[WikiEN-l] Actual Problems with WP:V

[Philip Sandifer]

Since I haven't done it in a while, I went to look at V,. As seems to  
happen every once in a while, all three have fallen into egregious  
disrepair. Here's my line-by-lines of it. I, of course, am posting the  
relevant bits to the talk page as well. I may do one of these for RS  
and NOR later - a quick glance suggests that they're backsliding  
rather a lot, and are infested with overreaching generalizations  
designed to avoid applications of judgment as often as possible. The  
page displays most of our absolute worst instincts, and is, through  
and through, an active barrier to the writing of successful articles  
as opposed to a page that describes and mandates our best practices.

Standard note of qualifications: I am a PhD student in English who  
fairly regularly teaches writing courses including ones that are  
expected to cover basic research skills. I am not a composition  
specialist, but I am at least tangentally aware of the trends there  
and know pretty well the general sense of "what makes good research- 
based writing."

That said, problematic quotes followed by my comments on them.

* "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not  
truth."

Not factually wrong as such, but how, exactly, WP:V became a  
notability guideline I am not sure. More to the point, though, this  
obscures a fundamental aspect of verifiability - we use it because  
it's a good way of ensuring truth, not because we prefer it to truth.

* "If no reliable, third-party (in relation to the subject) sources  
can be found for an article topic, Wikipedia should not have an  
article on it."

This, of course, has been done to death. Suffice it to say that there  
is no evidence whatsoever that this line has the in-practice support  
of the larger community.

* "Do not leave unsourced information in articles for too long"

This is supported by a quote from Jimbo that simply does not say "Do  
not leave unsourced information in articles for too long." At the risk  
of overreading the tea leaves, the quote in question is about "random  
speculative 'I heard it somewhere' pseudo information," and later in  
the post this is explicitly linked with bad writing. That is *not*  
equivalent to "every single statement requires a source." There is  
(and always has been) an implicit matter of judgment involved in what  
information should and should not be removed. This captures the heart  
of the problem that infests WP:V at the moment - it has become a  
guideline not about the nature of the information being presented but  
about the specific presentations of it in a way that creates excessive  
pressure to get it right on the first try and inhibits the  
collaborative editing structure that is implicit to our process.

* "In general, the most reliable sources are peer-reviewed journals  
and books published in university presses; university-level textbooks;  
magazines, journals, and books published by respected publishing  
houses; and mainstream newspapers. "

This is not untrue as such, but it is a weird bias - mainstream  
newspapers are very odd sources from our perspective, as they by their  
nature cover ephemeral material and do not attempt to provide a  
detached overview. The rest are all good, but weirdly biased towards  
academic topics in a way that is at times problematic. I'm very active  
with the peer-reviewed journal of ImageTexT, which focuses on comics  
studies. But I'm loathe to suggest that articles published in  
ImageTexT are the single best sources for their subjects, just because  
academic criticism in the humanities is a marginal part of the overall  
context of a given text.

* "Material from reliable non-academic sources may also be used in  
these areas, particularly if they are respected mainstream  
publications."

The word "respected" here is doing an awful lot of work for a word  
that is utterly unclear. Respected by whom and for what?

* "Questionable sources are those with a poor reputation for fact- 
checking. Such sources include websites and publications that express  
views that are widely acknowledged as extremist, are promotional in  
nature, or rely heavily on rumors and personal opinions."

This is currently phrased to suggest that websites are inherently  
questionable. I suspect that this is an accident, but who knows.

* "Self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable  
when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article  
whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by  
reliable third-party publications." "

This is simply untrue. The "established expert whose work has been  
published elsewhere" clause is just a mess. The Gray's Anatomy Writers  
Blog is self-published. Not all of the writers have published  
elsewhere on Gray's Anatomy. Therefore they are not reliable sources?  
Um, no.

However, caution should be exercised when using such sources: if the  
information in question is really worth reporting, someone else is  
likely to have done so."

The "if the information in question is really worth reporting"  
statement is also insane and gets at one of the major problems with  
our current model of verifiability - it is based excessively on a  
commercialized definition of viable information. Secondary sources  
are, in most cases, going to be published with an eye towards profit  
of one sort or another. Or, more to the point, they are published with  
an eye towards something more complex than the worthiness of  
information. This is true even of peer-reviewed non-profit journals.  
I've seen a number of articles rejected from journals not because they  
make inaccurate observations or observations that are not worth  
knowing, but because they make observations that are too obvious, too  
historical, or otherwise just not quite what the journal was looking  
for.

There are many cases, however, where that information would be wholly  
worth including in one of our articles. But, to use the oft-cited  
television example, few television series have the particular sort of  
fan-base that makes publishing a book of episode summaries a good  
idea. That isn't a comment about the worth of the information, unless  
we're tying worthiness to commercial profitability, in which case our  
systemic bias problems are worse than anyone thought.

This is also related to a fundamental shift in the nature of  
information distribution. The Internet means that information that is  
accurate but niche can get published. All of which worsens the  
aforementioned profitability issue - since there are plenty of people  
who will publish the information for free on the Internet it is much  
less of a good idea to try to commercially publish it. We are an  
example of that trend, but there are others. There's a real problem  
with the attempt to minimize the amount of discretion granted to self- 
published sources. It is increasingly the case that secondary and  
third-party sources are simply inadequate to the task of providing an  
encyclopedic overview of a topic. Other things need to be introduced -  
self-published sources are one option. So is credentialism. There are  
probably others, but the path we are choosing here *simply does not  
work*.

* "Self-published sources should never be used as third-party sources  
about living persons, even if the author is a well-known professional  
researcher or writer"

Unless the phrase "third-party" is being used misleadingly (and I  
doubt it based on the list of acceptable uses of self-published  
sources below) this is insane. Let me put this in a real context. J.  
Michael Straczynski, creator, producer, and primary writer (writing  
over 80% of the episodes) of Babylon 5 has self-published the scripts  
for B5 that he wrote. These scriptbooks contain introductions in which  
he talks about the production of the show, including stories about the  
actors.

There is *no justifiable reason* why these introductions are not  
reliable sources for the articles about the actors. The information  
should be explicitly credited - J. Michael Straczynski says that Actor  
X did Y - but the blanket ban is simply bad policy that does not  
reflect any good practices whatsoever.

I do not see a way in which application of this page could be used to  
improve most articles beyond what any reasonably informed editor would  
instinctively see to improve. For the most part, application of this  
page on anything but the barest of stubs would actively diminish the  
article. Furthermore, the page is increasingly not even a good page  
with some questionable advice. It has, at this point, rotted to its  
core. It would not meaningfully harm the project to delete it and  
start over, or to tag it as "not policy," replacing it with the single  
sentence "Editors should use their best judgment and ensure that  
information is reliably sourced, and that readers can follow up on  
those sources."

It is, in short, a train wreck.