[WikiEN-l] Another sourcing problem

[David Goodman]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 4:11 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Jon Q wrote:
>

>
> You''l find David Goodman has similar views to your own.
>
> Charles

And so I do.

But it doesn't take an ideal world to institutionalize BEFORE as a
requirement. Just an approximately 2/3 majority at a discussion. We've
come very close to it.  There are many other desirable changes, such
as the rewriting of NOT into a positive framework, such as WP DOES
INCLUDE, but this is something that's simple and obvious.

The problem is that those supporting articles are normally only those
who care about the particular article; those opposing it by and large
do have a general agenda to make the encyclopedia more rigorously
selective. The people who do not want that are much more dispersed and
I have found it impossible to keep their interest long enough to do
some good.

The worst thing we can do is to go case by case based on strength of
arguments, for there is nobody qualified to judge the relative
strength of competing arguments. Wikipedia is built on the general
concept of the wisdom of the community, and even  if the community is
not always very wise, there is no equitable way to proceed except to
assume that it is for the purpose of making decisions. . The only
people here competent to judge conflicting content policies or how to
interpret them are the interested members of the community as a whole,
acting in good faith, and the only discretion of an admin is to remove
those !votes that are not in good faith,as coming from single purpose
accounts, or in complete disregard of policy.  Any other view, and the
decision is made by the whim of whichever admin gets there
first--there is no general agreement among admins about the relative
importance of different policies (except for some obvious generally
agreed over-riding cases like BLP  and copyright). Voting is not
evil--it's the only way to work with large numbers of people, other
than brute force or established authority.

I sometime wish i had kept quiet about my view on the broad
inclusiveness desired in an  encyclopedia  until I had become an
admin, because then I could counter the effect of those admins who
have concealed or dissembled their tendency the other way--or who, in
some cases, have managed to get appointed regardless through
persistence.  I know what I want, but I do not confuse it with what
the community wants.  To be perfectly frank, there are those who do,
and every expression that individual admins can judge the quality of
arguments supports them.

The insistence of sources is good and necessary, and I very strongly
support the principle of WP:V. But the necessary source will depend
upon the field, and not every field is reducible to what google
indexes. We could get around this by redefining "Notability is not
popularity" to read "Notability is not necessarily popularity," and
accept that sufficient popular attention however expressed justifies
inclusion, as long as we can document the basic facts somehow.
Instead, we juggle with what we consider sources to maintain the
fiction of the WP:GNG. For some types of articles we accept local or
very specialized sources, for some we don't. If we really meant
WP:GNG, every high school athlete  would be notable, for even the high
school paper is accurate enough & under sufficient editorial control
to report the team statistics accurately. I wouldn't include them:
they belong in local wikis only, but I'd justify this by a decision
that they do not belong in Wikipedia, and not by quibbling about
sources.  In the other direction, we have accepted that every
inhabited settlement is notable, and that comprehensive unselective
primary  geographic sources are sufficient for WP:V--when i came here,
I recall making some tortured arguments about how such sources were
actually selective and secondary. The arguments were accepted, because
we wanted to include the places, not because the arguments really made
sense.

It's not whether or not we want to go by rule. We want to go by those
rules which actually do improve the encyclopedia, either by saying
what we dod and do not want or by making a stable compromise when we
cannot decide. Going purely case by case can destroy any
compromise,whereas good reference works are stable and consistent.

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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG