[Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

[George Herbert]

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 5:48 PM, Mike Godwin <mnemonic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Fred Bauder writes:
>
>> I think it probably seems to climate change deniers that excluding
>> political opinions from science-based articles on global warming is a
>> violation of neutral point of view, and of basic fairness. That is just
>> one example, but there are other similar situations.
>
> This analogy is breathtakingly unpersuasive. Apart from the fact that
> consensus about scientific theory is not analogous to consensus about
> the historical records of particular events, climate-change-denial
> theory is actually discussed quite thoroughly on Wikipedia. Plus, the
> author of the op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education doesn't seem
> at all like climate-change deniers.
>
> If there is something specific you want to suggest about the author --
> that he's agenda-driven, that his work is unreliable, or that the
> journal in which he published the article is not a reliable source --
> then I think equity requires that you declare why you doubt or dismiss
> his article.
>
> I read the article in the Chronicle pretty carefully. The author's
> experience struck me as an example of a pattern that may account for
> the flattening of the growth curve in new editors as well as for some
> other phenomena. As you may rememember, Andrew Lih conducted a
> presentation on "the policy thicket" at Wikimania almost five years
> ago. The wielding of policy by long-term editors, plus the rewriting
> of the policy so that it is used to undercut NPOV rather than preserve
> it, strikes me as worth talking about. Dismissing it out of hand, or
> analogizing it to climate-change denial, undercuts my trust in the
> Wikipedian process rather than reinforces it.
>
>
> --Mike

Let me make an observation -

The post-facto probability of 1.0 that the researcher was in fact
professional, credible, and by all accounts right does not mean that a
priori he should automatically have been treated that way before the
situation was clarified.

By far the majority of people who come up and "buck the system" or
challenge established knowledge in this manner are, in fact, kooks or
people with an agenda.  This started - as others have pointed out -
with a few fields where this is narrowly but clearly established, but
has been successfully generalized.

Let us acknowledge some obvious truths here, that we had bad info in
an article, that we had a scholar unfamiliar with WP process whose
first attempt to correct it went somewhat (but not horrifically)
wrong, that the engagement of a number of WP editors/administrators
failed to identify the credibility of the scholar and wrongness of the
info.

To simply toss UNDUE in response seems a mistake.  UNDUE is, every
day, actively helping us fight off crap trying to fling itself into
WP.

Valid questions, to me, seem to include whether the editors simply
failed to notice they were arguing with a subject matter expert
history professor and asking for a shrubbery rather than assisting the
guy through the rats nest of WP policy, whether the editors had any
preexisting biases that may have slanted their engagement here,
whether the editors had histories of inappropriate responses to less
experienced editors.

I think the answers to the last two are no; I don't know about one.

If the answer to one is "yes", then "These things happen" is an
explanation but not an excuse, and should be a prompt to help us all
get better at detecting that.  These things do happen, but should not.
 These things do happen, but we should expect better on the average.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com