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

[Thomas Morton]

>
> 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<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.
>

I absolutely agree with that. One of the big bug bears I have is that, when
discussing sourcing, people put them into categories such as "newspaper"
and declare them therefore reliable.

IMO our sourcing policy is very good at laying out how to consider the
reliability of the source - for example reminding us to think of it in
terms of not only the content but author and publisher (is the author known
for attacking X, is the publisher criticised for publishing poor quality
work?).

This is the key usefulness of publishing - in that it involves other
people/entities in the process.

So if anything we should boil the sourcing policy down to "lets see who
your friends are".


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.


Ugh, no. Don't get me started on this :) The lack of critical thinking
within the wider population is dire - and the spoon fed rubbish we get from
every side is disheartening. Things like the prevalence of homoeopathy are
examples of this issue.

We have filters; but they are subjective and usually not good.


> 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<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations>


The oral citations stuff is cool - and I now see where you are going with
your thought process.

For what its worth I don't think we preclude such sourcing - but I do think
that the community often misunderstands (or fails to read) the actual
policy (as opposed to, say, the summary).

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).
>

This is probably where we disagree. The amount of editorial decision making
in terms of "what weight should I give this material". If you have a set of
oral accounts of an event how do you present that - which parts as fact?
Which as opinion? What weighting? Finding expert people to do that review
stage - and have the work reviewed - is absolutely critical to writing an
Encyclopaedia.


> 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.


And this is what I meant about misunderstanding policies. Because nothing
in our policies precludes the use of primary sources. What you can't do is
use them for interpretation or analysis. So to make up an example; if you
have an oral citation from someone who was arrested under an oppressive
regime - and questioned at length on his choice of blonde hair color and
whether he dyed it. You could relate that experience, but you
couldn't necessarily say something like "The regime persecuted people with
blond hair, or those who dyed it".

So if there are oral recordings of at the Smithsonian & Yale (surely that
means they are published?? It certainly fits our explicit criteria for
published) then we can and should be using them.

One example of published primary sources we do use is court proceedings.

Tom