[Foundation-l] Verifiability: Constitution? Current German proposal

[Lars Aronsson]

Christoph Seydl wrote:

> Actually, the proposal is a little bit longer. Maybe, some non-German
> speakers are interested in the whole proposal:

I guess many who read these summaries in English will get the 
impression that fascism is a part of German lifestyle that didn't 
end in 1945, that every German wants to be as nasty as possible to 
their neighbors, with or without a Fuhrer.  Those who put forward 
such proposals should perhaps bear that in mind.  That this 
proposal came from a German-speaking Swiss doesn't change the 
impression of a Prussian attitude.  The knee-jerk reaction to 
propose new and harder rules is one that must actively be fought 
against, and this didn't happen in this case.  Identifying fake 
(or harmful or pointless) rule proposals is just as important as 
identifying fake articles.

Now, the German voting page actually begins with a problem 
description.  It describes a real problem and tries to find a 
solution for it.  However, the problem is never quantified and the 
overly broad proposed solution is jumped to without considering 
its possible harmful effects.  Even I cannot completely escape the 
suspicion that somebody is out to create (and enforce) rules, 
rather than writing a useful encyclopedia.

The problem description goes like this (my translation):

: Wikipedia contains ever more narrowly specialized articles, 
: whose correctness without source citations can be verified only 
: with much difficulty.  Over and over again, this leads to false 
: informations and completely made-up articles remaining in the 
: encyclopedia for months or years.  As an illustration of the 
: latter we have User:Gestumblindi/Fakemuseum .  Falsified 
: articles can, as seen from this, be dressed in full seriousness. 
: And still such total falsifications without external citations 
: are often speedily deleted, as soon as somebody sees them (which 
: can take some time, if the nonsense is prepared in a 
: Wikipedia-conformant manner).  It is all the more difficult to 
: detect partial fakes, that is when untruthful information is 
: embedded in existing subjects.  The usefulness of Wikipedia as a 
: citable and reliable source suffers because of the often missing 
: source citations.  "Then everybody can just write what fits him" 
: is an often heard prejudice.  Articles that are created with 
: source citations can help to counter this rumour of 
: unseriousity.


The next section of the German page provides statistics about how 
many new articles cite sources, but the page doesn't quantify the 
*problem*.  How many new articles were created and how many were 
really of the fake kind? How "often" is this accusation heard, 
from whom, and what kinds of articles are part of the problem?  
Did the accusations come from commercial publishers, teachers and 
librarians with a self-interest in the old authoritarian 
encyclopedias, and is there any evidence that these accusations 
would stop if Wikipedia adjusts its policies? The introduction of 
the problem description mentions narrowly specializied topics, so 
why not find a solution that is limited to that kind of articles? 
If somebody wants to write a fake article, isn't it just as easy 
to invent fake sources?  Enforcing the proposed policy would 
require citations to be in the article, but who is going to the 
library to check that these sources exist and are in agreement 
with what the article says?

I find no trace of empirical evidence that such a policy would 
help the rumour of Wikipedia as a reliable source.  What I do find 
is a proposed rule of the fascist kind that makes it a lot harder 
to contribute to Wikipedia.  So the easy conclusion is that this 
proposal is pushed by somebody with fascist tendencies.  Now 
*there* is a rumour that the German Wikipedia has to deal with.

Did I just accuse user:Gestumblindi of walking around in a brown 
shirt with a swastika on his arm?  No, of course not.  Before 
putting forward this proposal, he has been collecting a nice 
"museum" of fake articles found in the German Wikipedia.  He's 
ambitious and takes fact control seriously, which is a general 
trend on the German Wikipedia.  It's just that the solution he 
proposes is to introduce a draconian rule that (1) can't really 
solve the problem anyway, because the serious vandals will conform 
and invent sources, and (2) threatens to stop all serious 
contributions to Wikipedia.  And jumping to stricter rules is 
indeed a trend on the German Wikipedia.  Instead, I think he 
should turn his promising "fake museum" into a WikiProject where 
more volunteers are encouraged to help in tracing down fake 
articles.  That's the way to build something rather than 
introducing harmful rules.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se