In a message dated 10/22/2008 8:11:34 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, arromdee@rahul.net writes:
If our policy demands that someone corrects errors about themselves by getting the correct information published in a secondary source first, that policy is broken.
It is doubly broken if the justification for this policy is that a secondary source would do fact-checking, when most secondary sources in this situation wouldn't.
Having conflict of interest rules prevent someone from correcting errors about himself is another broken policy.>> --------------------------- Firstly, our articles are not about "corrections" because they are not about "errors". Attribution isn't truth, so it can't be in error. The only way for an attribution to be in error is to mis-quote it. Making it a meta-error. The error being about the wording, not about the underlying meaning. We do not require someone to publish in a secondary source in order to quote them. We quote primary sources as well. However the essential point should be raised first in a secondary source, and then the primary source can be used to enlarge or clarify the secondary.
Secondly, we do not assume that a secondary source "would do fact-checking". Rather our policy clearly (or should clearly) state that we *use* those secondary sources who *are known for* doing fact-checking. Just because "News of the World" is a newspaper does not mean we consider it a reliable source. So it would fail.
Thirdly our COI rules do not prevent a person from changing their own biography. We only request that they change it in a way consistent with the way other editors must work. That is, that they become "expert editors" of their own biography, using sources.
Finally, as others have pointed out, we have no way of knowing whether an editor is who-they-claim-to-be. So they should, firstly, post their material to their own *official* website and then perhaps it can be quoted. This has happened in many cases. If they decline, then that is not our concern, apparently it's not important enough for them to do the obvious.
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On Wed, 22 Oct 2008 WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Firstly, our articles are not about "corrections" because they are not about "errors". Attribution isn't truth, so it can't be in error. The only way for an attribution to be in error is to mis-quote it.
By common sense, if a Wikipedia article claims something and it's not true, that's an error, even if it is in fact true that a source made the erroneous claim and we merely reported on the source. Claiming it's not an error privileges technicalities over the real world, which is one of the problems that BLP tries to solve.
We do not require someone to publish in a secondary source in order to quote them.
That doesn't seem to be how it actually went, according to the article.
And it's not about quoting them, anyway, it's about correcting an error. An error can be corrected by removing the erroneous information as well as by adding a quote saying that the error is an error.
Secondly, we do not assume that a secondary source "would do fact-checking". Rather our policy clearly (or should clearly) state that we *use* those secondary sources who *are known for* doing fact-checking.
That doesn't seem to be how it actually went, according to the article.
Thirdly our COI rules do not prevent a person from changing their own biography.
That doesn't seem to be how it actually went, according to the article. Seeing a pattern here?
Finally, as others have pointed out, we have no way of knowing whether an editor is who-they-claim-to-be.
If you can do a cursory search of someone, and find nothing indicating an obvious fake, and if the request would be relatively noncontroversial, it's extremely likely that this is the person in question. Assuming that it is would result in vastly fewer errors than pretending we have no idea.
On Oct 22, 2008, at 3:09 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Firstly, our articles are not about "corrections" because they are not about "errors". Attribution isn't truth, so it can't be in error. The only way for an attribution to be in error is to mis-quote it. Making it a meta-error. The error being about the wording, not about the underlying meaning. We do not require someone to publish in a secondary source in order to quote them. We quote primary sources as well. However the essential point should be raised first in a secondary source, and then the primary source can be used to enlarge or clarify the secondary.
The problem here is that this line of reasoning, though consistent, is divorced from how people actually use an encyclopedia. We use attribution and verifiability because, in empirical fact, they are reasonably similar to truth. But in terms of actual use of Wikipedia as a resource, people depend on that isomorphism between accuracy and attribution. When that isomorphism breaks down, it poses a genuine problem.
Finally, as others have pointed out, we have no way of knowing whether an editor is who-they-claim-to-be. So they should, firstly, post their material to their own *official* website and then perhaps it can be quoted. This has happened in many cases. If they decline, then that is not our concern, apparently it's not important enough for them to do the obvious.
This ethic that people are responsible for our not fucking up their articles has rightly been considered offensive by numerous actual people.
-Phil
On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 07:59:34PM -0400, Philip Sandifer wrote:
The problem here is that this line of reasoning, though consistent, is divorced from how people actually use an encyclopedia. We use attribution and verifiability because, in empirical fact, they are reasonably similar to truth. But in terms of actual use of Wikipedia as a resource, people depend on that isomorphism between accuracy and attribution. When that isomorphism breaks down, it poses a genuine problem.
Hear hear. It's simply incoherent to write without any concern for whether the content is generally "correct" in the widely-understood sense of the word, and then call the resulting product an "encyclopedia".
- Carl
Philip Sandifer wrote:
We use attribution and verifiability because, in empirical fact, they are reasonably similar to truth. But in terms of actual use of Wikipedia as a resource, people depend on that isomorphism between accuracy and attribution. When that isomorphism breaks down, it poses a genuine problem.
A bit stronger than that, really. We use attribution and verifiability because the point of a Wikipedia article is to summarize external consensus on an issue, and attribution and verifiability are really the only ways of determining external consensus. They are often actually quite dissimilar to "truth", in that often we accurately summarize mutually contradictory information, such as two different academic fields' dissimilar takes on a subject, or religious and secular views of an issue.
More pragmatically, the reader has no particular reason to believe that a random Wikipedia editor (who could be anyone) has any particular personal insight into "the truth", so would prefer some sort of pointer to a more reliable source for potentially contentious statements, rather than "some guy on Wikipedia has investigated, and determined that all the sources are in fact wrong".
-Mark