[Foundation-l] Jihad in Defense of Objectivity (Was: Enforcing WP:CITE)

Mon Dec 5 08:23:10 UTC 2005

Jonathan Leybovich wrote:
> All-
>
> The last several dozen messages on this list regarding
> Wikipedia citation policy were prompted by Brian's
> re-posting of a message I had sent earlier in the week
> proposing a change to the page renderer whereby all
> factual assertions within an article would
> automatically be flagged (say, using red high-lights)
> if they were un-sourced.  I am truly gratified by the
> huge debate which this suggestion has already
> generated, and especially grateful to Brian for seeing
> enough value in my idea to bring it again to every
> one's attention.
>
> This exchange has been truly productive, and the
> disagreements that have been aired are, I think, more
> apparent than real.  One common misconception is that
> those of us who are pushing for stronger citation
> standards are doing so because we believe in citation
> for its own sake, or because we want to blindly mimic
> "real encyclopedias", or else because we are in some
> way elitist or credentialist and always believe in
> deferring to expert opinion.
>   
There is a difference between stronger citation standards and better 
citation technology. I am all for better citation technology. I am 
completely against raising the entry level of people to contribute to 
the Wikipedia project. I do believe that citing sources has its place. 
It may prove valuable to make content more NPOV and by minimising 
conflicts.
> What has gotten lost in the exchange, I think, is the
> fact that those of us advocating a strong citation
> policy are doing so only as a means to an end, with
> that end being objectivity.  The point of an
> encyclopedia is to contain objective knowledge,
> knowledge which any reasonable person could
> potentially confirm by visiting the evidence provided
> for it.  Ideally such evidence should be as unmediated
> and "direct" as possible, but in practice this often
> means deferring to an expert authority, because we
> either lack the means or skill to reproduce or
> interpret this evidence ourselves.  This is a
> necessary evil, but greatly ameliorated by the fact
> that all reputable scholars meticulously document
> their results, allowing anyone to reproduce their
> evidence later on.  Anyone who's read scholarly
> journals or monographs knows it is not uncommon for
> the footnotes and bibliography (i.e. the evidence) to
> take up more pages than the actual text (i.e. the
> interpretation)!
>   
Problematic in you approach is that you are talking about "reputable 
scholars"; we are not. We do not pretend to be scholars, that is exactly 
what distinguishes our way of producing Wikipedias and other content 
from how the traditional publications produce its content. It is also a 
line of defence against people who want to sue us for content that is 
wrong. We clearly state that our content may not be right and we are 
willing, we can and we do either as individuals or as an organisation 
improve our content where and when needed.
> Now, just because I think it's valuable to replicate
> academic standards of evidence and objectivity does
> not mean I think we should blindly reproduce academic
> visual/typographic conventions.  Just because scholars
> put bibliographical/reference sections at the end of
> their articles, or make their text unreadable with
> lots of footnotes does not mean I think Wikipedia
> should also.  Let's collect the same data, but think
> of better ways to present it.  Isn't it ironic that,
> memex, the forerunner of hypertext, was thought up
> because of the limitations of paper-based scholarship,
> and yet we're still talking about how to reproduce
> those same limitations within the web browser?
>   
When we find the technology to facilitate better standards, it means 
that it will be more easy, more inviting to add these sources. When you 
insist on these sources to be there you go too far and you kill the 
participation from many many people. The secret of our success is in 
enabling people to contribute their knowledge. Most people have never 
quoted sources. That is something that is done almost exclusively by 
academically trained people. When you say memex I do a [[memex]] and do 
not find an article.

