[WikiEN-l] And you thought Pokémon was trivial...

[maru dubshinki]

On 6/23/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/23/06, Zero <megamanzero521 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On 6/23/06, George William Herbert wrote:
> > >Is there a project or such of people who can go around focusing on
> > >adding references?
> >
> > >Would adding references be a useful thing to encourage as class
> > >projects for college students, etc?
> >
> > That would be a ideal wiki-project to implement, certainly more useful than
> > these sub projects that pop up every five minutes for the lastest fad down the street.
>
> Quick poking around finds:
> WikiProject Fact and Reference Check
>
> This project seems somewhat aligned with this goal, but it seems to
> combine fact checking with reference addition activities.
>
> It also seems, as a project, to be not moving very quickly at the moment.
>
> Would working within that structure be useful, or a new project?
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert

I figure it's a false premise. If you're gonna fact-check and
reference an article, you need a lot of knowledge of that area, not to
mention knowledge of what sources and books and reference works to
consult; you need subject-area knowledge to interpret what you find.

That knowledge is essential. You can through sheer grunt work and
search engines perhaps verify the true bits of an article, but there
are some things that just don't work. I'll lay out an example. Let us
suppose the Wikipedia articles on Japanese court poetry were
completely screwed up, and were the next designated target. You find
in the [[Emperor Go-Toba]] article an assertion that in his exile, he
asked [[Fujiwara no Teika]] to judge some of his poems.
Now, this seems fairly plausible. You know they were both alive at
this period, because you've already fact-checked the dates, you know
that they had a fairly close relation.  But how can you prove it? You
simply can't find any statements one way or the other.  No source is
going to tell you that this is false, and that it was *Fujiwara no
Ietaka* who Go-Toba asked to judge his poems. They might mention the
correct fact, but you can't be sure that he didn't really ask both and
your source for the correct fact simply omitted one of the requests -
after all, he was exiled for a pretty long time.  Hard to prove a
negative, y'know.

We can ask area-specific projects to do it. Ask a Star Wars editor to
fact-check and source a SW article; ask a football fan/editor to check
a football editor. Expecting a project of random people to instantly
make themselves into area epxerts is to expect too much.

~maru