[WikiEN-l] Nuke [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]]

[Phil Sandifer]

On Jan 25, 2007, at 11:58 AM, Bogdan Giusca wrote:

> Thursday, January 25, 2007, 6:25:38 PM, Ken wrote:
>
>> WP:CITE and WP:RS are unreasonably easy to abuse
>
> What you call "abuse", others call improval of the sourcing and
> of the verifiability, and of therefore the credibility of Wikipedia.
>
> From my experience on Wikipedia, almost all the criticism on the
> Reliable Sources requirements comes from people who edit mostly
> articles on anime, webcomics, furry subculture, internet memes
> and the like.
>

This just isn't true. There are plenty of reliable sources issues to  
be found about academic topics, particularly in the humanities. For  
example, it is mind-wrenchingly difficult to write a sourced article  
about [[Jacques Derrida]]. Why? Because one either has to frame his  
thought in terms of mediocre primers on his work like _Derrida for  
Beginners_, or one has to try to use the academic debate surrounding  
Derrida, in which case all of one's sources are aimed at an expert  
audience and there's no good foothold to explain the basics of  
Derrida's thought. Furthermore, one is left in a position where  
clueless political attacks on Derrida get disproportionate time,  
because lots of people can understand Ann Coulter and thus can add  
citations to her, but a lot fewer people can understand Julian  
Wolfreys and add citations to him.

There's not a good solution to this from within a source-paranoid  
culture, because the way to write a decent article on Derrida is to  
have three or four people who work with Derridean thought write it  
up, bash out compromises on wording among themselves, write brief  
bits that explain major debates about Derrida's thought where they  
can't agree on a generally applicable way of presenting something,  
and then to have a references section that points to some major work  
on Derrida. And if someone comes along and says "Dude, this article  
is crap. Here's a bunch of citations that show that this article  
totally misrepresents Derrida," we work from there.

But there is no good way to write an article on Jacques Derrida that  
is both a good introduction for a layperson and sourced at every turn.

I'd be similarly shocked if one could write a good article on high  
temperature physics or group theory while being totally dependent on  
published reliable sources, because those sources were never written  
for the purpose of being used to explain the concept to novices.
> Those areas are not the core of an encyclopedia and protecting those
> areas should should not result in the compromising the rest of
> Wikipedia.
>
> We can't have two sets of rules: one for cruft and one for the rest.

Nobody is proposing two sets of rules. What people have frequently  
proposed is that the rule should be "everything must be sourced to  
the recognized standards of reliability for that subject," and  
understanding that the standards are somewhat less rigorous in  
popular culture.

I'll also note that, contrary to popular rhetoric, [[WP:RS]] does  
very little to help fix pokecruft, because nobody can make a serious  
argument that Pokemon episodes are not reliable sources for  
information about what happens in Pokemon episodes. (At least not one  
that has ever gained any traction, and thank God for that, because  
it's a damn silly argument that has nothing to do with reliability  
and everything to do with frantically trying to build an idiot-proof  
wall against pokecruft by any means necessary, without regard for  
whether the wall makes sense.)

In fact, I suspect we'd have an easier time getting historical out-of- 
universe information if we let people who knew stuff about the  
history of Pokemon write articles without demanding they go back and  
figure out where exactly they read every single fact they're trying  
to include.

Put another way, the demand that every piece of information has a  
source means that we get a preponderance of information that's low- 
hanging fruit - that is, information that is easily found online and  
easily understood by anybody. That does not coincide well with  
information that is good.

Again, this is essentially a design problem. [[WP:RS]] and  
[[WP:CITE]] fail to consider that they need to be implemented by  
casual volunteers who are working out of good will. They'd be great  
policy if Wikipedia were written by paid experts and people who  
devote huge amounts of time to the project. (Which is who they were  
written by) But they're crap for someone who finds a problem on a  
page they're looking at and wants to fix it. Which is the vast  
majority of our editors.

This is the key problem. [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] were not written  
with our actual userbase in mind. They are useful only to people like  
us - that is, people who are obsessed enough with Wikipedia to join a  
mailing list for discussion of it. That's not most of our editors.

Here's what we need. Picture Susan. Susan is a 40-year-old stay at  
home mother who majored in English, and still has a fondness for Jane  
Austen. Susan, one day, is browsing the Internet and reads our  
article on [[Pride and Prejudice]]. She sees an error. In five  
minutes, her kid is getting off the school bus.

We need a policy that lets Susan fix the problem and then go meet her  
kid at the bus without having her change reverted.

-Phil