Following up on the recent discussion about citation and sources, I'd like to make a few points in no particular order.
1. Some primary sources are too difficult for most editors to access. Examples include unpublished material in archives and old newspapers in foreign languages. Other material is readily available - for example almost every university with a Law School or Political Science department will have the UN official records that I located recently.
2. Primary sources are not necessarily better than secondary sources. Many types of primary sources require experience and knowledge to interpret because they are written for people in the know and not for outsiders. In this case a presentation and analysis of the material by a specialist who understands the context and knows about other relevant sources is to be preferred. (Conversely, presentation of genuine primary material in a misleading fashion is taught in Propaganda 101.)
3. Many secondary sources are written by people whose purpose is to deceive their readers. We Wikipedians did not invent the art of POV-pushing. For every topic which provokes edit-wars in Wikipedia, there is an active information-war out there trying to convince us of one or the other POV.
4. The combination of 2 and 3 is a catch-22. We need the specialists but can we trust them? There is no easy answer to this but some partial answers can be given. One is that people who work for advocacy groups or governments are the least trustable. Next least trustable are the "independent experts" the media like to consult. The most trustable are academics; not the teachers you may have taken a course from, but those who publish their research in peer-reviewed journals and get cited by other such people. However, this only goes for academics writing on their own specialties.
5. Academic specialists have prejudices and political opinions too and there is no such thing as an unbiased secondary source.
6. The first rule of citation is to state the actual place you got the information from. If you want to report on some document D you read about in book B, your first obligation is to name B. It is a sin to only name D unless you looked at D yourself.
7. If it is necessary to cite one of the less trustable sources (see 4), the source should be identified sufficiently to warn readers that the source may have a motivation in slanting the evidence. That is, say what organisation the source belongs to or what job they have which might influence their opinion. However, it is not necessary to pass judgment on the source (say "member of the XYZ political party", not "member of the XYZ political party which some people claim to be a lot of racist scum").
8. Random web pages which make unsourced claims are not sources at all in my opinion and should be avoided altogether.
Zero.
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This is excellent, could you add this information in this vein to Wikipedia:Cite sources?
Fred
From: zero 0000 nought_0000@yahoo.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 02:18:37 -0800 (PST) To: wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] primary and secondary sources
Following up on the recent discussion about citation and sources, I'd like to make a few points in no particular order.
- Some primary sources are too difficult for most editors to access.
Examples include unpublished material in archives and old newspapers in foreign languages. Other material is readily available - for example almost every university with a Law School or Political Science department will have the UN official records that I located recently.
- Primary sources are not necessarily better than secondary sources.
Many types of primary sources require experience and knowledge to interpret because they are written for people in the know and not for outsiders. In this case a presentation and analysis of the material by a specialist who understands the context and knows about other relevant sources is to be preferred. (Conversely, presentation of genuine primary material in a misleading fashion is taught in Propaganda 101.)
- Many secondary sources are written by people whose purpose is
to deceive their readers. We Wikipedians did not invent the art of POV-pushing. For every topic which provokes edit-wars in Wikipedia, there is an active information-war out there trying to convince us of one or the other POV.
- The combination of 2 and 3 is a catch-22. We need the specialists
but can we trust them? There is no easy answer to this but some partial answers can be given. One is that people who work for advocacy groups or governments are the least trustable. Next least trustable are the "independent experts" the media like to consult. The most trustable are academics; not the teachers you may have taken a course from, but those who publish their research in peer-reviewed journals and get cited by other such people. However, this only goes for academics writing on their own specialties.
- Academic specialists have prejudices and political opinions too
and there is no such thing as an unbiased secondary source.
- The first rule of citation is to state the actual place you got the
information from. If you want to report on some document D you read about in book B, your first obligation is to name B. It is a sin to only name D unless you looked at D yourself.
