T P wrote:
There's nothing stupid about a prestigious reference work (as Wikipedia has become) waiting for a field to become significant before writing about it. If it becomes significant in fifteen years, we can write about it in fifteen years. [[WP:MASTODON]]
Please enlighten me - what does "No angry mastodons" have to do with whether any field is significant enough to be covered in Wikipedia? Either now or fifteen years from now?
As a sidenote, I would add that for any field due to become significant fifteen years in the future, we should already be covering, right now, the building blocks that field will ultimately study. For example, there's a bit of a push these days for Hip hop studies to gain recognition as an interdisciplinary academic field. Argue if you like about its legitimacy - I'm sure Citizendium would reject it; I observe that no Wikipedia article exists yet. But if you can imagine what Wikipedia would have looked like in 1992, I can assure you that it would have included detailed articles on Public Enemy and N.W.A, and the articles we have might look better for it today.
--Michael Snow
On 2/26/07, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
Please enlighten me - what does "No angry mastodons" have to do with whether any field is significant enough to be covered in Wikipedia? Either now or fifteen years from now?
It means there's no hurry.
As a sidenote, I would add that for any field due to become significant
fifteen years in the future, we should already be covering, right now, the building blocks that field will ultimately study. For example, there's a bit of a push these days for Hip hop studies to gain recognition as an interdisciplinary academic field. Argue if you like about its legitimacy - I'm sure Citizendium would reject it; I observe that no Wikipedia article exists yet. But if you can imagine what Wikipedia would have looked like in 1992, I can assure you that it would have included detailed articles on Public Enemy and N.W.A, and the articles we have might look better for it today.
If you can predict which fields will become significant in fifteen years, as opposed to which will become forgotten and make Wikipedia look foolish, you can make a lot of money.
Adam
On 2/27/07, T P t0m0p0@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/26/07, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
Please enlighten me - what does "No angry mastodons" have to do with whether any field is significant enough to be covered in Wikipedia? Either now or fifteen years from now?
It means there's no hurry.
As a sidenote, I would add that for any field due to become significant
fifteen years in the future, we should already be covering, right now, the building blocks that field will ultimately study. For example, there's a bit of a push these days for Hip hop studies to gain recognition as an interdisciplinary academic field. Argue if you like about its legitimacy - I'm sure Citizendium would reject it; I observe that no Wikipedia article exists yet. But if you can imagine what Wikipedia would have looked like in 1992, I can assure you that it would have included detailed articles on Public Enemy and N.W.A, and the articles we have might look better for it today.
If you can predict which fields will become significant in fifteen years, as opposed to which will become forgotten and make Wikipedia look foolish, you can make a lot of money.
Adam
So you are saying that if a field is completely forgotten or outmoded, even if we have the secondary sources to back us up and our encyclopaedia is not on paper, we should not be including articles on that field? I'd like some concrete examples - but then again, these are all hypotheticals since nobody's ever written an encyclopaedia and published it in realtime. Then again, could you perhaps point to some topics fifteen years old which you think would not be worthy of inclusion in an encyclopaedia today, but would have been included in Wikipedia by experts at the peak of the topics' fame?
Johnleemk
On 2/27/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
So you are saying that if a field is completely forgotten or outmoded, even if we have the secondary sources to back us up and our encyclopaedia is not on paper, we should not be including articles on that field? I'd like some concrete examples - but then again, these are all hypotheticals since nobody's ever written an encyclopaedia and published it in realtime. Then again, could you perhaps point to some topics fifteen years old which you think would not be worthy of inclusion in an encyclopaedia today, but would have been included in Wikipedia by experts at the peak of the topics' fame?
I think our reliance on secondary sources does help a lot.
On the other hand, a lot of pop culture is ephemeral. Minor entertainers and video games come to mind. Do we need an article on Michael Richards' racist tirade? Britney Spears in rehab? Do we really want articles on the latest Paris fashions, each year and every year?
I suppose such information has a certain historical value, but it doesn't fit in with my conception of what an encyclopedia should cover.
