[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as a primary source

[Erik Moeller]

On 3/13/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
> The idea that anybody famous can call up the WP office

I think I explicitly said that the office shouldn't be involved at all in this.

> Just as we need to be known for not allowing corporations to buy slanted
> coverage, we need it to be known that celebrities can't get the slant
> they want just by asking.

It's not about slant. It's mostly about very basic, undisputed fact
corrections where the only objection is a dogmatic "Oh, you may *say*
your birth date is so-and-so, but can you *prove it with a reliable
source*"?. If there's no consensus for inclusion, then it wouldn't be
included, except in some cases as an attributed statement.

I'm not concerned about a slippery slope here. Wikipedians tend to be
pretty paranoid the moment anyone vaguely connected to an article says
anything (and rightly so). Policy and processes are built on
consensus; there will be no consensus for anything sinister. What I
propose is not sinister, it is reasonable.

Putting statements on blogs or websites is one way of making them
"official", but not the only way, and has its own problems (websites
disappear, especially those that were just set up to make some
Wikipedia editor happy). IMHO it would be perfectly fine for Wikipedia
to accept such statements & corrections directly, and to refer to them
as <ref>correction/statement submitted by XX, ticket ID #123, received
...</ref>. The main issue here is verifying identity, but that could
be handled by trusted people who have access to the respective OTRS
queue.

I agree that it is silly to <ref> diffs and talk pages, but having a
specific tracking system (which we incidentally are using already
anyway) be put to use for this strikes me as completely sound.

This is better than just letting subjects edit directly (because we
can trace it, because humans act as COI filters, and because we can
implement peer-to-peer methods of verification),  and it certainly
seems a lot more reasonable to me than current practices.

-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik

DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.

"An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open,
free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic