[[ http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/culture/wikipedia/citation-and-trustworthiness... 2005 Nov 02 | Can you trust the Wikipedia?
In the past week the perennial question of "Can you trust the Wikipedia?" arose while I was working on the tedious -- though oddly compelling for an obsessive like myself -- task of reviewing the early period of Wikipedia history. I slowly worked through the Wikipedia timeline ensuring each event was dated and sourced. I realize that if I'm ever to trust this timeline, I need more than a bald claim. And, my appreciation is so much greater when I can peruse the primary source. For some sources, such as the Nupedia list archives, I was able to find copies of messages on the Internet Archive. Another source, Jimbo's explanation about Stallman's proposal for a competing project, is seemingly lost forever. Fortunately, Stallman was kind enough to tell me of his recollection of the incident and allow me to publish it. Most frustratingly, I encountered a tantalizing mention of Internet encyclopedia proposals from the UN's Millennium Project but failed to find any source or corroboration; that information is stricken from the article. Which brings me back to the question of trusting the Wikipedia. I have addressed the broader question of epistemological authority before, but now I want to focus on the role of sources.
Simply, Wikipedia is only as trustworthy as its links. Actual scholarly authority is similar. A critical part of scholarly training is learning why and how to cite (link to) others. Expert authority is also generated from experience in the field, and theoretical and methodological training. Yet, as I've noted many times "'We can never know everything.' We all can't be experts on everything, so we often need to rely upon credible authority while remaining critical and skeptical, but never dismissive." Consequently, the tokens "Ph.D." and "professor" become proxies for an assessment of trust that very few people are able to substantively test, but, to which many are willing to defer. Because Wikipedia lacks such reputation mechanisms Wikipedia is, again, only as trustworthy as its links. For educational purposes, the implication of this is profound. Should we teach students to trust a claim because it was simply uttered by a credentialed person? Or, should we encourage them to click a link and teach them how to investigate for themselves?
The consequent of this for Wikipedia culture is that it doesn't link enough. Perhaps my experience with Wikipedia history is exceptional since Wikipedians take the sources for granted. But, as I found, that's a poor historical assumption. I also share the concern that articles might become overly busy or dense with citations. There is a tension here, but one I think the technology can handle. It's why I believe the trustworthiness of Wikipedia is in part dependent upon the citation project and furthering a culture of "if you claim, you cite" as implied by the Verifiability policy.
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The consequent of this for Wikipedia culture is that it doesn't link enough.
It doesn't link enough??? IMHO opinion it links much to MUCH. Some artcles of maybe 1 A4 length contain over a 100 external links in the english wikipedia. Which is something I call madness. I certainly would not want to encourage people to go linking even more. On some subjects we have more links than the DMOZ project. And we are not google or DMOZ are we?
Waerth/Walter
Perhaps my experienc
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Walter van Kalken wrote:
The consequent of this for Wikipedia culture is that it doesn't link enough.
It doesn't link enough??? IMHO opinion it links much to MUCH. Some artcles of maybe 1 A4 length contain over a 100 external links in the english wikipedia. Which is something I call madness. I certainly would not want to encourage people to go linking even more. On some subjects we have more links than the DMOZ project. And we are not google or DMOZ are we?
As a sidenote to this, someone (NullC? Eloquence?) is planning to run a bot to poll archive.org for all the external links on en: and subsuently replace all external links with links to the archive.org copies...
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
Alphax wrote:
As a sidenote to this, someone (NullC? Eloquence?) is planning to run a bot to poll archive.org for all the external links on en: and subsuently replace all external links with links to the archive.org copies...
Those are not permanent, I have seen them dissappear.
Gerrit.
On Thursday 03 November 2005 02:03, Alphax wrote:
As a sidenote to this, someone (NullC? Eloquence?) is planning to run a bot to poll archive.org for all the external links on en: and subsuently replace all external links with links to the archive.org copies...
Yes, that strikes me as a bad idea too. Particularly, having done this for a number of broken links myself, the Way back machine has a number of dated copies of any given URL over periods of years. Linking to a copy of a a domain name squatter's advertisements after the original site went belly up doesn't sound useful. However, doing this automatically, or at least flagging such links, foreign links that return a 404 or domain squatters might be worthwhile.
On 11/3/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
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Walter van Kalken wrote:
The consequent of this for Wikipedia culture is that it doesn't link enough.
It doesn't link enough??? IMHO opinion it links much to MUCH. Some artcles of maybe 1 A4 length contain over a 100 external links in the english wikipedia. Which is something I call madness. I certainly would not want to encourage people to go linking even more. On some subjects we have more links than the DMOZ project. And we are not google or DMOZ are we?
As a sidenote to this, someone (NullC? Eloquence?) is planning to run a bot to poll archive.org for all the external links on en: and subsuently replace all external links with links to the archive.org copies...
Alphax | /"\
It's NullC; I've pushed and prodded him while chatting on IRC, and he mass-submitted the links in his offline mirror. And I'm afraid you've got it a little mixed up- (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Marudubshinki/Wikipedia_wish_list#Better_c...) the idea is not to replace the current direct links, but to supplement them. So far we are still stuck on format; how do you add the archived link to existing external links in a clear, automatable, compact and comprehensible way? I've got a few possibilities in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Marudubshinki/Linktest but none really satisfy me, and none of them have gotten too much support from people in IRC who've taken a look.
~Maru
On Wednesday 02 November 2005 23:03, Walter van Kalken wrote:
It doesn't link enough??? IMHO opinion it links much to MUCH. Some artcles of maybe 1 A4 length contain over a 100 external links in the english wikipedia. Which is something I call madness. I certainly would not want to encourage people to go linking even more. On some subjects we have more links than the DMOZ project. And we are not google or DMOZ are we?
Hi Walter, in no way am I advocating something like a directory or going overboard lists of lists. My concern is wholly encyclopedic. If we're going to be concerned with questions of authority or trustworthiness, we then have to ask ourselves where does the authority for any claim in a Wikipedia article arise from? Expert reputation is not something we share with other knowledge production disciplines. And, possibly, in our favor we have thousands of eyeballs and fingers that those other disciplines do not have. Most of the debate in a larger media about the Wikipedia seem to be about these two issues. However, the one thing we do have in common with traditional disciplines is citation/linking.
Now, I have scholarly pretensions ;) and I'm very concerned with Wikipedia's history, so my experiences are likely to be different than yours. But in considering the Wikipedia timeline, I find the following undated (within a year) and unsourced entries:
[[ http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia * formation of w:NPOV consensus * Naming Conventions begins to normalize page names * "basic topic pages" spring up * Killing of subpages begins * Standard presentations for chemical elements & biological species * Manual of Style: efforts to standardize presentation across wikipedia ]]
For some of these, I don't know what they mean. For some, I can take a guess but I haven't found a source yet. And for others, such as manual of style, I think I know what they mean but can find a source that places the date nearly a year earlier. So, I am simply reiterating the following: [[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiability Fact checking is time consuming. It is unreasonable to expect other editors to dig for sources to check your work, particularly when the initial content is questionable. The burden of evidence lies with the editor who has made the edit. ]]
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