There's an interesting article out in the current issue of the Chronicle:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/
It's behind a paywall, but in the spirit of fair use and in keeping with the author's intent (the article is on Wikipedia, and I believe the author would want to have us discuss it) I reproduce it here:
The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia
By Timothy Messer-Kruse
For the past 10 years I've immersed myself in the details of one of the most famous events in American labor history, the Haymarket riot and trial of 1886. Along the way I've written two books and a couple of articles about the episode. In some circles that affords me a presumption of expertise on the subject. Not, however, on Wikipedia.
The bomb thrown during an anarchist rally in Chicago sparked America's first Red Scare, a high-profile show trial, and a worldwide clemency movement for the seven condemned men. Today the martyrs' graves are a national historic site, the location of the bombing is marked by a public sculpture, and the event is recounted in most American history textbooks. Its Wikipedia entry is detailed and elaborate.
A couple of years ago, on a slow day at the office, I decided to experiment with editing one particularly misleading assertion chiseled into the Wikipedia article. The description of the trial stated, "The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing. ... "
Coincidentally, that is the claim that initially hooked me on the topic. In 2001 I was teaching a labor-history course, and our textbook contained nearly the same wording that appeared on Wikipedia. One of my students raised her hand: "If the trial went on for six weeks and no evidence was presented, what did they talk about all those days?" I've been working to answer her question ever since.
I have not resolved all the mysteries that surround the bombing, but I have dug deeply enough to be sure that the claim that the trial was bereft of evidence is flatly wrong. One hundred and eighteen witnesses were called to testify, many of them unindicted co-conspirators who detailed secret meetings where plans to attack police stations were mapped out, coded messages were placed in radical newspapers, and bombs were assembled in one of the defendants' rooms.
In what was one of the first uses of forensic chemistry in an American courtroom, the city's foremost chemists showed that the metallurgical profile of a bomb found in one of the anarchists' homes was unlike any commercial metal but was similar in composition to a piece of shrapnel cut from the body of a slain police officer. So overwhelming was the evidence against one of the defendants that his lawyers even admitted that their client spent the afternoon before the Haymarket rally building bombs, arguing that he was acting in self-defense.
So I removed the line about there being "no evidence" and provided a full explanation in Wikipedia's behind-the-scenes editing log. Within minutes my changes were reversed. The explanation: "You must provide reliable sources for your assertions to make changes along these lines to the article."
That was curious, as I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress. I also noted one of my own peer-reviewed articles. One of the people who had assumed the role of keeper of this bit of history for Wikipedia quoted the Web site's "undue weight" policy, which states that "articles should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views." He then scolded me. "You should not delete information supported by the majority of sources to replace it with a minority view."
The "undue weight" policy posed a problem. Scholars have been publishing the same ideas about the Haymarket case for more than a century. The last published bibliography of titles on the subject has 1,530 entries.
"Explain to me, then, how a 'minority' source with facts on its side would ever appear against a wrong 'majority' one?" I asked the Wiki-gatekeeper. He responded, "You're more than welcome to discuss reliable sources here, that's what the talk page is for. However, you might want to have a quick look at Wikipedia's civility policy."
I tried to edit the page again. Within 10 seconds I was informed that my citations to the primary documents were insufficient, as Wikipedia requires its contributors to rely on secondary sources, or, as my critic informed me, "published books." Another editor cheerfully tutored me in what this means: "Wikipedia is not 'truth,' Wikipedia is 'verifiability' of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that."
Tempted to win simply through sheer tenacity, I edited the page again. My triumph was even more fleeting than before. Within seconds the page was changed back. The reason: "reverting possible vandalism." Fearing that I would forever have to wear the scarlet letter of Wikipedia vandal, I relented but noted with some consolation that in the wake of my protest, the editors made a slight gesture of reconciliation—they added the word "credible" so that it now read, "The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer credible evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing. ... " Though that was still inaccurate, I decided not to attempt to correct the entry again until I could clear the hurdles my anonymous interlocutors had set before me.
So I waited two years, until my book on the trial was published. "Now, at last, I have a proper Wikipedia leg to stand on," I thought as I opened the page and found at least a dozen statements that were factual errors, including some that contradicted their own cited sources. I found myself hesitant to write, eerily aware that the self-deputized protectors of the page were reading over my shoulder, itching to revert my edits and tutor me in Wiki-decorum. I made a small edit, testing the waters.
