Jussi-ville writes:
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. ... 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.
I think the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is a must-read. Here you have a researcher who actually took pains to learn what the rules to editing Wikipedia are (including No Original Research), and who, instead of trying to end-run WP:NOR, waited years until the article was actually published before trying to modify the Haymarket article. To me, this is a particularly fascinating case because the author's article, unlike the great majority of sources for Wikipedia articles, was peer-reviewed -- this means it underwent academic scrutiny that the newspapers, magazines, and other popular sources we rely on never undergo.
I think the problem really is grounded in the UNDUE WEIGHT policy itself, as written, and not in mere misuse of the policy.
--Mike
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 4:44 AM, Mike Godwin mnemonic@gmail.com wrote:
I think the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is a must-read. Here you have a researcher who actually took pains to learn what the rules to editing Wikipedia are (including No Original Research), and who, instead of trying to end-run WP:NOR, waited years until the article was actually published before trying to modify the Haymarket article. To me, this is a particularly fascinating case because the author's article, unlike the great majority of sources for Wikipedia articles, was peer-reviewed -- this means it underwent academic scrutiny that the newspapers, magazines, and other popular sources we rely on never undergo.
I think the problem really is grounded in the UNDUE WEIGHT policy itself, as written, and not in mere misuse of the policy.
Perhaps the policies can be improved, but they are written to stop bad editing rather than to encourage good editing. I don't think that can be changed. It's impossible to legislate good judgement, and it's judgement that was called for with the Haymarket article.
Mike
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 4:44 AM, Mike Godwin mnemonic@gmail.com wrote:
I think the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is a must-read. Here you have a researcher who actually took pains to learn what the rules to editing Wikipedia are (including No Original Research), and who, instead of trying to end-run WP:NOR, waited years until the article was actually published before trying to modify the Haymarket article. To me, this is a particularly fascinating case because the author's article, unlike the great majority of sources for Wikipedia articles, was peer-reviewed -- this means it underwent academic scrutiny that the newspapers, magazines, and other popular sources we rely on never undergo.
I think the problem really is grounded in the UNDUE WEIGHT policy itself, as written, and not in mere misuse of the policy.
Perhaps the policies can be improved, but they are written to stop bad editing rather than to encourage good editing. I don't think that can be changed. It's impossible to legislate good judgement, and it's judgement that was called for with the Haymarket article.
Mike
The policy had its roots in the effort to deal with physics cranks, see
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-September/006715.html
It it is misapplied when rigorous new research is excluded. What is needed is capacity make judgements based on familiarity with the literature in the field. You can have that, as a academic in the field might, or you can learn about it by reading literature in the field and finding how how new research was received, reviewed and commented on.
Fred
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 1:57 PM, Mike Christie coldchrist@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps the policies can be improved, but they are written to stop bad editing rather than to encourage good editing. I don't think that can be changed. It's impossible to legislate good judgement, and it's judgement that was called for with the Haymarket article.
A cop pulls over a black man and and follows the usual procedures. It turns out he was a Harvard Professor. He failed to exercise good judgement.
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 1:57 PM, Mike Christie coldchrist@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps the policies can be improved, but they are written to stop bad editing rather than to encourage good editing. I don't think that can be changed. It's impossible to legislate good judgement, and it's judgement that was called for with the Haymarket article.
As of now they do not merely allow, but require the removal of various kinds of good editing. And though it is impossible to legislate good judgement, it is possible to supply enforcers with equipment far in excess of what doing their job properly requires.
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 3:57 AM, Mike Christie coldchrist@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps the policies can be improved, but they are written to stop bad editing rather than to encourage good editing. I don't think that can be changed. It's impossible to legislate good judgement, and it's judgement that was called for with the Haymarket article.
If policies don't encourage good judgment, or discourage bad judgment, then what are policies for?
It seems worth discussing whether it would be good to revise the existing policy to restore its original (presumed) functionality.
More generally, I've believed for a long time that WP policies have been increased, modified, and subverted in ways that both create a higher barrier to entry for new editors and that discourage both new editors and existing ones.
--Mike
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 3:57 AM, Mike Christie coldchrist@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps the policies can be improved, but they are written to stop bad editing rather than to encourage good editing. I don't think that can be changed. It's impossible to legislate good judgement, and it's judgement that was called for with the Haymarket article.
If policies don't encourage good judgment, or discourage bad judgment, then what are policies for?
It seems worth discussing whether it would be good to revise the existing policy to restore its original (presumed) functionality.
