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