Adam
On 2/27/07, T P t0m0p0@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/27/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
So you are saying that if a field is completely forgotten or outmoded, even if we have the secondary sources to back us up and our encyclopaedia is not on paper, we should not be including articles on that field? I'd like
some
concrete examples - but then again, these are all hypotheticals since nobody's ever written an encyclopaedia and published it in realtime.
Then
again, could you perhaps point to some topics fifteen years old which
you
think would not be worthy of inclusion in an encyclopaedia today, but would have been included in Wikipedia by experts at the peak of the topics' fame?
I think our reliance on secondary sources does help a lot.
On the other hand, a lot of pop culture is ephemeral. Minor entertainers and video games come to mind. Do we need an article on Michael Richards' racist tirade? Britney Spears in rehab? Do we really want articles on the latest Paris fashions, each year and every year?
I suppose such information has a certain historical value, but it doesn't fit in with my conception of what an encyclopedia should cover.
Adam
Well, I believe such incidents would be included in an encyclopaedia of Michael Richards or Britney Spears-related things. And certainly, biographies written about them in the future would mention the incidents. I don't think they make a good example, though, because any articles about such incidents would almost certainly be merged into another relevant article - typically the main article on the celebrity in question - because there's simply not much you can say about them. And as for the latest Paris fashions, we have an article for every year of the Oscars - why not an article for every year of a Paris fashion show, as long as the sources are there?
Also, remember the great thing about Wikipedia is that information can both be put in and taken out at the click of a mouse. If (let's say) this information some day truly becomes an embarassment to WP, we can delete it - and at the same time, the articles would have served their purpose throughout their lifetime, by being a resource for the readers of an era where the information was considered relevant and appropriate for an encyclopaedia or other general reference tertiary source.
Johnleemk
On 2/27/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Also, remember the great thing about Wikipedia is that information can both be put in and taken out at the click of a mouse. If (let's say) this information some day truly becomes an embarassment to WP, we can delete it
and at the same time, the articles would have served their purpose throughout their lifetime, by being a resource for the readers of an era where the information was considered relevant and appropriate for an encyclopaedia or other general reference tertiary source.
This does stretch my notion of what an encyclopedia should be -- the idea that we can include information that we later decide to take out. But then, I was the one who said we shouldn't limit Wikipedia to norms established by traditional encyclopedias, so I'll yield the point.
Adam
John Lee wrote:
And as for the latest Paris fashions, we have an article for every year of the Oscars - why not an article for every year of a Paris fashion show, as long as the sources are there?
Absolutely. I personally make a point of being fashion unconscious, but I know that there are others that are interested in such things. An article or articles that chronical these annual changes could serve very well in helping to understand how the fashion industry works. How do they manage in their marketting strategies to convince people to pay outrageous prices for new clothes when the old ones are still perfectly wearable.
Imagine an open source fashion industry! Anybody could have original designer clothing by building drawings on a web site. The drawings are interpreted by someone who can sew, and the finished product is sent to you within a few days. :-)
Ec
On 27/02/07, T P t0m0p0@gmail.com wrote:
On the other hand, a lot of pop culture is ephemeral. (...) Do we really want articles on the latest Paris fashions, each year and every year?
A set of articles on 'contemporary' fashions on an annual (or biannual or quadrennial or decade or as appropriate) cycle is, perhaps surprisingly, a very good thing to have, from a historical perspective. They're not really something you can easily link out to, but it's a very interesting field of study and one where (especially as you get older) good overview print material can become flakier.
There are people scanning 1890s ladies magazines for the fashion pictures and uploading them to Commons, incidentally. The raw material is there to work with.
Even if not accepted as field of historica study in its own right, it's a useful reference source; a reliable work discussing specific fashions of the 1530s versus the 1550s is a godsend when, for example, trying to work out supporting information for unsourced contemporary portraits.
(And I suspect, to a lesser degree, it's true for more contemporary photographs. Surprisingly often you can look at an undated image and say "before 1985" because of some detail; clothing should be able to factor into this as well, though I don't know if it's routinely done by archivists)
On 2/27/07, T P t0m0p0@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/27/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
So you are saying that if a field is completely forgotten or outmoded, even if we have the secondary sources to back us up and our encyclopaedia is not on paper, we should not be including articles on that field? I'd like some concrete examples - but then again, these are all hypotheticals since nobody's ever written an encyclopaedia and published it in realtime. Then again, could you perhaps point to some topics fifteen years old which you think would not be worthy of inclusion in an encyclopaedia today, but would have been included in Wikipedia by experts at the peak of the topics' fame?
