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

Mon Dec 5 17:16:55 UTC 2005

Jonathan Leybovich wrote:

>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?
>  
>
I would submit that, while citations may improve things somewhat, they 
aren't the primary problem on articles like [[jihad]].  There is *some* 
disagreement, it is true, over what has actually been claimed by 
people.  Citations would help this.  The bigger disagreement, though, is 
over which claims are notable enough to be included, what order they 
ought to be included in, how they ought to be phrased, and so on.  On 
especially controversial subjects, such as what the primary causes of 
terrorism are, it is possible to dig up a published reference that takes 
nearly any point of view on the subject; on very controversial ones it 
will even be possible to find peer-reviewed journal articles taking each 
of those points of view.  The difficult part is figuring out which ones 
to cite and how to summarize and relate them.

That's not to say citations won't help, but I think we ought to be 
careful not to fall into the trap of letting citations obfuscate 
things.  *Especally* problematic are citations to primary sources, which 
can slide into original research---the mess of articles on the 2004 
election controversy had citations to election results thrown in by the 
bucketfull, for example.

-Mark