My improvement lasted five minutes before a Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write."
I guess this gives me a glimmer of hope that someday, perhaps before another century goes by, enough of my fellow scholars will adopt my views that I can change that Wikipedia entry. Until then I will have to continue to shout that the sky was blue.
Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University. He is author of The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks, to be published later this year by the University of Illinois Press.
---
Two things that the article relates to, currently happening/ in proposal:
A discussion on oral citations (recently revived): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Oral_Cit...
A proposal to examine citations, including the use of 'primary sources': http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships/Project_Ideas/InCite
---
Cheers, Achal
Relevant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Haymarket_affair#.22No_Evidence.22
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Haymarket_affair#Dubious
On 14 February 2012 06:02, David Richfield davidrichfield@gmail.com wrote:
Relevant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Haymarket_affair#.22No_Evidence.22
As with so many cases, causing a stink gets the giant searchlight directed on the article, and things get worked out... it's just a pity it doesn't scale well!
This followup may be of some interest:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/does-wikipedia-have-an...
I particularly liked this comment:
"Digging into Wikipedia's logs on the changes, it's clear that the entry's gatekeepers did not handle the situation optimally, chiding Messer-Kruse for his manners and not incorporating the new research into the article, even as a minority viewpoint. But it's also worth noting that the expectation that Wikipedia would quickly reflect such a dramatic change in a well-known historical narrative is a very, very high bar. (...) we hold this massive experiment in collaborative knowledge to a standard that is higher than any other source. We don't want Wikipedia to be just as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica: We want it to have 55 times as many entries, present contentious debates fairly, and reflect brand new scholarly research, all while being edited and overseen primarily by volunteers."
The key problem here is that WP:UNDUE was expressly written to address the problem of genuine ongoing controversies, and fringe views. In this case there is no ongoing controversy, but the use of the policy has for long been used to remove new research no-one has even refuted, much less there being an intractable controversy over the issue.
It is equally clear that some portions of the policy have been wilfully wordsmithed so it could be used outside the original intent. There is plenty of meticulously sourced new information that has been challenged and removed from wikipedia because of this. It is only now that this subverted use of the policy runs headlong into this kind of glaringly obvious example of it's misuse that people are taking notice. And taking notice of it in the wrong way.
Correcting the act, but not the root cause. In fact, if I wanted to retain the ability to use the policy in precisely this manner, I would be very quick about making sure the issue were quickly settled, so there never arose a genuine review of the policy and its uses. The fact that the policy is used in this fashion daily if not hourly. Those (ab)uses just haven't been as glaringly obvious. I suspect we all know that deep within our hearts, but loathe to go through the tedium of overhauling a policy page with such deep devotees.
The key problem here is that WP:UNDUE was expressly written to address the problem of genuine ongoing controversies, and fringe views. In this case there is no ongoing controversy, but the use of the policy has for long been used to remove new research no-one has even refuted, much less there being an intractable controversy over the issue.
It is equally clear that some portions of the policy have been wilfully wordsmithed so it could be used outside the original intent. There is plenty of meticulously sourced new information that has been challenged and removed from wikipedia because of this. It is only now that this subverted use of the policy runs headlong into this kind of glaringly obvious example of it's misuse that people are taking notice. And taking notice of it in the wrong way.
Correcting the act, but not the root cause. In fact, if I wanted to retain the ability to use the policy in precisely this manner, I would be very quick about making sure the issue were quickly settled, so there never arose a genuine review of the policy and its uses. The fact that the policy is used in this fashion daily if not hourly. Those (ab)uses just haven't been as glaringly obvious. I suspect we all know that deep within our hearts, but loathe to go through the tedium of overhauling a policy page with such deep devotees.
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
Actually, there is an ongoing controversy, the whitewashing of radical history which is what the language, paraphrasing, "no evidence was presented but the defendants were found guilty", is all about.
The policy, misused in the course of POV struggle, is a way of excluding information with interferes with presentation of a desired point of view.
