[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Seeking Comment

[Fastfission]

Of course, reporting consensus really relies on the ability to gauge
consensus, which is pretty difficult in and of itself.

Perhaps one way to avert the "sources" problem is to have a few people
who are willing to look up specific sources. I'm not talking about the
"fact-checking" project -- I don't have time to go over an entire
article, even one on a topic I know fairly well, to check each date,
fact, etc. against a source. But if someone said to me, "A user is
citing X fact as being from Y book, maybe on page Z, could you check
this out for me?" I'd be happy to do it over the course of a few days
as my time permitted.

Now this would require two things -- first, people will almost
universal access to anything in mainstream print. There are a few of
us around -- I have access through my overly-wealthy university to
just about anything which was ever in print and then some more. Some
things, such as back issues of the New York TImes, the Washington
Post, and the Wall Street Journal, I can access electronically almost
instantly. I can also do quick searches of dozens of scholarly
journals through JSTOR. I'd be happy to use these resource to benefit
Wikipedia, and have already done this with a few users (people who
wanted specific newspaper articles or obituaries of relatively obscure
scientists, etc.). I imagine there are many others out there with
similar resources at their disposal through their vocation.

The next thing needed with such people would be "trust" -- if "I" say
that the fact was confirmed or not, can you trust that 1. I even
bothered to look it up and 2. that I am telling the truth? Hopefully
such things would be easy to red flag or double-check if there was any
real dispute.

The hope, of course, is that just about anything which would feature
on Wikipedia would be based heavily on secondary sources (i.e. no
original research) and anything not available at a major university
would not likely be mainstream enough for real inclusion. Were there
an organized team of people willing to double-check difficult SPECIFIC
facts (again, I'm not going to spend hours on a single article) or to
even skim literature/journals/reviews for ideas of consensus in a
field (which is that hard to do even if one is not an expert in the
field), it might relieve some of this "content" anxiety that people
seem to be having.

There might, of course, already be something like this, but I haven't
seen it or mention of anything analogous.

FF

On 6/7/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Matt Brown wrote:
> 
> >"Cite your sources" is fine.  "Provide your sources," though, is not.
> >On many obscure topics, the sources WILL be difficult to locate.  Any
> >attempt to turn this requirement into having to provide sources that
> >can be requested from the average library or online will remove a
> >large number of very credible but obscure sources - specialist
> >publications, limited circulation journals, and many other documents.
> >
> >
> IMO, those would only be legitimate sources to cite if the subject
> itself is obscure and known only to specialists.  If it's a well-known
> subject, it would make more sense to use mainstream sources on the
> subject.  If the obscure source is indeed important, it will at least
> have been cited by someone else.  If, for example, you find an obscure
> source on the Holocaust that is not cited in any mainstream work on the
> Holocaust, it would be original research to begin to build an argument
> based on it.  (If you thought mainstream Holocaust historians were
> ignoring some obscure but credible and important source, that would be
> an issue to take up with them; we're just here to report the consensus
> in the field, not to create it.)
> 
> -Mark
> 
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