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

Mon Dec 5 09:54:41 UTC 2005

Objectivity Is The Greatest...

On Sun, 4 Dec 2005, Jonathan Leybovich wrote:

> 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)!

Yes.  At some point, it should be possible to construct an "n-depth" 
talmud-style view of an article, showing footnotes, annotations on those 
footnotes, and annotations on those in turn; each within its own 
scrollable window (well, hopefully by then we'll have progressed beyond 
'scrollable windows' as a temporary-focus-expanding interface component).
Right now we don't store any of the data needed to have more than one 
hard-to-use level of annotation.

> 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?

Definitely.

> 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

This statement deserves a well-argued online presentation. I certainly 
happen to agree, but not everyone will, at least not at first.

Thanks for the Jihad example.  Ward once said that the real strength in 
wikis lies in enabling subtle discussion; in letting two people who don't 
know eachother clarify their disagreement down to a very specific, subtle 
point -- two variations on a particular sentence or paragraph -- before 
they have to break into a meta-discussion.

Providing a mechanism to explicitly cite and anti-cite statements (it is 
excellent that you mention both positive and negative links through 
citation), and to provide background information about the sources for 
cites, allows for another magnitude of subtlety and clarity.

> etc.) when appropriate for the claim.  The article
> renderer then highlights "evidence holes" with a
> distinct, attention-grabbing style that alerts both
> readers  and editors.  Such "footnotes" may be hidden
> in the main article, but visible through a new tab

Yes.  Making new features available only through new tabs avoids confusing 
those used to the old system.

> Phase 2: Creation of a citation database/authority
> text map
>
> called TYPE.  In the case of a Wikpedia citation, TYPE
> is by default a positive evidentiary citation- the
> Wikipedia article uses the cited book, document,
> photograph, etc. as proof of some fact.  Yet there are
> many other sorts of text relationships, the most
> obvious kind being negative citations- one work
> attacks the authority of another.

or null citations- a work claiming that there are no supporting / 
contradictory claims about a subject.

> Using the text relationship database, editors can now
> see at a glance what is authoritative within a
> particular literature.  The article renderer now takes

It is less cut-and-dried than this; one useful comparative view would be 
the authority-ranking of major essays/articles in a field assuming 
School-of-thought A is correct in its assumptions, and the authority-tree 
assuming some rival School B is correct in its assumptions.

Or more simply, just tracking dependencies... for instance getting a quick 
look at mathematical proofs which rely on the Axiom of Choice.

> virtuous circle begins- a citation based upon a work
> of popular history is exchanged for one relying upon a
> more specialized work, which is later exchanged for a
> scholarly monograph or journal article, which in turn
> encourages reference to primary sources, etc.  By this
> process Wikipedia becomes not just accurate, but
> scholarly and state-of-the-knowledge.

By this process, the claims of the popular works are also being verified 
or disproven by Wikipedia authors over time; hopefully that information 
can be passed on to the book editors/publishers -- as they too enter the 
digital age.

SJ