[Foundation-l] Jihad in Defense of Objectivity (Was: Enforcing WP:CITE)

Mon Dec 5 01:49:36 UTC 2005

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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