Jonathan Leybovich wrote:
To those who thus maintain that greater standards of
objectivity will damage community within Wikipedia, I
ask you to explain the [[Jihad]] article on the
English language site. This is not an obscure
article; it has gone through 100's, if not 1000's, of
edits and is in the top-10 results list when Googling
on its keyword. Yet this article is a perfect example
of community dysfunction; it is reverted constantly;
it is locked almost weekly; and yet despite all this
activity it is getting worse over time. Because there
is no agreement on what this term even means, the
article is getting shorter and shorter as more and
more of its "controversial" material is shunted off to
sub-articles, where the process repeats itself (see
[[Rules of war in Islam]], under a neutrality alert as
I write). The problem here (leaving aside anonymous
vandals), is not community, it is objectivity. The
warring editors behave unconstructively not because
they mean badly, necessarily, but because they're
trapped in an epistemological hell. It's not only
that there's not enough objective evidence provided
for each assertion, it's that people have no idea
where to find such evidence, or even have the basis
with which to recognize it as such. Thus the
impossibility of consensus, and a continuing edit war
until the article is whittled down to a links page.
Yet isn't the damage done to community, here- in terms
of anger and frustration, in terms of factionalism, in
terms of loss of goodwill and trust- even greater than
that done to knowledge?
I would submit that, while citations may improve things somewhat, they
aren't the primary problem on articles like [[jihad]]. There is *some*
disagreement, it is true, over what has actually been claimed by
people. Citations would help this. The bigger disagreement, though, is
over which claims are notable enough to be included, what order they
ought to be included in, how they ought to be phrased, and so on. On
especially controversial subjects, such as what the primary causes of
terrorism are, it is possible to dig up a published reference that takes
nearly any point of view on the subject; on very controversial ones it
will even be possible to find peer-reviewed journal articles taking each
of those points of view. The difficult part is figuring out which ones
to cite and how to summarize and relate them.
That's not to say citations won't help, but I think we ought to be
careful not to fall into the trap of letting citations obfuscate
things. *Especally* problematic are citations to primary sources, which
can slide into original research---the mess of articles on the 2004
election controversy had citations to election results thrown in by the
bucketfull, for example.
-Mark