- If it is necessary to cite one of the less trustable sources (see
4), the source should be identified sufficiently to warn readers that the source may have a motivation in slanting the evidence. That is, say what organisation the source belongs to or what job they have which might influence their opinion. However, it is not necessary to pass judgment on the source (say "member of the XYZ political party", not "member of the XYZ political party which some people claim to be a lot of racist scum").
- Random web pages which make unsourced claims are not
sources at all in my opinion and should be avoided altogether.
Zero.
Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Zero, there's a discussion going on at Wikipedia talk:CIte sources about how that page can be improved. Some editors there feel we should not distinguish at all between types of sources, but should accept any citation. Others feel we should distinguish, but disagree as to what words we ought to use to describe a good source (reputable, authoritative, credible: all are being discussed). There's a feeling among some editors that we should discuss the difference between primary and secondary: others feel we shouldn't get into it. My own view is that all these issues should be thrashed out on that page, because if the info isn't there, where else can editors expect to find it? Any input from you would be much appreciated.
Slim
On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 02:18:37 -0800 (PST), zero 0000 nought_0000@yahoo.com wrote:
Following up on the recent discussion about citation and sources, I'd like to make a few points in no particular order.
I think a major fear (voiced or not) is that making the process seem any more complicated will scare off J. Random Wiki Editor from citing any sources at all. I'm not sure how real this fear is.
It is definitely the case that we'd rather a bad cite than no cite. Because at least, then, one can check the source out. This is why language of calling sources "acceptable" is possibly counterproductive; it's not the CITE that's unacceptable, it's rather that some sources are insufficiently accurate.
There's a distinction between "acceptable to mention" and "acceptable as verification". Even if one's source is not that solid, and thus doesn't count as verification, it certainly should still be mentioned. Most articles are works in progress and thus will have gaps in verifiability. Mentioning one's current best source (even if a possibly unreliable source) is still a good thing to do.
For example, I will use a random web site for a source, but I will know that that source is only an "interim" one until I can find a better one.
-Matt (User:Morven)
Matt Brown said:
It is definitely the case that we'd rather a bad cite than no cite.
I strongly disagree. The only cites should be good cites. Bad ones are misleading and wasteful. A good cite is easy enough to make: one that accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the subjectmatter. This latest fuss was, at bottom, over attempts by some of us to transform a bad cite (a statement that a UN source said something that we didn't know it said) into a good one (a statement that a secondary source gave a figure and attributed it to a UN source). The former would have misled the reader, the latter would have given the reader more accurate information. As it turned out the cited UN source did not contain the information, but another UN source did. The secondary source proved to be in error so the inference drawn from it was incorrect in a small but significant detail.
From: "Tony Sidaway" minorityreport@bluebottle.com
Matt Brown said:
It is definitely the case that we'd rather a bad cite than no cite.
I strongly disagree. The only cites should be good cites. Bad ones are misleading and wasteful. A good cite is easy enough to make: one that accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the subjectmatter. This latest fuss was, at bottom, over attempts by some of us to transform a bad cite (a statement that a UN source said something that we didn't know it said) into a good one (a statement that a secondary source gave a figure and attributed it to a UN source).
Um, no. The cite said exactly that already. The latest fuss was, at the bottom, over attempts to exclude the cite altogether because one editor didn't like it. And even after it was confirmed as factually correct, he still made several attempts to exclude it on other grounds.
The former would have misled the reader, the latter would have given the reader more accurate information. As it turned out the cited UN source did not contain the information, but another UN source did.
Um, no again. As it turned out the cited UN source did indeed contain the information, but the author of the original source presented it in a misleading way, though it made no difference to the article in question, since it wasn't used that way in the article.
It's hard to follow exactly what is going on in these debates if you don't read the relevant information carefully.
Jay.
I strongly disagree. The only cites should be good cites. Bad ones are misleading and wasteful. A good cite is easy enough to make: one that accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the subjectmatter. This latest fuss was, at bottom, over attempts by some of us to transform a bad cite (a statement that a UN source said something that we didn't know it said) into a good one (a statement that a secondary source gave a figure and attributed it to a UN source).