I think our reliance on secondary sources does help a lot.
On the other hand, a lot of pop culture is ephemeral. Minor entertainers and video games come to mind. Do we need an article on Michael Richards' racist tirade? Britney Spears in rehab? Do we really want articles on the latest Paris fashions, each year and every year?
Yes.
I suppose such information has a certain historical value, but it doesn't fit in with my conception of what an encyclopedia should cover.
It's good that you're starting to admit that your desired conception of WIkipedia differs from what it actually is.
On 2/27/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
It's good that you're starting to admit that your desired conception of WIkipedia differs from what it actually is.
'Twas always so, though perhaps you did not notice.
Adam
On 2/27/07, T P t0m0p0@gmail.com wrote:
and video games come to mind. Do we need an article on Michael Richards' racist tirade?
Sure. I, for one, am not ashamed of Wikipedia's extensive depth on current events. I would also have no qualms about deleting such an article 5 years from now.
Steve
T P wrote:
On 2/26/07, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
fifteen years in the future, we should already be covering, right now, the building blocks that field will ultimately study. For example, there's a bit of a push these days for Hip hop studies to gain recognition as an interdisciplinary academic field. Argue if you like about its legitimacy - I'm sure Citizendium would reject it; I observe that no Wikipedia article exists yet. But if you can imagine what Wikipedia would have looked like in 1992, I can assure you that it would have included detailed articles on Public Enemy and N.W.A, and the articles we have might look better for it today.
If you can predict which fields will become significant in fifteen years, as opposed to which will become forgotten and make Wikipedia look foolish, you can make a lot of money.
I don't see why we would look foolish for having good historical coverage. If a field was *ever* of enough note to have multiple reliable sources we can cite, then we ought to cover it, and that will still be true 15 and 150 years from now. The solution to imbalanced coverage between present-day and older stuff is not to reduce our generally thorough coverage of present-day stuff, but to greatly improve our much sparser coverage of anything older than 50 years. Was there some field of study that was briefly popular in 1830 but faded to insignificance by 1845? If anyone's written anything reliable about it that we can cite, then I'd like to be able to read an article on the subject.
-Mark
On 2/27/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I don't see why we would look foolish for having good historical coverage. If a field was *ever* of enough note to have multiple reliable sources we can cite, then we ought to cover it, and that will still be true 15 and 150 years from now. The solution to imbalanced coverage between present-day and older stuff is not to reduce our generally thorough coverage of present-day stuff, but to greatly improve our much sparser coverage of anything older than 50 years. Was there some field of study that was briefly popular in 1830 but faded to insignificance by 1845? If anyone's written anything reliable about it that we can cite, then I'd like to be able to read an article on the subject.
That's a valid point. I am concerned, however, that people will write stuff in the heat of the moment and not go back and revise with the benefit of hindsight.
Adam
T P wrote:
On 2/27/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I don't see why we would look foolish for having good historical coverage. If a field was *ever* of enough note to have multiple reliable sources we can cite, then we ought to cover it, and that will still be true 15 and 150 years from now. The solution to imbalanced coverage between present-day and older stuff is not to reduce our generally thorough coverage of present-day stuff, but to greatly improve our much sparser coverage of anything older than 50 years. Was there some field of study that was briefly popular in 1830 but faded to insignificance by 1845? If anyone's written anything reliable about it that we can cite, then I'd like to be able to read an article on the subject.
That's a valid point. I am concerned, however, that people will write stuff in the heat of the moment and not go back and revise with the benefit of hindsight.
