On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote:
Part of it is a matter of degree. The article on the
John Kerry controversy
isn't the #2 search for "Kerry" on the Internet.
And whenever people mention this, they conveniently forget to mention
that the #1 result is Dan Savage's website. We didn't put it out
there and we aren't perpetuating it. Wikipedia entries are typically
near the top of *any* search result. Sometimes when I create an
article on a historical figure it shoots to the top of the results
with a day or less, even above pages that have been around for years,
edu sites, archives, etc.
Part of it is that we're talking about different
types of things. The Kerry
controversy is ultimately about factual claims, and therefore whether our
article harms John Kerry depends on whether we give undue weight to those
claims. This one isn't about factual claims; it's about creating an
unpleasant association, so avoiding undue weight isn't enough to keep it
from doing harm.
I don't understand this kind of hairsplitting. Documenting
fabrications is acceptable, but only the right kind of fabrications?
Aren't, say, the "factual claims" of Birthers about creating
"unpleasant associations" with Obama? The last thing we need in
Wikipedia is more systemic bias, and this is what that hairsplitting
would lead to.
And there aren't 132 reliable sources; there was a
post on BLPN which
analyzed the problems with a bunch of sources (several were self-published,
for instance. Of course they had to be left in as part of a "compromise"),
but there are so many "sources" that nobody could possibly check them all.
Furthermore, the large number of sources is itself part of the abuse of the
system--sources are often links and raise the page's Google rank, just like
including big templates.
That post you mentioned cherry picked a few sources out of the 132.
14 in that post were from The Stranger, the newspaper where Dan
Savage's columns originate. The published writing of one of the two
principal players in this matter is absolutely a reliable source for
this article, as it's been long-established that people are an RS for
their own views. The other 20 don't meet the gold standard, but
neither are they worthy of being immediately dismissed without
discussion. But even if we throw all of them out, that still leaves
98 reliable sources that are not in dispute: major newspapers,
academic books, etc. Nitpicking them isn't enough, you just dismiss
them out of hand with scare quotes and then try to use that fact
against it. Shouldn't an article be well-sourced? If you don't think
they've been properly "checked", then post on BLPN and we'll both get
some people together to check them. That's what we do here, it's part
of the editing process. And adding reliable sources isn't good
anymore, it's doubleplusungood "abuse"? This way lies madness if we
try to apply this to the encyclopedia. If you want to discuss actual
gaming of the system, we can, but let's not label proper editing and
reliable sourcing as "abuse".
The most frustrating thing about this discussion is the way that
editors of long standing feel free to slur everyone that disagrees
with them. As the conflict moves from talk page to noticeboard to
mailing list and back again (start an RFC already and let's centralize
this nonsense!) these editors have attacked normal editing as "abuse"
and slurred other editors as rabid anti-Santorum partisans and gay
activists. I really thought we were better than this.