Um, no. The cite said exactly that already. The latest fuss was, at the bottom, over attempts to exclude the cite altogether because one editor didn't like it. And even after it was confirmed as factually correct, he still made several attempts to exclude it on other grounds.
Actually, the attempts that this "one editor" did, was to tell the readers that the "cite" inserted did refer to something completely different from what all the other "cites" referred to. Those attempts were completely resisted (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Estimates_of_the_Palestinian_Refug...) for some reason.
I think most of us have had enough of this. If a dispute remains, please use the Wikipedia dispute resolution procedure.
Fred
From: BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com Reply-To: BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com, English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 20:51:15 +0100 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] primary and secondary sources
I strongly disagree. The only cites should be good cites. Bad ones are misleading and wasteful. A good cite is easy enough to make: one that accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the subjectmatter. This latest fuss was, at bottom, over attempts by some of us to transform a bad cite (a statement that a UN source said something that we didn't know it said) into a good one (a statement that a secondary source gave a figure and attributed it to a UN source).
Um, no. The cite said exactly that already. The latest fuss was, at the bottom, over attempts to exclude the cite altogether because one editor didn't like it. And even after it was confirmed as factually correct, he still made several attempts to exclude it on other grounds.
Actually, the attempts that this "one editor" did, was to tell the readers that the "cite" inserted did refer to something completely different from what all the other "cites" referred to. Those attempts were completely resisted (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Estimates_of_the_Palestinian_Refug... e_flight_of_1948&diff=9512567&oldid=9511977) for some reason.
-- mvh Björn _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I have revised a pair of old and narrowly rejected policies in the hopes that the current climate is such that they will pass with more ease.
The first can be located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_policy/ Personal_attacks. This proposal would allow sysops to impose 24 hour blocks for personal attacks, in the vein of the 24 hour blocks for 3RR violations. The previous policy allowed for longer blocks, and had fewer admonishments about improper use of the policy.
The second can be located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_a_troll. This policy has been changed more substantially. It explicitly notes that sysops may not ban for trolling, and acknowledges that no firm definition of trolling will be exhaustive. It also contains a warning about the impossibility of accurately judging other people's motives. The sole use of this policy, in its new form, would be to allow the arbitration committee to, should they be inclined, sanction users for trolling.
I have also, through a small fiat, created [[Wikipedia:Don't be a dick]]. As this policy is explicitly unenforced and unenforcable, and meant as a joke with serious content, I did not forsee any problems with it.
-Snowspinner
Phil Sandifer (sandifer@sbcglobal.net) [050128 09:46]:
I have also, through a small fiat, created [[Wikipedia:Don't be a dick]]. As this policy is explicitly unenforced and unenforcable, and meant as a joke with serious content, I did not forsee any problems with it.
I concur wholeheartedly and move a commendation for Snowspinner for writing this. Huge swathes of [[m:instruction creep]] are caused by having to explain particular instances of this to the hard of thinking.
Also, remember the handy shortcut: [[WP:DICK]].
- d.
Has anyone else noticed the following? Often, though not always, when I edit a page containing accents like umlauts and acutes, when I press "preview" or "save," the accents come out mangled: for example, a "u" with an umlaut above it, comes out as a weird-looking Y, and it happens to words I haven't edited. In addition to changing the letter, this breaks the links to pages with accents in the title, leaving red links. I was told this happened with Macs, and I use a Mac, but I've only noticed it myself in the last week or so. Is there anything I can do my end to stop it from happening? I use OS 10.2.8 and the browser is usually Safari 1.0.3.
Sarah
I don't have this problem with Safari 1.2 (v25) under OS 10.3.8 Sarah, so one option might be to upgrade to 10.3.