Fred
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 3:42 AM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
The key problem here is that WP:UNDUE was expressly written to address the problem of genuine ongoing controversies, and fringe views. In this case there is no ongoing controversy, but the use of the policy has for long been used to remove new research no-one has even refuted, much less there being an intractable controversy over the issue.
It is equally clear that some portions of the policy have been wilfully wordsmithed so it could be used outside the original intent. There is plenty of meticulously sourced new information that has been challenged and removed from wikipedia because of this. It is only now that this subverted use of the policy runs headlong into this kind of glaringly obvious example of it's misuse that people are taking notice. And taking notice of it in the wrong way.
Correcting the act, but not the root cause. In fact, if I wanted to retain the ability to use the policy in precisely this manner, I would be very quick about making sure the issue were quickly settled, so there never arose a genuine review of the policy and its uses. The fact that the policy is used in this fashion daily if not hourly. Those (ab)uses just haven't been as glaringly obvious. I suspect we all know that deep within our hearts, but loathe to go through the tedium of overhauling a policy page with such deep devotees.
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
Actually, there is an ongoing controversy, the whitewashing of radical history which is what the language, paraphrasing, "no evidence was presented but the defendants were found guilty", is all about.
The policy, misused in the course of POV struggle, is a way of excluding information with interferes with presentation of a desired point of view.
I think you are being way too generous. The misuse of the policy is far wider than mere POV issues. The issue is that the policy as currently employed and systematically construed, is not fit to use. It is not enabling us to work together on issues that are controversial in the world outside wikipedia. It is exacerbating problems within the Wikipedia editorship. Let me repeat in more concise form. The policy was written to enable serious work on hard topics, it as it stands, hinders work, making it hard to edit simple facts.
On 2/19/12 2:29 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
The key problem here is that WP:UNDUE was expressly written to address the problem of genuine ongoing controversies, and fringe views. In this case there is no ongoing controversy, but the use of the policy has for long been used to remove new research no-one has even refuted, much less there being an intractable controversy over the issue.
In some cases I think *that* is also the correct response, though it's difficult to sort out how to distinguish when it is and isn't. In my own field (artificial intelligence), there is a certain amount of excessive recentism in Wikipedia articles--- some new paper will come out with a grand new result or critique, will get a flurry of coverage in New Scientist and similar publications, and the Wikipedia article will be updated with this "cutting-edge AI" result.
But, this often ends up being premature, because the grand result will not really turn out to be as grand as initially claimed (or perhaps even accepted by the field at all), the critique may be responded to in six months in convincing fashion, etc. In many cases, when editing myself, I prefer to be skeptical of the past 1-2 years of journal articles and conference papers, except those that I know to be rock-solid (admittedly a judgment call). It's not clear with very recent papers to what extent they constitute consensus of the field, when the field hasn't had a chance to process them yet; though if it's a literature you're familiar with, you can sometimes make educated guesses as to which are flash-in-a-pan versus genuinely major new results. I suppose that's where I'd agree with the frequent calls for more "experts" on Wikipedia; one thing someone expert in a field can do well is give some context to and evaluate recent publications.
-Mark
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 7:25 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
On 2/19/12 2:29 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
The key problem here is that WP:UNDUE was expressly written to address the problem of genuine ongoing controversies, and fringe views. In this case there is no ongoing controversy, but the use of the policy has for long been used to remove new research no-one has even refuted, much less there being an intractable controversy over the issue.
In some cases I think *that* is also the correct response, though it's difficult to sort out how to distinguish when it is and isn't. In my own field (artificial intelligence), there is a certain amount of excessive recentism in Wikipedia articles--- some new paper will come out with a grand new result or critique, will get a flurry of coverage in New Scientist and similar publications, and the Wikipedia article will be updated with this "cutting-edge AI" result.
I completely agree that *sometimes* it the correct response. I completely disagree that it is a WP:UNDUE issue. Maybe we should have a WP:SPECULATIVE policy page.
On 14/02/12 02:39, Achal Prabhala wrote:
The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia
By Timothy Messer-Kruse
[...]
My improvement lasted five minutes before a Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write."
There are lots of places on Wikipedia where misconceptions have been summarily dealt with, respectable sources criticised and facts brought to light. Unfortunately, most academics don't have time for the edit wars, lengthy talk page discussions and RFCs that are sometimes required to overcome inertia.
