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

Mon Dec 5 17:29:34 UTC 2005

This is all theoretically very interesting, and I cannot oppose it.  
Nevertheless until someone is ready to code this it won't happen .  
Meanwhile, many of us who concern ourselves with content still have to 
go on with life without waiting for you to do the coding, which could 
take a long time.

What would you suggest that we non-technical people do in the meantime?

Ec

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.
>
>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)!
>
>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?
>
>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.
>
>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'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]].
>
>Phase 1: Toward a more reliable Wikipedia
>
>Citation mark-up is introduced which holds a pointer
>to an enclosed factual assertion's proof; proof is
>provided via either reference to another work, or with
>direct evidence (a photograph, eye-witness testimony,
>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
>which renders them in a useful graph format.  Perhaps
>as part of article rating, citations must be confirmed
>by the checker; data regarding which assertions were
>verified is stored with other article rating
>attributes.
>
>Phase 2: Creation of a citation database/authority
>text map
>
>Each citation within a Wikipedia article is now
>automatically saved within a [[m:Wikidata]] text
>relationship database.  A text relationship joins two
>"[[w:texts]]", and among its other attributes has one
>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.  
>
>As Wikipedia editors do their research and follow the
>citations of those works which they themselves cite,
>they are able to create "authority maps" for
>literature within various scholarly fields.  What is
>considered authoritative? What is considered outdated?
>They record this information into the text
>relationship database.  They are not merely copying
>other's footnotes, though, since a text relationship
>does not have to be "verbalized" within a text.  If
>they know a particular work contradicts some evidence,
>for example, let them record it and so rightly
>diminish the work's authority.
>
>Eventually the Wikidata text relationship database
>becomes a hugely valuable scholarly tool in its own
>right, and acts as the first resort for Wikipedia
>editors doing  research.  Formulas are developed which
>rate sources/evidence: incoming positive citations are
>good; incoming negative ones are bad.  Lots of less
>obvious factors like age are considered- a 50 year old
>work that's still constantly invoked is probably
>particularly sound.  Other formula factors are
>identified, though anyone can potentially create their
>own formulas to run against the data.
>
>Phase 3: The honing of Wikipedia
>
>Using the text relationship database, editors can now
>see at a glance what is authoritative within a
>particular literature.  The article renderer now takes
>source quality (generated by the formulas discussed
>above) into consideration when rendering each section
>of an article.  Those parts of the article relying on
>weak, discredited, or out-dated sources are flagged
>with one style, while perhaps especially credible
>sources are "commended" using another.  Hopefully  a
>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.
>
>Please see the following for more details about this
>project:
>
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiTextrose
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite
>
>Thank you for your time and sorry for the long e-mail.
>