[Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge

[Ray Saintonge]

This is spot on.

At times I wonder if some Wikipedians have ever heard of epistemology.  
I also have taken note that there is a tendency among some editors to 
truncate probability calculations to the nearest whole number.

Ray

On 07/29/11 2:50 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> The great thing about an oral history citations project is that it is
> a first and active method to remedy one of the big problems with
> English Wikipedia: the epistemology - how we decide we know what we
> know - really is completely and utterly broken at the edges.
>
> (I realise this is foundation-l, but en:wp is a third of Wikimedia by
> most measures, and this discussion shows its ways of doing things
> getting into everywhere else.)
>
> The trouble is that all through history, turning information into
> knowledge has required human judgement and nuance. People do four-year
> humanities degrees to *start* getting *any good at all* at this stuff.
> But Wikipedia being Wikipedia, the whole thing has to be (a) reduced
> to a three paragraph guideline (b) which calcifies into policy (c)
> misinterpreted by socially-inept teenagers (d) with the
> misinterpretations being perpetuated well past the point of actual
> failure.
>
> Thus we end up with blithering insanity like the phrase "reliable
> sources" being used unironically, as if being listed on WP:RS
> *actually makes a source humanly reliable*. This is particularly
> hilarious when applied to newspapers - no-one who has *ever* been
> quoted by the media would think this way.
>
> (For those of you aware of the hip Bayesian way to calculate
> uncertainty, this is what happens when your network has allowed
> probabilities of 1 or 0.)
>
> Now, the sourcing method we have almost works. Its successes are
> important and useful. But there's a lot of denial that it breaks
> really badly when misapplied, and that the misapplications are even a
> problem. WJohnson's earnestly put forward this viewpoint in this
> thread; his argument appears to be that we don't have a perfect
> solution so therefore this must not be a problem and doing something
> that doesn't work *harder* must be the right answer.
>
> Somehow we have to get the nuance back. All this stuff is produced by
> humans, and working assumptions that it isn't are *broken*.
>
> The oral citations project appears to be a first step to even
> acknowledging that the present methods actually break at the edges.
> This alone makes it a good and useful thing. And, y'know, we might
> actually learn something.
>
>
> - d.