All-
The last several dozen messages on this list regarding Wikipedia citation policy were prompted by Brian's re-posting of a message I had sent earlier in the week proposing a change to the page renderer whereby all factual assertions within an article would automatically be flagged (say, using red high-lights) if they were un-sourced. I am truly gratified by the huge debate which this suggestion has already generated, and especially grateful to Brian for seeing enough value in my idea to bring it again to every one's attention.
This exchange has been truly productive, and the disagreements that have been aired are, I think, more apparent than real. One common misconception is that those of us who are pushing for stronger citation standards are doing so because we believe in citation for its own sake, or because we want to blindly mimic "real encyclopedias", or else because we are in some way elitist or credentialist and always believe in deferring to expert opinion.
What has gotten lost in the exchange, I think, is the fact that those of us advocating a strong citation policy are doing so only as a means to an end, with that end being objectivity. The point of an encyclopedia is to contain objective knowledge, knowledge which any reasonable person could potentially confirm by visiting the evidence provided for it. Ideally such evidence should be as unmediated and "direct" as possible, but in practice this often means deferring to an expert authority, because we either lack the means or skill to reproduce or interpret this evidence ourselves. This is a necessary evil, but greatly ameliorated by the fact that all reputable scholars meticulously document their results, allowing anyone to reproduce their 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)!
Now, just because I think it's valuable to replicate academic standards of evidence and objectivity does not mean I think we should blindly reproduce academic visual/typographic conventions. Just because scholars put bibliographical/reference sections at the end of their articles, or make their text unreadable with lots of footnotes does not mean I think Wikipedia should also. Let's collect the same data, but think 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?
I'm sorry if a lot of this is obvious, but hopefully 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 that other people experience the world in roughly the same ways we do, cooperation and this thing we call community is impossible. Everyone just does whatever it is they want and never stop to consider how this affects other people because without objectivity knowledge of other people is by definition impossible.
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've been working on a new project proposal which I've deferred announcing on this list partly because I wanted to do some more polishing to it, but mainly because it relied upon an enhancement to the software (i.e. [[m:Wikidata]]) whose completion date was still a ways off. However, now seems as good a time as any to make an announcement, so let me provide an overview. Much of it is identical to SJ's proposal here and in [[m:Wikicite]].
Phase 1: Toward a more reliable Wikipedia
Citation mark-up is introduced which holds a pointer to an enclosed factual assertion's proof; proof is provided via either reference to another work, or with direct evidence (a photograph, eye-witness testimony, 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 which renders them in a useful graph format. Perhaps as part of article rating, citations must be confirmed by the checker; data regarding which assertions were verified is stored with other article rating attributes.
Phase 2: Creation of a citation database/authority text map
Each citation within a Wikipedia article is now automatically saved within a [[m:Wikidata]] text relationship database. A text relationship joins two "[[w:texts]]", and among its other attributes has one 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.
As Wikipedia editors do their research and follow the citations of those works which they themselves cite, they are able to create "authority maps" for literature within various scholarly fields. What is considered authoritative? What is considered outdated? They record this information into the text relationship database. They are not merely copying other's footnotes, though, since a text relationship does not have to be "verbalized" within a text. If they know a particular work contradicts some evidence, for example, let them record it and so rightly diminish the work's authority.
Eventually the Wikidata text relationship database becomes a hugely valuable scholarly tool in its own right, and acts as the first resort for Wikipedia editors doing research. Formulas are developed which rate sources/evidence: incoming positive citations are good; incoming negative ones are bad. Lots of less obvious factors like age are considered- a 50 year old work that's still constantly invoked is probably particularly sound. Other formula factors are identified, though anyone can potentially create their own formulas to run against the data.
Phase 3: The honing of Wikipedia
Using the text relationship database, editors can now see at a glance what is authoritative within a particular literature. The article renderer now takes source quality (generated by the formulas discussed above) into consideration when rendering each section of an article. Those parts of the article relying on weak, discredited, or out-dated sources are flagged with one style, while perhaps especially credible sources are "commended" using another. Hopefully a 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.
Please see the following for more details about this project:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiTextrose http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite
Thank you for your time and sorry for the long e-mail.
__________________________________________ Yahoo! DSL Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com
Jonathan Leybovich wrote:
All-
The last several dozen messages on this list regarding Wikipedia citation policy were prompted by Brian's re-posting of a message I had sent earlier in the week proposing a change to the page renderer whereby all factual assertions within an article would automatically be flagged (say, using red high-lights) if they were un-sourced. I am truly gratified by the huge debate which this suggestion has already generated, and especially grateful to Brian for seeing enough value in my idea to bring it again to every one's attention.
