability criteria to decide who is eligible for an interview for example, having an article on wikipedia about them would be a great start, but it would also be useful to interview notable professionals and hobbyists in their areas of interest. Collaborative consensus building can be used to create proposed questions. The interview is then performed and stored, and can then be used for citations in Wikipedia articles. This would give us greater ability to insert informed opinion into an article without running into many of the problems with original research since we could attach a source to those views.

Ray Saintonge stated for the record: Why are old Soviet records "original research" while old US records (NVR, DANFS, &c.) are okay? -- Sean Barrett | If you insist upon discussing my fiasco, I sean(a)epoptic.com | shall forthwith go home. --Nadreck of Palain

On 6/6/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: It disturbs me that "No original research", originally intended to prevent crackpot theories with no following being pushed on Wikipedia, is starting to mutate into something quite different. "Cite your sources" is fine. "Provide your sources," though, is not. On many obscure topics, the sources WILL be difficult to locate. Any attempt to turn this requirement into having to provide sources that can be requested from the average library or online will remove a large number of very credible but obscure sources - specialist publications, limited circulation journals, and many other documents. -Matt (User:Morven)

On 6/6/05, JAY JG <jayjg(a)hotmail.com> wrote: Hm. I'm the only person in recent memory who has made such a claim, so should I be offended that you appear to be binning me in with crackpot theorists? For the record, I've never been a party to a content dispute on wikipedia. I've discussed NOR because I believe it's a fundamentally weak idea at its core but it functions as a bandaid to solve many problems *now*... but long term we need process in place to accept and reject new research in a way which keeps out most of the crackpots (or at least mitigates their harm) and doesn't break NPOV. Already wikipedia has become a better (more complete, more neutral, more verified and reviewed) corpus than some of the sources we cite, simply because our process are our contributors pretty good for some things... or alternatively, because other places are so bad. :) In any case we're weaving an odd world where wikipedia will become a default source of reliable general material... but to insert something new you must first publish it someplace less reliable. ... The point is that in the process of reinventing the encyclopedia we are also reinventing peer review. The logical conclusion is that while the encyclopedia should not be a repository for original research (because it's an encyclopedia), we will ultimately end up building such a repository because our process is superior and because we will eventually need it as a reference once we've put everyone else out of business. ;) Which is why I proposed wikiviews as a first cautious step in that direction.

JAY JG wrote: This argument sounds like its original research. :-) Ec

On 6/7/05, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: Agreed. It's simply that some subjects are obscure enough (or at least, the scholarly analysis of them is obscure enough) that the sources would not necessarily be available through most libraries, for instance. To pick an example of personal interest, the publications of most railroad historical societies will not be in many libraries' collections. The research and scholarship involved can be first-rate, however, and quite appropriate to cite in a Wikipedia article. Furthermore, any other specialist in the field should be able to check those references without too much difficulty, even if the material is not that easily available to the general public. However, the true point of contention in this, I think, will be how citable primary sources should be, and to what degree going to primary sources is original research. Published primary sources are probably fairly uncontroversial, but what about unpublished primary sources? E.g., to pick a topic of personal interest again, is citing documents that can be found in the California Railroad Museum's collection of Southern Pacific Railroad original documents acceptable, or is going through such a collection original research? The references are available to anyone who cares to go there, but they are not published. -Matt (User:Morven)

Of course, reporting consensus really relies on the ability to gauge consensus, which is pretty difficult in and of itself. Perhaps one way to avert the "sources" problem is to have a few people who are willing to look up specific sources. I'm not talking about the "fact-checking" project -- I don't have time to go over an entire article, even one on a topic I know fairly well, to check each date, fact, etc. against a source. But if someone said to me, "A user is citing X fact as being from Y book, maybe on page Z, could you check this out for me?" I'd be happy to do it over the course of a few days as my time permitted. Now this would require two things -- first, people will almost universal access to anything in mainstream print. There are a few of us around -- I have access through my overly-wealthy university to just about anything which was ever in print and then some more. Some things, such as back issues of the New York TImes, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, I can access electronically almost instantly. I can also do quick searches of dozens of scholarly journals through JSTOR. I'd be happy to use these resource to benefit Wikipedia, and have already done this with a few users (people who wanted specific newspaper articles or obituaries of relatively obscure scientists, etc.). I imagine there are many others out there with similar resources at their disposal through their vocation. The next thing needed with such people would be "trust" -- if "I" say that the fact was confirmed or not, can you trust that 1. I even bothered to look it up and 2. that I am telling the truth? Hopefully such things would be easy to red flag or double-check if there was any real dispute. The hope, of course, is that just about anything which would feature on Wikipedia would be based heavily on secondary sources (i.e. no original research) and anything not available at a major university would not likely be mainstream enough for real inclusion. Were there an organized team of people willing to double-check difficult SPECIFIC facts (again, I'm not going to spend hours on a single article) or to even skim literature/journals/reviews for ideas of consensus in a field (which is that hard to do even if one is not an expert in the field), it might relieve some of this "content" anxiety that people seem to be having. There might, of course, already be something like this, but I haven't seen it or mention of anything analogous. FF On 6/7/05, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:

JAY JG wrote: And how do you propose to know that the conclusion is "original"? Ec

On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Sean Barrett wrote: Ease of verification? In theory, many old US records are accessible by the Freedom of Information Act; I believe something similar exists for many national archives. Note that I wrote above the words "in theory": in practice, the US government often refuses to release copies of records, or redacts them to remove some or all information -- & sometimes not consistently. The movie _Fahrenheit 911_ has a memorable example where one document was given to a journalist with some information removed -- but not to another. (I do not have any reliable knowledge about how other governments handle releasing their records, so I won't comment on those cases.) Years ago, when this topic was raised on this list, I seem to remember that there was a consensus towards requiring all sources cited or used to be *published*. Not only did that mean that the material received some token degree of review, & did not depend on Wikipedia for dissemination into the larger public discussion (which was one reason for the No Original Research rule), but it also allowed a Wikipedia user to verify the citation for her/himself. Thus an unpublished memo from a national or corporate archive written in 1955 should not be cited; but a letter between two ancient rulers that has been translated & published as part of _The Armana Letters_ (published by John Hopkins Press, & for sale on Amazon) can be cited. I am always happily surprised at what I can access through my local public library's Interlibrary Loan services -- often at no cost to me. Of course, this requirement leads to other questions. What about rare books or ephemera? For example, if one wanted to write articles on Grunge rock in Seattle (home of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarten & other well-known bands), _The Rocket_ is an invaluable & authoritative source to cite. However, that newspaper went out of business years ago, & I wouldn't have a clue where I could find copies of specific -- or any -- issues. (It was a free weekly newspaper that could be found at all of the local record stores in Seattle & Portland.) If there is a library with a run of its issues, I doubt that they would share either the originals or a photocopy thru ILL; but then, coming thru old issues of _The Rocket_ or 16th century incunabula seems to me close to performing original research. Another question is citing untranslated, non-English sources in a English-language Wikipedia. Obviously, many experts write in languages other than English, & some topics cannot be developed beyond a stub without use of non-English sources; however, when a contributor writes an article & only cites, say, Russian or Georgian-language sources for her/his article, I have to take it on faith that not only are the references reported correstly, but that the works even exist. And I'm sure that there are other issues one could discuss. However, if we could agree that published sources -- either primary or secondary -- can be cited, but unpublished works can not be, this would solve most of the problem. Geoff

On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Matt Brown wrote: Well, I've convinced one more person than I thought I would. ;-) My example was intended to point out the contrast, not as a guideline. In fact, I'm amazed at how easy it is to find a title that is not listed at Amazon or Advanced Book Exchange -- a few of which I've consulted in my writings. If I had to insist on a limit, it would be only to those works listed in the catalogs of the Library of Congress & the British Library -- & maybe one or two other similar institutions. Allowing for duplicates, I estimate that gives us 50-60 million titles, most of which would be available thru the average inter-library loan service. Honestly, if I were to critique a given article for its sources, I am not going to get upset if they include one or two sources out of a dozen that are hard to get ahold of; it's when the article only uses such sources, & I have suspicions about the accuracy of the article. Either case would be troubling to me. Wikipedia is supposed to be no more than a secondary work, not a place to do publish research. With the exception of facts that are either banally obvious or commonplace (e.g. "France is a country in Europe"), if you can't find a published source to cite, then you should consider whether you are writing about something that is not part of Wikipedia's scope; much as that word is dispised here, the subject may not be notable. (Of course, an objection to this would be the matter of contemporary pop culture: AFAIK, there are no books about subjects like the Lost television series, Ken Jennings, Pokemon trivia. However, these topics have enough of an audience that we should trust that the Wiki method will provide a means to keep bad information from entering the article.)

Geoff Burling wrote: There's a gold mine of material available before even needing FOI. For example, all US patent applications made since their big fire are available on line. In about 1970 I remember wandering in a section of university stacks where they were storing booklets received at a rapid rate from various US government agencies. There was no way that any library could keep up with maintaining a subject catalogue of this stuff. My favourite was a pamphlet from the US Army, "The Toxic Effect of Burning Chicken Feathers." "Years ago" is wonderfully hyperbolic considering that in most jurisdictions the project is not old enough to attend kindergarten. "Published", in most cases, is a solid objective criterion to use as a starting point. There may still be arguments about whether something really was published. Is a doctoral thesis "published" when it is simply put on University library shelves and made available through interlibrary loan? Half the problem faced by many of our contributors is in not knowing the extent of available resources, and how to get at them. To the extent that it can be found, protecting this ephemeral material is a big problem. Copyright permissions would be a nightmare, but in 95 years the newsprint is likely to be so crumbly as to be unusable. Maybe there's a need to be more agressive about building on-line pdf files of this stuff. There is a strong argument for considering such actions to be fair use. The fourth of the factors to be considered is the effect on the copyright holder's market. It's a good starting point, as long as we don't start imposing qualifications on the published material. "Peer reviewed" is a common one that is mentioned. The problem with that is that it's a subjective judgement; determining whether a publication is peer-reviewed requires a significant exercise of POV. In theory we could go beyond the "published" criterion, but I would approach that with extreme caution. We've been known to have a few anal editors for whom ANY measure of flexibility sets us on the road to chaos and confusion. Ec

Sean Barrett a écrit: **seconded** Anthere

Jimmy Wales (jwales(a)wikia.com) [050613 10:38]: jguk has already left Wikipedia over the present content-related AC case, feling he was being railroaded. I don't think that counts as a win for Wikipedia - we're talking about a good contributor, not some obnoxious nutter we're better without. It's a larger version of exasperating one's opponents off the wiki, only this time using the AC as a hammer. So far I'm only seeing taking on content-related cases as setting up a disaster. - d.

To get a handle on how much content-arbitration is really needed, perhaps the people who feel it's required could list some examples of when it would have been useful. Or perhaps we're discussing a problem that doesn't exist? Dan ___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

--- Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net> wrote: Very well put. Thus my idea of having advisory panels in various fields that the ArbCom can consult to help it find out just who is and is not following our content-related policies. 12 people simply do not have enough combined knowledge about everything needed to make this effective except in the most obvious of cases. Another excellent point. If we only looked at violations of purely behavioral policies, then all a POV/OR-pusher would need to do is be persistent and provoke editors working against them into violations of our behavioral policies and guidelines. It can be *very* frustrating to know what is NPOV and what is and is not original research in an area and have somebody very persistently try to push a POV or OR. Thus I can understand why some outbursts from good editors can happen. Such outbursts can not be condoned, but the reason why they happened should be considered and that information should mitigate any remedy for the outburst and the person provoking the outburst should be sanctioned. If we (the ArbCom) ding the good editor for violating a behavioral policy and leave the bad editor alone just because we either did not understand the content policy violation or because we are gun-shy from enforcing those policies except in the most blatant of cases, then we have failed in our primary goal; to provide an environment where good editors can create the best encyclopedia possible. That's why I want the ArbCom to have the ability to consult subject-area advisory panels when needed. -- mav __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

--- David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: Thus the need for subject-area advisory panels. The 'disaster' you talk about seems to focus on a bad FoF. A subject area advisory panel would have helped the ArbCom avoid such a mistake. -- mav __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

On 6/19/05, JAY JG <jayjg(a)hotmail.com> wrote: So? There has been a few people campaining the other ways as well. They will probably get bored in the end. -- geni

Really? People who edit dozens of articles solely for the purpose of removing BC/AD notation, and who have made hundreds of edits to further that goal over a period of many months? Who did you have in mind? jguk's campaign lasted for 8 months, from soon after he joined Wikipedia until the time he left. I see no indication that he was becoming bored. Who are these other people, and why do you imagine they will get bored? Jay. Jay.

