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

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 6:48 PM, Mike Godwin <mnemonic at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 6:35 PM, George Herbert
> <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Apart from the question of whether this particular article -- on the
> Haymarket bombing -- has been hurt by editors' ill-considered
> application of UNDUE, there's the larger question of what it means for
> our credibility when a very respected journal, The Chronicle of Higher
> Education, features an op-ed that outlines, in very convincing detail,
> what happens when a subject-matter expert attempts to play the rules
> and is still slapped down. If I thought this author's experience is
> rare, I wouldn't be troubled by it. But as someone who frequently
> fielded complaints from folks who were not tendentious kooks, my
> impression is that it is not rare, and that the language of UNDUE --
> as it exists today -- ends up being leveraged in a way that hurts
> Wikipedia both informationally and reputationally.

Any policy - or policy change - we can think of will have unforseen
consequences.  It will somewhere between partly and largely be
interpreted, on the fly, often alone, by editors who are tired or not
paying 100% attention when they apply it.  Some of the applying
editors will have a lack of long-term Wikipedia history and knowledge
to draw on, a lack of insight into the policy implications, etc.  Some
will have personal agendas or biases.

I am not you, and neither have worked for the Foundation nor been
quite as intimately involved in the higher level "public policy"
around internet information and academia as you have for the 20-plus
years ...  That said, I have somewhat of a grounding in these issues
and am comfortable with calling for help or wider attention if I reach
my comfort zone on individual issues; I've been on OTRS (and
technically still are, though I'm inactive at the moment), and a
number of on-and-off wiki contacts of some sort.

Is it possible that you being Mike Godwin is leading to a selection
bias, where a large fraction of the actual experts with actual
problems with process who did anything about it came to or through you
on their way to solving or reporting the problem?

I believe that we're seeing legitimate experts driven away.  Perhaps
its as often as daily.  I know is that I see something (that usually
gets eventually resolved constructively) about once a month, a few of
which (annually?) get big press of some sort.

On a roughly daily basis, when I'm active on-wiki, I run into people
in the less qualified to outright kook realm who are attempting to
impersonate a legitimate expert.

It seems that there are a large surplus of the latter, and only a few
of the former, statistically.  Assuming that's accurate, that should
inform the policy discussion.


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