Yeah, I think that's worth watching out for. This is an issue even on topics that are *definitely* notable. For recent events, we use a lot of news articles as sources, since they're the only thing available. As an event gets less recent, we should start rewriting the articles to use reliable secondary sources written by historians and analysts, who are better equipped to filter and contextualize the news articles for us. Our article on World War II, for example, is based on books by historians, not on the original newspaper accounts. Our article on the recent war in Somalia, meanwhile, necessarily relies exclusively on original newspaper accounts. I would hope that in 5 or 10 years' time, when secondary sources on it become available, it will have been rewritten so it no longer does.
IMO, this is part of the gray area of "original research". Is writing an article on the war in Somalia directly from news reports original historical research? It depends partly on how the article is written---the more synthesis of narratives and analysis of the overall situation, the more it's treading into research territory. Once secondary sources do appear, it's important to try to get away from that gray area as much as possible and reduce our use of the contemporary news sources. So I can see your view that it would be better to just wait until the sources exist before writing an article at all. That would certainly be sounder, but I think our articles on recent topics provide an important enough service that it's worth muddling through the gray areas anyway, so long as they do eventually get returned to.
-Mark
On 27/02/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I think our articles on recent topics provide an important enough service that it's worth muddling through the gray areas anyway, so long as they do eventually get returned to.
A reliable way of finding out articles which were "contemporary" two years ago and coming back to clean, discard or polish them as appropriate would be usefu;. Any ideas?
On 2/27/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 27/02/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I think our articles on recent topics provide an important enough service that it's worth muddling through the gray areas anyway, so long as they do eventually get returned to.
A reliable way of finding out articles which were "contemporary" two years ago and coming back to clean, discard or polish them as appropriate would be usefu;. Any ideas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events go back 2 years will pick up some. Other than that dig through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2000s_fads and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_memes
Delirium wrote:
IMO, this is part of the gray area of "original research". Is writing an article on the war in Somalia directly from news reports original historical research? It depends partly on how the article is written---the more synthesis of narratives and analysis of the overall situation, the more it's treading into research territory. Once secondary sources do appear, it's important to try to get away from that gray area as much as possible and reduce our use of the contemporary news sources. So I can see your view that it would be better to just wait until the sources exist before writing an article at all. That would certainly be sounder, but I think our articles on recent topics provide an important enough service that it's worth muddling through the gray areas anyway, so long as they do eventually get returned to.
When speaking of original research we always need to remember why such a rule arose: to prevent the more loony ideas from having a podium. Articles on current events need to be layered. For some of the of the basic information such as who invaded, and on what date newspaper reports are as reliable as anything. People are anxious to find out more about these things as they happen, and government sources and big news media often leave the impression that they are biased. If we put up early information that is questionable it's easier for us to admit we were wrong and make the necessary corrections than it is for governments and big media.
Our coverage of events like the London subway bombing or the Indian Ocean tsunami managed to keep on top of events better that the standard news outlets. This offered a degree of accountability that was not generally available elsewhere. Other aspects develop more slowly, like the stranger conspiracy theories about the 9/11 events. If those theories are out there they need to be taken into account and a neutral approach to such things requires a fair representation of both sides of the story.
Media accountability could become a big issue. The chasm between media investment interests and government spin on one hand, and free-for-all speculation on the other requires some kind of neutrality somewhere in the middle. NPOV provides a framework for accountability. It is not inimical to original research as long as there is ample room to correct the errors in that are inevitable in original research. Put in other terms reliability is not as important as accountability.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
When speaking of original research we always need to remember why such a rule arose: to prevent the more loony ideas from having a podium. Articles on current events need to be layered. For some of the of the basic information such as who invaded, and on what date newspaper reports are as reliable as anything. People are anxious to find out more about these things as they happen, and government sources and big news media often leave the impression that they are biased. If we put up early information that is questionable it's easier for us to admit we were wrong and make the necessary corrections than it is for governments and big media.
I agree for current events, but the older something gets, and the more secondary sources become available, the less necessary or wise this becomes, I think. It would be a mistake to cite 1940s newspaper reports even for dates of World War II events, because some of the newspapers may have reported incorrect information---much sounder is to cite a recent book on the subject, which will have read all those newspaper records, compared them to each other and other information, and produced a more reliable summary we can use. For current events we're basically doing that job ourselves, by comparing multiple sources, watching for updates, corrections, and retractions, and so on.
-Mark