-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Foundation-l] Jihad in Defense of Objectivity (Was: Enforcing WP:CITE) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 17:49:36 -0800 (PST) From: Jonathan Leybovich jleybov@yahoo.com Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@wikimedia.org To: foundation-l@wikimedia.org
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.
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