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

Mon Dec 5 15:40:02 UTC 2005

I think these are some great ideas.  In fact, I think some time in the
future we'll see a lot of them implemented.

The problem, I think, is that they are such a radical departure from
the normal wiki process.  Wiki markup is currently fairly simple. 
There are some more complicated add-ons, such as tables, but for the
most part it's not hard to read and edit wiki-text after a basic
introduction.

Introducing detailed citation features would require either abanoning
that simplicity or abandoning the concept of writing the wikitext
directly.  Both of these would be significantly detrimental to the
Wikipedia project in the short term.

I think there needs to be a proof of concept created first.  Later,
I'm talking on the order of years, Wikipedia might be able to
incorporate many of the features into the mediawiki software.  I think
a nice WYSIWYG editor is a prerequisite though.

In the mean time, Wikipedia articles are GFDL.  There's no problem
with copying them, running them through a citation check, making
fixes, and then merging back.

Anthony

On 12/4/05, Jonathan Leybovich <jleybov at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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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