This exchange has been truly productive, and the disagreements that have been aired are, I think, more apparent than real. One common misconception is that those of us who are pushing for stronger citation standards are doing so because we believe in citation for its own sake, or because we want to blindly mimic "real encyclopedias", or else because we are in some way elitist or credentialist and always believe in deferring to expert opinion.
There is a difference between stronger citation standards and better citation technology. I am all for better citation technology. I am completely against raising the entry level of people to contribute to the Wikipedia project. I do believe that citing sources has its place. It may prove valuable to make content more NPOV and by minimising conflicts.
What has gotten lost in the exchange, I think, is the fact that those of us advocating a strong citation policy are doing so only as a means to an end, with that end being objectivity. The point of an encyclopedia is to contain objective knowledge, knowledge which any reasonable person could potentially confirm by visiting the evidence provided for it. Ideally such evidence should be as unmediated and "direct" as possible, but in practice this often means deferring to an expert authority, because we either lack the means or skill to reproduce or interpret this evidence ourselves. This is a necessary evil, but greatly ameliorated by the fact that all reputable scholars meticulously document their results, allowing anyone to reproduce their 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)!
Problematic in you approach is that you are talking about "reputable scholars"; we are not. We do not pretend to be scholars, that is exactly what distinguishes our way of producing Wikipedias and other content from how the traditional publications produce its content. It is also a line of defence against people who want to sue us for content that is wrong. We clearly state that our content may not be right and we are willing, we can and we do either as individuals or as an organisation improve our content where and when needed.
Now, just because I think it's valuable to replicate academic standards of evidence and objectivity does not mean I think we should blindly reproduce academic visual/typographic conventions. Just because scholars put bibliographical/reference sections at the end of their articles, or make their text unreadable with lots of footnotes does not mean I think Wikipedia should also. Let's collect the same data, but think 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?
When we find the technology to facilitate better standards, it means that it will be more easy, more inviting to add these sources. When you insist on these sources to be there you go too far and you kill the participation from many many people. The secret of our success is in enabling people to contribute their knowledge. Most people have never quoted sources. That is something that is done almost exclusively by academically trained people. When you say memex I do a [[memex]] and do not find an article.
I want to point out to you, again, that Wikipedia is a success because of its inclusive nature. And I want to point out to you, again, that Nupedia was build to academic standards and a complete failure. When you want to go over the existing articles and start adding sources you do something that I applaud. When we insist on "objective" standards, we make Nelson Mandela a criminal because he was convicted by a lawful court and send to jail.
I'm sorry if a lot of this is obvious, but hopefully 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 that other people experience the world in roughly the same ways we do, cooperation and this thing we call community is impossible. Everyone just does whatever it is they want and never stop to consider how this affects other people because without objectivity knowledge of other people is by definition impossible.
The consequences of your point of view are not obvious at all. Your faith that people experience things in a similar way is wrong. When I see documentaries on TV and I see all these people make their faith central to their lives, I only wonder. Given that people deny as a result evolution, find objection to other ways of thinking and have their big libraries that "prove" their point of view, I fear that you only raise vandalism to the next level as you will make Wikipedia an even more fertile battle ground for debaters and POV pushers.
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?
Other articles come to mind and yes they are frustrating, I have been involved in "fundamentalism" and I have given up because some Christian warriors claimed the exclusive right to that name. Now do you really think that showing sources saves the day for this article? Are you not aware that for every article that "proves" a point an other article "disproves" the same point? Do you not agree you get into a situation where the discussion degenerates into a fight about the relative merits of given sources ?
Again, I applaud better functionality and I think we should provide sources for further reading. But believing that by providing sources we will provide objectivity is naive. If there is one area where traditional thinking and an overly reliance on previous thinkers has proved to be the undoing of progress it is science.
I've been working on a new project proposal which I've deferred announcing on this list partly because I wanted to do some more polishing to it, but mainly because it relied upon an enhancement to the software (i.e. [[m:Wikidata]]) whose completion date was still a ways off. However, now seems as good a time as any to make an announcement, so let me provide an overview. Much of it is identical to SJ's proposal here and in [[m:Wikicite]].
I am well aware of what Wikidata is. Wikidata is the implementation of relational technology within the Mediawiki software. Off itself it provides you with no functionality. A database design is necessary to consider if it possible to create the functionality that you describe. The design of such is database is probably more complicated than the one of the Ultimate Wiktionary. It is also vital to find people to understand any proposed design because this designs assumptions define its function. What I read in the parts below have more to do with building wonderful functionality than with actual database design.. You cannot build the code if you have no underlying structure.
Given its complexity and given how hard it is to define this functionality in a way that makes sense to someone who could make a database out of it like me, I wish you luck and hope that the functionality of Wikidata proves useful for showing sources and further reading as well.
Thanks, GerardM
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
I think these are some great ideas. In fact, I think some time in the future we'll see a lot of them implemented.
