Objectivity Is The Greatest...
On Sun, 4 Dec 2005, Jonathan Leybovich wrote:
evidence later on. Anyone who's read scholarly
journals or monographs knows it is not uncommon for
the footnotes and bibliography (i.e. the evidence) to
take up more pages than the actual text (i.e. the
interpretation)!
Yes. At some point, it should be possible to construct an "n-depth"
talmud-style view of an article, showing footnotes, annotations on those
footnotes, and annotations on those in turn; each within its own
scrollable window (well, hopefully by then we'll have progressed beyond
'scrollable windows' as a temporary-focus-expanding interface component).
Right now we don't store any of the data needed to have more than one
hard-to-use level of annotation.
of better ways to present it. Isn't it ironic
that,
memex, the forerunner of hypertext, was thought up
because of the limitations of paper-based scholarship,
and yet we're still talking about how to reproduce
those same limitations within the web browser?
Definitely.
the next point is less so- which is that objectivity,
which requires evidence, one means to which happens to
be citation- is not just a scholarly imperative, but
also a moral one. Without objectivity, and the faith
This statement deserves a well-argued online presentation. I certainly
happen to agree, but not everyone will, at least not at first.
Thanks for the Jihad example. Ward once said that the real strength in
wikis lies in enabling subtle discussion; in letting two people who don't
know eachother clarify their disagreement down to a very specific, subtle
point -- two variations on a particular sentence or paragraph -- before
they have to break into a meta-discussion.
Providing a mechanism to explicitly cite and anti-cite statements (it is
excellent that you mention both positive and negative links through
citation), and to provide background information about the sources for
cites, allows for another magnitude of subtlety and clarity.
etc.) when appropriate for the claim. The article
renderer then highlights "evidence holes" with a
distinct, attention-grabbing style that alerts both
readers and editors. Such "footnotes" may be hidden
in the main article, but visible through a new tab
Yes. Making new features available only through new tabs avoids confusing
those used to the old system.
Phase 2: Creation of a citation database/authority
text map
called TYPE. In the case of a Wikpedia citation, TYPE
is by default a positive evidentiary citation- the
Wikipedia article uses the cited book, document,
photograph, etc. as proof of some fact. Yet there are
many other sorts of text relationships, the most
obvious kind being negative citations- one work
attacks the authority of another.
or null citations- a work claiming that there are no supporting /
contradictory claims about a subject.
Using the text relationship database, editors can now
see at a glance what is authoritative within a
particular literature. The article renderer now takes
It is less cut-and-dried than this; one useful comparative view would be
the authority-ranking of major essays/articles in a field assuming
School-of-thought A is correct in its assumptions, and the authority-tree
assuming some rival School B is correct in its assumptions.
Or more simply, just tracking dependencies... for instance getting a quick
look at mathematical proofs which rely on the Axiom of Choice.
virtuous circle begins- a citation based upon a work
of popular history is exchanged for one relying upon a
more specialized work, which is later exchanged for a
scholarly monograph or journal article, which in turn
encourages reference to primary sources, etc. By this
process Wikipedia becomes not just accurate, but
scholarly and state-of-the-knowledge.
By this process, the claims of the popular works are also being verified
or disproven by Wikipedia authors over time; hopefully that information
can be passed on to the book editors/publishers -- as they too enter the
digital age.
SJ