The text of Messer-Kruse's article doesn't show much understanding of this aspect of Wikipedia. But publishing it could be seen as canny. It should be effective at recruiting new editors and bringing more attention to the primary sources in question. The article is being actively edited along those lines.
-- Tim Starling
There are a number of interesting relies. As they too undoubtedly intended the material to be available, (I'm one of them & at any rate I did,) I include them here; if additional come in, I shall post them.
operalala 1 day ago In your 2011 edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde... instead of providing a counterargument to a cited quotation, you removed and replaced it.
From the research that went into your book, you should have a wealth
of material to draw on to support your edits. You need to cite your sources, just like a term paper, or not complain when it gets handed back to you.
marka 7 hours ago in reply to operalala Wait a minute. He claims to have cited primary sources - but potentially erroneous secondary sources are the standard? By these measures, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, etc., wouldn't have been mentioned in their own time - but Biblical entries should get top billing because they have been cited by many? Or Stalinist & Maoist propaganda, because they have been cited many times?
And as his student says, if the prosecution spent numerous days at trial, what, indeed, were they talking about? On its face, the Wiki entry is clearly erroneous. A judge & jury found the evidence 'credible.' Who says it wasn't, and what is their evidence?
jwhab309 1 day ago Thank you. I was not aware that quality research was unacceptable in Wikipedia land. Very unfortunate indeed. 6 people liked this. Like Reply
See Kuhn, Thomas, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," with Wikipedia playing the role of gatekeeper of hegemonic paradigms in the place of scientific journals. Although "in the place of" may not be correct -- perhaps "in addition to" is more accurate.
marka 6 hours ago And now that I've gone to the primary sources cited in the Wiki article, the author of this Chron article is correct - the citations do NOT support the assertions in the Wiki. For example, the assertion that 'friendly fire' was the cause of police wounds, the very sources cited say exactly the opposite - primary gunfire was from the crowd - also noted in Wiki footnote 5. Yikes! Looks like Wiki 'editors' are adhering to some ideological point of view, rather than actually read the footnotes and follow the links. Operalala, who .... are you?
dgoodman 6 hours ago Qualified experts prevail at Wikipedia when they rely on their expertise, not their qualifications. A true expert will be able to give the best arguments and know the best sources. If they also write in a style understandable by non-specialists, and not condescend to them, they will have their edits accepted. It is intended to be different from the academic world; there is no respect at Wikipedia for status, but only for evidence. People however qualified or expert who have done original research that is not yet accepted by their profession will not have their ideas accepted at Wikipedia as the mainstream view, precisely because their views are in fact not yet mainstream. How could they expect it, for who at Wikipedia will be able to judge them? For that they need other experts, and the world of peer-reviewed publication is the place for them.
22067030 4 hours ago Wikipedia is presumably not authoritative so much as a place to start. The gatekeepers are often inexpert, and may be unaware of who the experts are, and at any rate are not maintaining a citable source. Wikipedia is the place to START research. That means, for example, if there is a squabble over, say, climate change, then the squabble itself is a topic that should have citations for people who want to explore the squabble further. But Wikipedia's mission will be undercut if experts - or people who imagine themselves to be experts - start deleting stuff.
I would recommend that if this is a place where the conventional wisdom is very wrong, you start a new page on the controversy itself, with citations to as wide a variety of points of view as you can find, and then link current pages to your new page.
My experience with Wikipedia is that you can tell if you are having an impact by what you initiate, not what you inscribe in stone.
GLMcColm
On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 5:12 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 14/02/12 02:39, Achal Prabhala wrote:
The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia
By Timothy Messer-Kruse
[...]
My improvement lasted five minutes before a Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write."
There are lots of places on Wikipedia where misconceptions have been summarily dealt with, respectable sources criticised and facts brought to light. Unfortunately, most academics don't have time for the edit wars, lengthy talk page discussions and RFCs that are sometimes required to overcome inertia.
The text of Messer-Kruse's article doesn't show much understanding of this aspect of Wikipedia. But publishing it could be seen as canny. It should be effective at recruiting new editors and bringing more attention to the primary sources in question. The article is being actively edited along those lines.
-- Tim Starling
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org