I want to point out to you, again, that Wikipedia is a success because 
of its inclusive nature. And I want to point out to you, again, that 
Nupedia was build to academic standards and a complete failure. When you 
want to go over the existing articles and start adding sources you do 
something that I applaud. When we insist on "objective" standards, we 
make Nelson Mandela a criminal because he was convicted by a lawful 
court and send to jail.
> I'm sorry if a lot of this is obvious, but hopefully
> the next point is less so- which is that objectivity,
> which requires evidence, one means to which happens to
> be citation- is not just a scholarly imperative, but
> also a moral one.  Without objectivity, and the faith
> that other people experience the world in roughly the
> same ways we do, cooperation and this thing we call
> community is impossible.  Everyone just does whatever
> it is they want and never stop to consider how this
> affects other people because without objectivity
> knowledge of other people is by definition impossible.
>   
The consequences of your point of view are not obvious at all. Your 
faith that people experience things in a similar way is wrong. When I 
see documentaries on TV and I see all these people make their faith 
central to their lives, I only wonder. Given that people deny as a 
result evolution, find objection to other ways of thinking and have 
their big libraries that "prove" their point of view, I fear that you 
only raise vandalism to the next level as you will make Wikipedia an 
even more fertile battle ground for debaters and POV pushers.
> To those who thus maintain that greater standards of
> objectivity will damage community within Wikipedia, I
> ask you to explain the [[Jihad]] article on the
> English language site.  This is not an obscure
> article; it has gone through 100's, if not 1000's, of
> edits and is in the top-10 results list when Googling
> on its keyword.  Yet this article is a perfect example
> of community dysfunction; it is reverted constantly;
> it is locked almost weekly; and yet despite all this
> activity it is getting worse over time.  Because there
> is no agreement on what this term even means, the
> article is getting shorter and shorter as more and
> more of its "controversial" material is shunted off to
> sub-articles, where the process repeats itself (see
> [[Rules of war in Islam]], under a neutrality alert as
> I write).  The problem here (leaving aside anonymous
> vandals), is not community, it is objectivity.  The
> warring editors behave unconstructively not because
> they mean badly, necessarily, but because they're
> trapped in an epistemological hell.  It's not only
> that there's not enough objective evidence provided
> for each assertion, it's that people have no idea
> where to find such evidence, or even have the basis
> with which to recognize it as such.  Thus the
> impossibility of consensus, and a continuing edit war
> until the article is whittled down to a links page. 
> Yet isn't the damage done to community, here- in terms
> of anger and frustration, in terms of factionalism, in
> terms of loss of goodwill and trust- even greater than
> that done to knowledge?
>   
Other articles come to mind and yes they are frustrating, I have been 
involved in "fundamentalism" and I have given up because some Christian 
warriors claimed the exclusive right to that name. Now do you really 
think that showing sources saves the day for this article? Are you not 
aware that for every article that "proves" a point an other article 
"disproves" the same point? Do you not agree you get into a situation 
where the discussion degenerates into a fight about the relative merits 
of given sources ?

Again, I applaud better functionality and I think we should provide 
sources for further reading. But believing that by providing sources we 
will provide objectivity is naive. If there is one area where 
traditional thinking and an overly reliance on previous thinkers has 
proved to be the undoing of progress it is science.
> I've been working on a new project proposal which I've
> deferred announcing on this list partly because I
> wanted to do some more polishing to it, but mainly
> because it relied upon an enhancement to the software
> (i.e. [[m:Wikidata]]) whose completion date was still
> a ways off.  However, now seems as good a time as any
> to make an announcement, so let me provide an
> overview.  Much of it is identical to SJ's proposal
> here and in [[m:Wikicite]].
>   
I am well aware of what Wikidata is. Wikidata is the implementation of 
relational technology within the Mediawiki software. Off itself it 
provides you with no functionality. A database design is necessary to 
consider if it possible to create the functionality that you describe. 
The design of such is database is probably more complicated than the one 
of the Ultimate Wiktionary. It is also vital to find people to 
understand any proposed design because this designs assumptions define 
its function. What I read in the parts below have more to do with 
building wonderful functionality than with actual database design.. You 
cannot build the code if you have no underlying structure.

Given its complexity and given how hard it is to define this 
functionality in a way that makes sense to someone who could make a 
database out of it like me, I wish you luck and hope that the 
functionality of Wikidata proves useful for showing sources and further 
reading as well.

Thanks,
    GerardM