More generally, I've believed for a long time that WP policies have been increased, modified, and subverted in ways that both create a higher barrier to entry for new editors and that discourage both new editors and existing ones.
--Mike
I think it probably seems to climate change deniers that excluding political opinions from science-based articles on global warming is a violation of neutral point of view, and of basic fairness. That is just one example, but there are other similar situations.
Fred
On 02/19/12 12:04 PM, Mike Godwin wrote:
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 3:57 AM, Mike Christiecoldchrist@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps the policies can be improved, but they are written to stop bad editing rather than to encourage good editing. I don't think that can be changed. It's impossible to legislate good judgement, and it's judgement that was called for with the Haymarket article.
If policies don't encourage good judgment, or discourage bad judgment, then what are policies for?
It seems worth discussing whether it would be good to revise the existing policy to restore its original (presumed) functionality.
More generally, I've believed for a long time that WP policies have been increased, modified, and subverted in ways that both create a higher barrier to entry for new editors and that discourage both new editors and existing ones.
Policies in general tend to discourage judgement of any sort. Even when such policies are classified as guidelines there will always be those who seek their rigid application. In criminal law, when an accused is acquitted of a particularly heinous crime there will always be those who believe that it's because the law was not tough enough. They often succeed in making it tougher, and end up catching more fish than intended.
I just passed my 10th Wiki Birthday, and I'm certainly discouraged from much substantial editing. I often leave material that I suspect to be wrong because the emotional cost of making the correction is much too high. If others do that too the reliability of the entire Wikipedia is put in question.
As Mark has said, some subjects are highly vulnerable to recentism, but one shouldn't expect that with a historical article about events from 1886. When crowdsourcing it is dangerous to assume that the majority will always be right. That perpetuates errors, and makes correcting them very difficult. Whatever we think of Stalin we want to spell his name right. An English speaking majority in a Google ranking refers to him as Joseph even if a stricter or more scholarly transliteration gives Josef. Whatever spelling we choose alters the landscape; as a highly popular source that is often quoted and copied we set the standard for what is correct. Our errors will establish the norm. We become our own uncertainty principle.
Ray
I have initiated a discussion at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Neutral_point_of_view#The_.27Und...
It is there that any refinement of the policy and how it is properly applied can possibly be resolved. I note that the article in question still does not contain information regarding the evidence presented at the trial.
Fred
On 2/20/12 10:39 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
As Mark has said, some subjects are highly vulnerable to recentism, but one shouldn't expect that with a historical article about events from 1886.
I agree it's more of a problem in some areas than others, but I think it also often applies as a heuristic to history as well: many revisionist proposals never succeed in revising the mainstream historical narrative. The fact that they're published in a journal simply means that several peers thought it was a legitimate proposal worth publishing, not necessarily that it's going to become the new majority view.
I even ran into a recent example in classics while editing on Wikipedia. A paper was published in 1985 challenging the standard account of a Roman fellow's death, [[en:Marcus Marius Gratidianus]], which I dug up and suggested we use it to revise our (older) traditional narrative. But then some more searching dug up late-1980s and early-1990s papers that defended the traditional narrative, and from what I can tell that 1985 paper is now considered an intriguing suggestion but unlikely to be correct, or partially correct at best.
But what if the year were 1985 and those responses hadn't come out yet? How do we determine if that paper's new findings are the new mainstream narrative, or just an interesting proposal, worth mentioning as a minority view, but ultimately unpersuasive? In hindsight, updating the article in 1985 to anoint this as the new scholarly view would've been premature, because it never did get accepted by the rest of the field. The only real answer seems to be "wait a few years and let it percolate through the literature", and my only guess at a faster alternative is to have experts in the field who can make some kind of educated guess as to which revisionist proposals are likely to ultimately succeed. I think it's a hard problem in general.
-Mark
The one thing experts in a field are not good at, is predicting the success of innovative material. If it were of predictable value, it wouldn't be revisionist. Experts can tell is something fits into the accepted paradigms; they can tell if something is so wrong with respect to soundly known facts that is is very unlikely to be true, they can even tell if they individually agree with a new proposal--but they cannot tell what is outside the current boundaries but the field as a whole will accept, or how many years or decades it will take for such acceptance, or how long the acceptance will last until the next reversal.
To the extent experts can judge the new work, we do not need them to tell us on Wikipedia directly, overturning the principle that all editors are equal; a new work of any importance will have reviews and commentaries on it, and that's where the experts will have their say, and where any editor can find and cite them, as is the established practice. We do need to cover such reviews more than we currently do; if experts come to a talk page and indicate these to us, we can include them.
Unfortunately, in the humanities such reviews can take several years to arrive--though sometimes there will be an immediate discussion in academic magazines,whether specialist ones or general sources such as the (UK) Times Higher Education or the (US) Chronicle of Higher Education. Perhaps we should even consider the use of some of the most accepted blogs for the purpose also.
But we should at least give some mention to peer-reviewed materials published by a major academic publisher--so at least the readers can know of it and examine it for themselves.
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 11:32 AM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
On 2/20/12 10:39 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
As Mark has said, some subjects are highly vulnerable to recentism, but one shouldn't expect that with a historical article about events from 1886.
I agree it's more of a problem in some areas than others, but I think it also often applies as a heuristic to history as well: many revisionist proposals never succeed in revising the mainstream historical narrative. The fact that they're published in a journal simply means that several peers thought it was a legitimate proposal worth publishing, not necessarily that it's going to become the new majority view.
I even ran into a recent example in classics while editing on Wikipedia. A paper was published in 1985 challenging the standard account of a Roman fellow's death, [[en:Marcus Marius Gratidianus]], which I dug up and suggested we use it to revise our (older) traditional narrative. But then some more searching dug up late-1980s and early-1990s papers that defended the traditional narrative, and from what I can tell that 1985 paper is now considered an intriguing suggestion but unlikely to be correct, or partially correct at best.
But what if the year were 1985 and those responses hadn't come out yet? How do we determine if that paper's new findings are the new mainstream narrative, or just an interesting proposal, worth mentioning as a minority view, but ultimately unpersuasive? In hindsight, updating the article in 1985 to anoint this as the new scholarly view would've been premature, because it never did get accepted by the rest of the field. The only real answer seems to be "wait a few years and let it percolate through the literature", and my only guess at a faster alternative is to have experts in the field who can make some kind of educated guess as to which revisionist proposals are likely to ultimately succeed. I think it's a hard problem in general.
-Mark
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On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Mike Godwin mnemonic@gmail.com wrote:
Jussi-ville writes:
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 the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is a must-read. Here you have a researcher who actually took pains to learn what the rules to editing Wikipedia are (including No Original Research), and who, instead of trying to end-run WP:NOR, waited years until the article was actually published before trying to modify the Haymarket article. To me, this is a particularly fascinating case because the author's article, unlike the great majority of sources for Wikipedia articles, was peer-reviewed -- this means it underwent academic scrutiny that the newspapers, magazines, and other popular sources we rely on never undergo.
I think the problem really is grounded in the UNDUE WEIGHT policy itself, as written, and not in mere misuse of the policy.
--Mike
I agree. It's the way UNDUE is written that is problematic, and it has led, for years, to significant-minority viewpoints being excluded -- on the grounds that the views are not sufficiently well-represented by reliable sources; or that the reliable sources, even if peer-reviewed, belong to the wrong field.
Sarah
On 2/19/12 4:12 PM, Sarah wrote:
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Mike Godwinmnemonic@gmail.com wrote:
I think the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is a must-read. Here you have a researcher who actually took pains to learn what the rules to editing Wikipedia are (including No Original Research), and who, instead of trying to end-run WP:NOR, waited years until the article was actually published before trying to modify the Haymarket article. To me, this is a particularly fascinating case because the author's article, unlike the great majority of sources for Wikipedia articles, was peer-reviewed -- this means it underwent academic scrutiny that the newspapers, magazines, and other popular sources we rely on never undergo.
I think the problem really is grounded in the UNDUE WEIGHT policy itself, as written, and not in mere misuse of the policy.
--Mike
I agree. It's the way UNDUE is written that is problematic, and it has led, for years, to significant-minority viewpoints being excluded -- on the grounds that the views are not sufficiently well-represented by reliable sources; or that the reliable sources, even if peer-reviewed, belong to the wrong field.
The history of why it's written that way is interesting to keep in mind. As far as I recall and can reconstruct, the main three targets were: 1) fringe-physics advocates; 2) alternative-medicine advocates; and 3) advocates of heterodox theories of WW2 and the Holocaust. There was an influx of all three circa 2003-05, once Wikipedia started getting internet-famous (featured on Slashdot, etc.).
