[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Charles Matthews]

Gwern Branwen wrote:
>  I see a lot of mindless fetishism
> of sourcing here, 
Oh, and "mindless fetishsim" about content, too. Let's remember that 
there is a definite mission, which is to write a reference work. It is 
not a new idea that encyclopedic works should cite their sources.
> but suppose Cunctator resurrected an article and
> stuck in a random newspaper article for the claim 'Foo was married in
> 1967.' Nobody disputed that before; nobody disputed that after; no new
> information was added. How *exactly* is the article better? 
It is different. It is certainly not worse. The information about where 
to find the information has been added. There is a certain 'presentism' 
about the argument, even though you've chosen a date before most 
Wikipedians were born. It is (a) not obvious that information about 
marriages is undisputed (one of my problem BLPs had just this issue 
about whether someone was a wife or not, and (b) not obvious that you 
can always find a published source for births, deaths and marriages.

> Is it
> better because some hypothetical viewer might one day go, hm, I wonder
> if he really was married in 1967, and will look at the cite and be
> relieved?
>
> Speaking from personal experience on the _Evangelion_ articles: I have
> on multiple occasions spent hours or weeks tracking down some fact
> widely accepted amongst Eva fans & academic commentators to its
> original source and found it.  And then felt a sick hollow feeling as
> I realize that all I have done is waste my life satisfying RS
> standards, when the fans and professors knew it all along because they
> trust each other and their forebears and can see for themselves the
> consilience of all those commonly accepted facts.
>   
So you have made available to 300 million-odd readers of Wikipedia facts 
that were available to the cognoscenti, now in a way that does not 
involve "trust". I would probably not spend time in such quantities 
fact-checking mathematics, where I have an idea of reputations in the 
first place; but I seem to be doing plenty of fact-checking right now in 
an area of history where I have little background and don't know whether 
the scholarship of what I'm working on is cast-iron. I believe scholars 
traditionally got these blues (as well as piles, perhaps not unconnected).

Charles