The problem, I think, is that they are such a radical departure from the normal wiki process. Wiki markup is currently fairly simple. There are some more complicated add-ons, such as tables, but for the most part it's not hard to read and edit wiki-text after a basic introduction.
Introducing detailed citation features would require either abanoning that simplicity or abandoning the concept of writing the wikitext directly. Both of these would be significantly detrimental to the Wikipedia project in the short term.
I think there needs to be a proof of concept created first. Later, I'm talking on the order of years, Wikipedia might be able to incorporate many of the features into the mediawiki software. I think a nice WYSIWYG editor is a prerequisite though.
In the mean time, Wikipedia articles are GFDL. There's no problem with copying them, running them through a citation check, making fixes, and then merging back.
Anthony
On 12/4/05, Jonathan Leybovich jleybov@yahoo.com wrote:
All-
The last several dozen messages on this list regarding Wikipedia citation policy were prompted by Brian's re-posting of a message I had sent earlier in the week proposing a change to the page renderer whereby all factual assertions within an article would automatically be flagged (say, using red high-lights) if they were un-sourced. I am truly gratified by the huge debate which this suggestion has already generated, and especially grateful to Brian for seeing enough value in my idea to bring it again to every one's attention.
This exchange has been truly productive, and the disagreements that have been aired are, I think, more apparent than real. One common misconception is that those of us who are pushing for stronger citation standards are doing so because we believe in citation for its own sake, or because we want to blindly mimic "real encyclopedias", or else because we are in some way elitist or credentialist and always believe in deferring to expert opinion.
What has gotten lost in the exchange, I think, is the fact that those of us advocating a strong citation policy are doing so only as a means to an end, with that end being objectivity. The point of an encyclopedia is to contain objective knowledge, knowledge which any reasonable person could potentially confirm by visiting the evidence provided for it. Ideally such evidence should be as unmediated and "direct" as possible, but in practice this often means deferring to an expert authority, because we either lack the means or skill to reproduce or interpret this evidence ourselves. This is a necessary evil, but greatly ameliorated by the fact that all reputable scholars meticulously document their results, allowing anyone to reproduce their 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)!
Now, just because I think it's valuable to replicate academic standards of evidence and objectivity does not mean I think we should blindly reproduce academic visual/typographic conventions. Just because scholars put bibliographical/reference sections at the end of their articles, or make their text unreadable with lots of footnotes does not mean I think Wikipedia should also. Let's collect the same data, but think 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?
I'm sorry if a lot of this is obvious, but hopefully 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 that other people experience the world in roughly the same ways we do, cooperation and this thing we call community is impossible. Everyone just does whatever it is they want and never stop to consider how this affects other people because without objectivity knowledge of other people is by definition impossible.
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've been working on a new project proposal which I've deferred announcing on this list partly because I wanted to do some more polishing to it, but mainly because it relied upon an enhancement to the software (i.e. [[m:Wikidata]]) whose completion date was still a ways off. However, now seems as good a time as any to make an announcement, so let me provide an overview. Much of it is identical to SJ's proposal here and in [[m:Wikicite]].
Phase 1: Toward a more reliable Wikipedia
Citation mark-up is introduced which holds a pointer to an enclosed factual assertion's proof; proof is provided via either reference to another work, or with direct evidence (a photograph, eye-witness testimony, 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 which renders them in a useful graph format. Perhaps as part of article rating, citations must be confirmed by the checker; data regarding which assertions were verified is stored with other article rating attributes.
Phase 2: Creation of a citation database/authority text map
Each citation within a Wikipedia article is now automatically saved within a [[m:Wikidata]] text relationship database. A text relationship joins two "[[w:texts]]", and among its other attributes has one 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.
As Wikipedia editors do their research and follow the citations of those works which they themselves cite, they are able to create "authority maps" for literature within various scholarly fields. What is considered authoritative? What is considered outdated? They record this information into the text relationship database. They are not merely copying other's footnotes, though, since a text relationship does not have to be "verbalized" within a text. If they know a particular work contradicts some evidence, for example, let them record it and so rightly diminish the work's authority.
Eventually the Wikidata text relationship database becomes a hugely valuable scholarly tool in its own right, and acts as the first resort for Wikipedia editors doing research. Formulas are developed which rate sources/evidence: incoming positive citations are good; incoming negative ones are bad. Lots of less obvious factors like age are considered- a 50 year old work that's still constantly invoked is probably particularly sound. Other formula factors are identified, though anyone can potentially create their own formulas to run against the data.
Phase 3: The honing of Wikipedia
Using the text relationship database, editors can now see at a glance what is authoritative within a particular literature. The article renderer now takes source quality (generated by the formulas discussed above) into consideration when rendering each section of an article. Those parts of the article relying on weak, discredited, or out-dated sources are flagged with one style, while perhaps especially credible sources are "commended" using another. Hopefully a 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.