The other option might be to use the rather nice Firefox web browser: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Christiaan
On 28 Jan 2005, at 7:40 am, slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Has anyone else noticed the following? Often, though not always, when I edit a page containing accents like umlauts and acutes, when I press "preview" or "save," the accents come out mangled: for example, a "u" with an umlaut above it, comes out as a weird-looking Y, and it happens to words I haven't edited. In addition to changing the letter, this breaks the links to pages with accents in the title, leaving red links. I was told this happened with Macs, and I use a Mac, but I've only noticed it myself in the last week or so. Is there anything I can do my end to stop it from happening? I use OS 10.2.8 and the browser is usually Safari 1.0.3.
Sarah
The other option might be to use the rather nice Firefox web browser: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
or [[Camino]].
paz y amor, [[User:Thebellman]]
slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Has anyone else noticed the following? Often, though not always, when I edit a page containing accents like umlauts and acutes, when I press "preview" or "save," the accents come out mangled: for example, a "u" with an umlaut above it, comes out as a weird-looking Y, and it happens to words I haven't edited. In addition to changing the letter, this breaks the links to pages with accents in the title, leaving red links. I was told this happened with Macs, and I use a Mac, but I've only noticed it myself in the last week or so. Is there anything I can do my end to stop it from happening? I use OS 10.2.8 and the browser is usually Safari 1.0.3.
Wow, I heard about those versions in archaeology class - but Professor Jobs said that all known copies had been lost in the Great Disk Crash of 2003.
You're in possession of the truly rare! Do the window backgrounds have more of a vellum or a papyrus look? Officially the papyrus versions were only sold in Egypt, but apparently there were rumors of pirated copies being sold in the markets of Rome, and an obscure passage in "Cult of Mac" has been interpreted as meaning that one of them made it all the way to Eboracum (modern-day York).
:-)
Stan
I hope this isn't someone from Apple mocking my very nice computer that, incidentally, I didn't buy that long ago by normal-person standards.
But yes, it's papyrus, seeing as how you asked.
S
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 09:54:47 -0800, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
I use OS 10.2.8 and the browser is usually Safari 1.0.3.
Wow, I heard about those versions in archaeology class - but Professor Jobs said that all known copies had been lost in the Great Disk Crash of 2003. You're in possession of the truly rare! Do the window backgrounds have more of a vellum or a papyrus look?
slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
I hope this isn't someone from Apple mocking my very nice computer that, incidentally, I didn't buy that long ago by normal-person standards.
Sorry - if truth be known, 95% of my WP editing is with Mozilla on my home machine, which is still running 10.2.8. We're in the final stages of Tiger here, which means daily test builds of the system - it's not uncommon to hear in the halls "you're still running that version?? It's over a week old!!"
Stan
Stan Shebs wrote:
We're in the final stages of Tiger here, which means daily test builds of the system - it's not uncommon to hear in the halls "you're still running that version?? It's over a week old!!"
Pray do tell more!
Christiaan
On Jan 28, 2005, at 2:40 AM, slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Has anyone else noticed the following? Often, though not always, when I edit a page containing accents like umlauts and acutes, when I press "preview" or "save," the accents come out mangled: for example, a "u" with an umlaut above it, comes out as a weird-looking Y, and it happens to words I haven't edited. In addition to changing the letter, this breaks the links to pages with accents in the title, leaving red links. I was told this happened with Macs, and I use a Mac, but I've only noticed it myself in the last week or so. Is there anything I can do my end to stop it from happening? I use OS 10.2.8 and the browser is usually Safari 1.0.3.
It's a character set mismatch, and older Safari was especially susceptible to that problem. Usually it's an ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) page interpreted as Unicode, or vice versa. You can use the View->Text Encoding menu to tweak it for a single page, and you can change the default in the preferences (Appearance section). It still may not be 100% reliable, though. Apple seems to treat Safari more as a test bed for Web libraries than a production browser. As others suggested, one of the Mozilla family might be a good substitute.