On 6/19/05, Rick <giantsrick13(a)yahoo.com> wrote: I know it might not be entirely obvious just just because someone prefers something doesn't make it 'POV' in the NPOV sense. The only POV intrinsic to the BCE/CE side is that BC/AD is not NPOV. BCE/CE doesn't push a specific world view, it doesn't deny the existence or importance of Jesus, it merely doesn't support that view either. Just because the side with the "Jesus wasn't God" POV prefer BCE/CE doesn't make using BCE/CE an example of supporting a POV. So at worst you could claim that it is meta-meta-pov: the use of BCE/CE implies that BC/AD may not be NPOV. The majority opinion on Wikipedia doesn't support the claim that BCE/CE use is a POV, but rather that the use of BC/AD is so old that the POVness of it has been washed away by time and therefor it is permissible.

On 6/19/05, James D. Forrester <james(a)jdforrester.org> wrote: I omitted the word '''some''' because the implication was being made that BCE/CE itself is POV, which is clearly untrue. The confusion that it is clearly stems from the fact that many people with a particular pov prefer one over the other... This certainly isn't the only reason, as I previously mentioned, it is argued that BCE/CE isn't as widely understood. But this is the reason that causes people to think that the BCE/CE debate is one POV verses another POV. Since I was specifically discussing the claim that arbcom was getting involved with supporting one POV over another, my primary interest was in demonstrating why BCE/CE isn't POV at all. That is to say that arbcom may or may not be doing the right thing, but they aren't affirming one POV over another... because if we were to agree that one of the phrasings were non-neutral then it would be the BC/AD nomenclature and we would have no choice but to adopt the BCE/CE form. Since the original post was concerned about arbcom's involvement in deciding NPOV, I think this point is quite important. I'm sorry, because I suspect I must be a little dense here... I just can't follow how your (quite correct) criticism of my loosely worded claim in any way invalidates the rest of my message, and I really do wish you had replied point by point.

-On Monday, June 20, 2005 2:52 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, it isn't. Were it "clearly untrue", everyone would see it immediately (that is, after all what those words would mean). I don't. Others don't. Or are we all just being difficult and stating that we fail to see the BCE/CE is NPOV to annoy you (what is termed "trolling")? Well, yes, indeed. Something that is regarded by one group of POV-holders as good and another as bad is, generally, well ... How to put this? So terribly tricky. Still, I will try: POV. Gosh. Wasn't actually so hard, when it came down to it. If group A says that foo is NPOV, but group B say that it is POV, then it by definition cannot be NPOV - because otherwise group B would agree that it was. In this scenario, I think that the difficulty is that people want something that is, indeed, absolutely NPOV, and acceptable to everyone. However, this is a case, I feel, like too many others, sadly, where there is no such Nirvana solution; we must make do with the least POV use. "Both" sides feel that using "AD" and "BC" is POV, and both are right. However, where they differ is that one side either considers "CE" and "BCE" to be less POV than the others for most people, or fails to see it as POV at all, whereas the other finds it more POV. [Snip] Please, do, go ahead. I await with baited breath. I disagree; by strongly criticising one side of a wide-ranging edit war, and saying nothing at all about the other, the old proposed rulings were impliticly condoing the POV of those not mentioned, and discarding that of Jguk and others. I agree. However, this is not true - *both* are non-neutral, the argument is to the relative neutrality of them two. I absolutely agree. I just disagree with your conclusion. :-) Sorry. In future I will reply, point-by-point, with "See above.". I had written this thrice before deciding to merely snip. Yours, -- James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] Mail: james(a)jdforrester.org | jon(a)eh.org | csvla(a)dcs.warwick.ac.uk IM : (MSN) jamesdforrester(a)hotmail.com

Exactly. Fred On Jun 19, 2005, at 8:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

SouthernComfort had no previous contibutions to [[Zoroastrianism]]. -- geni

On Sunday, June 19, 2005 4:18 PM, JAY JG <jayjg(a)hotmail.com> wrote: [Snip] Indeed. And the United States was continuously at war with Germany from 1918 until 1945, and has been so with the United Kingdom since 1776. *yawns* [Snip] Yours, -- James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] Mail: james(a)jdforrester.org | jon(a)eh.org | csvla(a)dcs.warwick.ac.uk IM : (MSN) jamesdforrester(a)hotmail.com

On 6/20/05, JAY JG <jayjg(a)hotmail.com> wrote: Perhaps it's the Almighty, bending Wikipedia to His POV? -- Peter in Canberra