Please see the following for more details about this project:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiTextrose http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite
Thank you for your time and sorry for the long e-mail.
Yahoo! DSL – Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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
This is all theoretically very interesting, and I cannot oppose it. Nevertheless until someone is ready to code this it won't happen . Meanwhile, many of us who concern ourselves with content still have to go on with life without waiting for you to do the coding, which could take a long time.
What would you suggest that we non-technical people do in the meantime?
Ec
Jonathan Leybovich wrote:
All-
The last several dozen messages on this list regarding Wikipedia citation policy were prompted by Brian's re-posting of a message I had sent earlier in the week proposing a change to the page renderer whereby all factual assertions within an article would automatically be flagged (say, using red high-lights) if they were un-sourced. I am truly gratified by the huge debate which this suggestion has already generated, and especially grateful to Brian for seeing enough value in my idea to bring it again to every one's attention.
This exchange has been truly productive, and the disagreements that have been aired are, I think, more apparent than real. One common misconception is that those of us who are pushing for stronger citation standards are doing so because we believe in citation for its own sake, or because we want to blindly mimic "real encyclopedias", or else because we are in some way elitist or credentialist and always believe in deferring to expert opinion.
What has gotten lost in the exchange, I think, is the fact that those of us advocating a strong citation policy are doing so only as a means to an end, with that end being objectivity. The point of an encyclopedia is to contain objective knowledge, knowledge which any reasonable person could potentially confirm by visiting the evidence provided for it. Ideally such evidence should be as unmediated and "direct" as possible, but in practice this often means deferring to an expert authority, because we either lack the means or skill to reproduce or interpret this evidence ourselves. This is a necessary evil, but greatly ameliorated by the fact that all reputable scholars meticulously document their results, allowing anyone to reproduce their 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)!
Now, just because I think it's valuable to replicate academic standards of evidence and objectivity does not mean I think we should blindly reproduce academic visual/typographic conventions. Just because scholars put bibliographical/reference sections at the end of their articles, or make their text unreadable with lots of footnotes does not mean I think Wikipedia should also. Let's collect the same data, but think 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?
I'm sorry if a lot of this is obvious, but hopefully 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 that other people experience the world in roughly the same ways we do, cooperation and this thing we call community is impossible. Everyone just does whatever it is they want and never stop to consider how this affects other people because without objectivity knowledge of other people is by definition impossible.
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've been working on a new project proposal which I've deferred announcing on this list partly because I wanted to do some more polishing to it, but mainly because it relied upon an enhancement to the software (i.e. [[m:Wikidata]]) whose completion date was still a ways off. However, now seems as good a time as any to make an announcement, so let me provide an overview. Much of it is identical to SJ's proposal here and in [[m:Wikicite]].
Phase 1: Toward a more reliable Wikipedia
Citation mark-up is introduced which holds a pointer to an enclosed factual assertion's proof; proof is provided via either reference to another work, or with direct evidence (a photograph, eye-witness testimony, 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 which renders them in a useful graph format. Perhaps as part of article rating, citations must be confirmed by the checker; data regarding which assertions were verified is stored with other article rating attributes.
Phase 2: Creation of a citation database/authority text map
Each citation within a Wikipedia article is now automatically saved within a [[m:Wikidata]] text relationship database. A text relationship joins two "[[w:texts]]", and among its other attributes has one 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.
As Wikipedia editors do their research and follow the citations of those works which they themselves cite, they are able to create "authority maps" for literature within various scholarly fields. What is considered authoritative? What is considered outdated? They record this information into the text relationship database. They are not merely copying other's footnotes, though, since a text relationship does not have to be "verbalized" within a text. If they know a particular work contradicts some evidence, for example, let them record it and so rightly diminish the work's authority.
Eventually the Wikidata text relationship database becomes a hugely valuable scholarly tool in its own right, and acts as the first resort for Wikipedia editors doing research. Formulas are developed which rate sources/evidence: incoming positive citations are good; incoming negative ones are bad. Lots of less obvious factors like age are considered- a 50 year old work that's still constantly invoked is probably particularly sound. Other formula factors are identified, though anyone can potentially create their own formulas to run against the data.
Phase 3: The honing of Wikipedia
Using the text relationship database, editors can now see at a glance what is authoritative within a particular literature. The article renderer now takes source quality (generated by the formulas discussed above) into consideration when rendering each section of an article. Those parts of the article relying on weak, discredited, or out-dated sources are flagged with one style, while perhaps especially credible sources are "commended" using another. Hopefully a 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.
Please see the following for more details about this project:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiTextrose http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite
Thank you for your time and sorry for the long e-mail.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org