[Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

[Achal Prabhala]

On Wednesday 22 February 2012 06:59 PM, Thomas Morton wrote:
> On 22 February 2012 13:11, Achal Prabhala<aprabhala at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>>
>> On Wednesday 22 February 2012 03:45 PM, Thomas Morton wrote:
>>
>>> Jokes aside :) the problem here is exemplary of what Wikipedia *doesn't*
>>>> do well, which is to find ways to assess the legitimacy of
>>>> not-yet-legitimised knowledge
>>>>
>>> I'm not seeing a good argument that we *should* assess the legitimacy.
>>> This
>>> seems to be being cast in the light of "verifiability not truth" (a really
>>> silly maxim) but, in reality, it goes more back to our idea of "we use
>>> reliable sources because they are *peer reviewed*".
>>>
>> Well actually, we use newspaper sources very frequently, as well as
>> non-scholarly (and therefore non-peer-reviewed) books, so in fact, we rely
>> on *printing* (or to put it more kindly, publishing) as a signal for
>> peer-review, not peer-review itself. In my opinion, this is a poor signal.
>
> Well realistically, yes, we consider something that has been reputably
> published to have a basic level of reliability. But that is not the end of
> the test.
>
> This idea of "published" can (and is) relaxed though. Indeed it is my
> perception that in many topic areas we rely far too heavily on online
> sources - there can be a distinct prejudice against offline source material.
>
> However I am interested in whether you have a specific idea of what you
> would change? Can you express a reason for why using the published test is
> a poor signal?
>
> Tom


I think it's a poor signal when it's the only signal, when it wholly 
occupies the phrase 'legitimate knowledge'. In a cross-cultural context, 
and especially on English Wikipedia, it's notoriously fraught - it's 
very difficult for someone with no experience of a place to distinguish 
between 'printed' and 'respectably published' - or even more simply, 
between a lunatic fringe newsletter and a mainstream newspaper. I 
thought what Tom Morris had to say here was very useful: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tom_Morris/The_Reliability_Delusion - 
that we could well deepen our own understanding of currently 
unimpeachable sources - like the Guardian or the Observer.

So the helpful starting point here is that printed, published work is 
fallible and variably reliable too.

In real life, each of us has figured out ways to filter the legitimate 
from the illegitimate in terms of received knowledge, whether in 
newspapers, conversations, or on twitter. But on Wikipedia, we've only 
figured out a way to sort the published, and maybe a little but more. 
Published knowledge though, is a fraction of what there is to know as a 
whole. That sounds terribly high-minded but it's not really, and some 
more on this is available here: 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations

My point is not that we should discard what we have in terms of 
policies. My point is that we may benefit from acknowledging what the 
policies lead us *not to do well*. And that would be to find a system to 
sort out the unreliable and fake from the reliable and legitimate when 
it comes to oral citations, or social media citations or primary sources 
- in exactly the same way as we've figured out a system to sort the 
unreliable from the reliable in another fallible knowledge system - 
printed publishing. And if we think that these things we don't do well 
are important and that we can figure a way to bring them in, then we 
should find that way. (Which is to say - to add to what we've got, not 
to forego the current system).

An aside: there are millions of oral testimonies hosted at thousands of 
extremely reputable organisations - on Native American life at the 
Smithsonian, or Holocaust history at Yale - which currently have no 
place on Wikipedia, because they're primary sources. Often but not 
always, these primary sources relate to power relations - and so you are 
far more likely to find the lives of women, Native Americans, Holocaust 
survivors or Jazz musicians in oral testimony than in the printed word. 
Sometimes, foregoing these primary sources may be the right decision, 
but other times this will not be so - and by disallowing primary sources 
in entirety, or not figuring out a system to use them sensibly, I think 
we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Related point: there's this project proposal that you might be 
interested in - 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships/Project_Ideas/InCite


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