On 13/03/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 3/14/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)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.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk