[WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

Thu Sep 28 18:22:09 UTC 2006

On 9/28/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> So, the current situation is that
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Falls_%28town%29%2C_New_York
>
> contains the following completely out-of-context and unverified and
> unverifiable paragraph:
>
> "Private education
>
> Finger Lakes Christian School is a private Pre-K-Grade 12 school located
> in Seneca Falls, New York. It shares the building with the 1st Baptist
> Church. The current principal is the Rev. Scott Van Kirk. The school was
> established in 1991.

This is all verifyable with the New York State board of education.  I had
all the links up a few days ago and will go back and find them again
sometime in the next few days, and reference the article.

Linked to The First Baptist Church of Seneca Falls,
> its aims were to offer an alternative for Christian children.

This is only verifyable off the school website and student info
packet/application.

The school
> has about 75 students.
>

 This is verifyable with the New York State board of education.

Its admission policy is that at least one parent
> or guardian must be a born-again Christian. As well as the general
> curriculum, pupils at the school attend Bible classes twice a week, and
> students have devotional meetings with their teachers or a Pastor at
> least weekly and have a weekly Chapel service."

This is only verifyable off the school website and student info
packet/application

I would go in and simply delete it myself and insist that it not be
> added back until someone finds a source better than the school's own
> homemade website, but I don't want to be seen as creating *actual
> policy* in this area by my edits.
>
> I'm just saying.

I think you're applying too high a bar for verifyability.  The basic factual
existence, location, size and management of the school are independently
verifyable.  This will be as a rule easily true for any of the 124,000-ish
schools in the US.

I think that using a school website for additional descriptive information
of the nature of the tidbits above is eminently reasonable.  Once we
establish that an organization such as a school exists, and verify its
general information, then "flavor" details from its website or own published
information should count as reasonably verified.  The fundamental focus of
verifyability needs to be avoiding the publication of untracable false
information.  In this case, we are tracing the information to the
publications of the organization itself, whose existence the NY State Board
of Education vouches for.

One could use a stricter verifyability standard and strip out own-website
sourced school information, but I ask you (and the assembled throngs), to
what end?  If the intent is to both provide accurate information and
verifiable (referenced) information, then the second is met (school's
existence and statistics easily externally confirmed, so it becomes a
credible reference regarding itself).  Schools as a rule would get in huge
amounts of trouble if they started lying in public publications or websites
about themselves, so we should make a reasonable assumption of accuracy for
those websites.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com