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

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 12/6/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
> >Maybe complicated isn't what I'm looking for.  But consider the
> >following and whether or not you'd enjoy editing it by hand:
> >
> >'''Roy [[cite:ISBN:123456789:p. 7|"Roy Orbison's middle name is
> >Kelton"|"Kelton"]] Orbison''' ([[cite:ISBN:123456789:p.9|"He was born
> >in Foo, Bar on April 23 of 1936"|"[[April 23]], [[1936]]"]] &ndash;
> >[[cite:ISBN:123456789:p.11|"He died that same year, on the 6th of
> >December"|"[[December 6]], [[1988]]"]]),
> >[[cite:ISBN:123456789:p.13|"They called him "The Big O""|"nicknamed
> >"The Big O""]], was ...
> >
> Interesting example!  Correct bibliography should not override reality
> checks.  Saying that someone born in 1936 died in "that same year",
> which also happens to be 1988 leads me to the conclusion that
> 1936=1988.  :-)   This may not have been Anthony's intention, but if
> what we are trying to say becomes so obscured by citations this is an
> omen of our future problems.
>
Well, yeah, that was intentional.  As I was performing the exercise I
thought about how not all references are going to be as neat and clean
as containing the exact statement in the original.  What if the
reference has a big long paragraph starting with "In 1988, Orbison
began [blah blah whatever]" and ending with "He died that same year". 
Do you quote the whole paragraph, do you use ellipsis (in hindsight I
guess that would be the best solution), do you just add [1988] after
"that same year" (in which case why bother with the exact quote in the
first place)?  It's not so cut and dry.

I was thinking about this yesterday and I imagined some even cooler
things that could be done, such as scanning in the actual page itself
(it could be hosted on a separate site, with lots of access
restrictions, under fair use).  But now we're talking even more of a
pipe dream than the original plan.

> >Maybe I'm misunderstanding how these cites would be used, because that
> >was hell; it was even worse than I had thought before going through
> >the actual exercise.
> >
> >I don't think wiki markup is the proper solution for this.  And that
> >means significant redesign.  Feel free to prove me wrong here, though,
> >and show us a working model which is just as easy to edit as
> >Wikipedia.
> >
> >I think it's a great idea, I just think it's years ahead of its time
> >(and that assumes it's designed independently of Wikimedia, cramming
> >it through Wikimedia development processes would only hinder it).
> >
> >
> Perhaps.  When I asked my own question about what the rest of us can do
> I was not interested in a lot of theoretical material about what library
> scientists put into card catalogues.  I was considering the point of
> view of a normal Wikipedian (assuming such an animal exists) who is
> about to write an article and who already has adequate references that
> he is ready, willing and able to use.  His problem is to find a
> practical way to enter the citations in a way that will scale with the
> proposed theoretical framework.
>
Well, I think a good starting point would be to simply put the
reference(s) in the comment field.  Then someone or some software
could later go through those references and apply them to the
appropriate text (based on the diff).  I go back and forth as to
whether or not it'd be a good idea to have a separate field for this
(and whether or not to require it to be filled out, at least for
non-minor edits).

Putting in a reference with every single edit is probably a good idea
(reverts of vandalism being at least one exception), but I can't even
force myself to do it, so I guess it's best kept as some elusive
target rather than a real requirement.  It'd certainly slow down
editing, especially if you got carried away with it (fixing a spelling
error and referencing the page in the OED).

> The ultimate database seems more and more like the computer geek's
> response the the unified field theory of physicists.  There are still
> many agnostics among us who would like to see proof of 42's existence.
>
> Ec

Well, yeah, to really do it well you almost need artificial
intelligence, the holy grail of computer science.

Anthony