WP:NOR was a first-cut reaction to exclude the totally fringe stuff, like some Usenet people who had migrated to Wikipedia and were trying to make it their own personal original-physics playground. But what about minority views that *are* published somewhere, just not widely held? The response was WP:UNDUE, that those should indeed be covered, but in an appropriate, limited sense--- it should not be the case that every single article on a subatomic particle would include a section explaining the heterodox view according to $very_minor_fringe_theory, even though the theory itself should have an article, and perhaps a brief mention in one of the top-level articles (e.g. in some sort of "alternative views" section of a particle-physics article). Same with including minority historical views in every single article on the Holocaust, or on the Civil War, even in the case of minority views held by respectable scholars.
What I find discussing this is that, put in that context, the majority of people (at least that I've talked to) think the policy is correct and makes sense in that context. So the trick seems to be that it makes less sense in other contexts.
-Mark
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 7:16 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
On 2/19/12 4:12 PM, Sarah wrote:
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Mike Godwinmnemonic@gmail.com wrote:
I think the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is a
must-read. Here you have a researcher who actually took pains to learn what the rules to editing Wikipedia are (including No Original Research), and who, instead of trying to end-run WP:NOR, waited years until the article was actually published before trying to modify the Haymarket article. To me, this is a particularly fascinating case because the author's article, unlike the great majority of sources for Wikipedia articles, was peer-reviewed -- this means it underwent academic scrutiny that the newspapers, magazines, and other popular sources we rely on never undergo.
I think the problem really is grounded in the UNDUE WEIGHT policy itself, as written, and not in mere misuse of the policy.
--Mike
I agree. It's the way UNDUE is written that is problematic, and it has led, for years, to significant-minority viewpoints being excluded -- on the grounds that the views are not sufficiently well-represented by reliable sources; or that the reliable sources, even if peer-reviewed, belong to the wrong field.
The history of why it's written that way is interesting to keep in mind. As far as I recall and can reconstruct, the main three targets were: 1) fringe-physics advocates; 2) alternative-medicine advocates; and 3) advocates of heterodox theories of WW2 and the Holocaust. There was an influx of all three circa 2003-05, once Wikipedia started getting internet-famous (featured on Slashdot, etc.).
WP:NOR was a first-cut reaction to exclude the totally fringe stuff, like some Usenet people who had migrated to Wikipedia and were trying to make it their own personal original-physics playground. But what about minority views that *are* published somewhere, just not widely held? The response was WP:UNDUE, that those should indeed be covered, but in an appropriate, limited sense--- it should not be the case that every single article on a subatomic particle would include a section explaining the heterodox view according to $very_minor_fringe_theory, even though the theory itself should have an article, and perhaps a brief mention in one of the top-level articles (e.g. in some sort of "alternative views" section of a particle-physics article). Same with including minority historical views in every single article on the Holocaust, or on the Civil War, even in the case of minority views held by respectable scholars.
What I find discussing this is that, put in that context, the majority of people (at least that I've talked to) think the policy is correct and makes sense in that context. So the trick seems to be that it makes less sense in other contexts.
You are missing the point, the original wording of the policy was fine, in any context, closely read. But the language has been tweaked, so the original intent is completely clouded and replaced by a vastly expanded ambit of applicability.
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Mike Godwin mnemonic@gmail.com wrote:
Jussi-ville writes:
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. ... 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.
I think the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is a must-read. Here you have a researcher who actually took pains to learn what the rules to editing Wikipedia are (including No Original Research), and who, instead of trying to end-run WP:NOR, waited years until the article was actually published before trying to modify the Haymarket article. To me, this is a particularly fascinating case because the author's article, unlike the great majority of sources for Wikipedia articles, was peer-reviewed -- this means it underwent academic scrutiny that the newspapers, magazines, and other popular sources we rely on never undergo.
I think the problem really is grounded in the UNDUE WEIGHT policy itself, as written, and not in mere misuse of the policy.
Yes, that is what I said in my previous posting, the policy as it originally was written was fine, but people deliberately edited the policy in such a way that the letter of the policy in the strict sense makes this kind of abuse possible, and not merely possible, but commonplace. Some of the editors might have had excusable motives of not only removing fringe beliefs from wikipedia but also things they considered too inconsequential to be in an encyclopaedia. I think they were fundamentally and comprehensively wrong to take this view, but I cannot deny that from their philosophical perspective, removing what they consider dross but others might not, is from their perspective a good thing no matter how much they must twist the original intent of the policy document.
A collateral of this and a few other policies similarly co-opted and edited beyond the original aims and intent of the policy in effect was to leverage power to the experienced editors who knew how to quote chapter and verse from the policies, and to dissuade new editors from protesting the validity of their case. I do believe this might have some relevance to the low retention rate of new editors.
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