I strongly disagree. The only cites should be good cites. Bad ones are misleading and wasteful. A good cite is easy enough to make: one that accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the subjectmatter.
Maybe I need to state what I meant better; citations should be good BUT one should cite references to one's sources even when those sources are not necessarily the best.
I think there are two separate things being discussed here, which are being confused together (by me at least, and thus I assume probably others).
One, the quality of the citation. This is what you described above. In other words, it identifies the source accurately, gives enough information to find the needed information easily, and documents its relation to the subject matter truthfully and accurately. This has nothing to do with the actual nature or quality of the source material. A high quality of citation is essential.
Two, the quality of the actual source material. This is a quite different matter, and contains much more subjectivity and scope for argument (not to say there isn't any in the previous). One can have good cites for bad sources, and bad cites for good sources.
What I really meant in the previous post Tony replied to is that one should always give good cites for one's sources -- even sources not of the highest quality, accuracy etc. A good cite for a bad source beats a bad cite for a bad source, or no cite at all. At least the article is properly referencing and characterising its sources, and is therefore much more transparent.
Bad cites are an insiduous poison in that they claim authority but lack it, and are deceptive. Bad sources are easier to fix or at least identify.
Sometimes one is forced to rely on poor sources while an article is still in development, while one is searching for more authoritative reference material. On some subjects there are no good sources at all; all are unreliable or incomplete. In these cases, it's best for the conscientous contributor to use what sources are available, cite them meticulously, mention the problems in the article if it can be done in a NPOV way, and certainly document the problem on the talk page for future editors to read.
I hope this clarifies things.
-Matt
Tony Sidaway wrote:
Matt Brown said:
It is definitely the case that we'd rather a bad cite than no cite.
I strongly disagree. The only cites should be good cites. Bad ones are misleading and wasteful. A good cite is easy enough to make: one that accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the subjectmatter. This latest fuss was, at bottom, over attempts by some of us to transform a bad cite (a statement that a UN source said something that we didn't know it said) into a good one (a statement that a secondary source gave a figure and attributed it to a UN source). The former would have misled the reader, the latter would have given the reader more accurate information. As it turned out the cited UN source did not contain the information, but another UN source did. The secondary source proved to be in error so the inference drawn from it was incorrect in a small but significant detail.
I would be more supportive of Matt's position. When you try to divide citations into "good cites" and "bad cites" you make a determination which should also be subject to the "cite your sources" rule. Rather than proposing that one source or the other would have misled the reader, we would do better in such circumstances to cite both sources, and let the reader decide which misleading he prefers to follow.
Ec
For me this goes back to Larry Sanger, who was always deleting my cites on the basis that they were "bad". He went overboard, but frankly, some are bad and we do the reader no favor by not saying so, in one way or another.
Fred
From: Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 09:52:11 -0800 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] primary and secondary sources
Tony Sidaway wrote:
Matt Brown said:
It is definitely the case that we'd rather a bad cite than no cite.
I strongly disagree. The only cites should be good cites. Bad ones are misleading and wasteful. A good cite is easy enough to make: one that accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the subjectmatter. This latest fuss was, at bottom, over attempts by some of us to transform a bad cite (a statement that a UN source said something that we didn't know it said) into a good one (a statement that a secondary source gave a figure and attributed it to a UN source). The former would have misled the reader, the latter would have given the reader more accurate information. As it turned out the cited UN source did not contain the information, but another UN source did. The secondary source proved to be in error so the inference drawn from it was incorrect in a small but significant detail.
I would be more supportive of Matt's position. When you try to divide citations into "good cites" and "bad cites" you make a determination which should also be subject to the "cite your sources" rule. Rather than proposing that one source or the other would have misled the reader, we would do better in such circumstances to cite both sources, and let the reader decide which misleading he prefers to follow.
Ec
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