As other have pointed out, wikipedia has to deal with lots of bad edits from people who are not motivated by a pursuit of facts or truth.
To deal with this, they've come up with a set of policies that the editors seem to enforce fairly rigidly. This does an okay job of preventing the wackos from taking over. Unfortunately, since the editors often lack the subject expertise to distinguish cranks from experts, these policies end up making it harder for experts to contribute in some cases.
I'm sure this would lead to arguments about how to verify expertise, but even if it only started with unimpeachable credentials that would seem like a start. Tell me very clearly who is providing the commentary, and I can decide myself if it's credible.
I feel like I'm rambling a bit, but really this seems like a wasted opportunity. Why recreate Wikipedia from whole cloth when it already has so much? I suppose that given the way it's licensed, you could always fork it...
This is a limitation for physical encyclopedias because paper, and even more so shelf space, are expensive so some facts have to be prioritized over others. And you can't easily make corrections to a book after it is printed and sold, and since research never stops a paper encyclopedia will frequently be out of date, thus it can never be that accurate - so why expend a ton effort to make it more accurate in the first place?
Electronic encyclopedias, like Wikipedia, don't have the same inherent limitations. Wikipedia just happens to have re-created them for the same reason electronic calendars by default show you one month at a time, even on the 30th and 31st, rather than a chunk of next and last months.
The reason so many people are so motivated to complain about Wikipedia and all it's limitation is because everyone intuitively can sense there ought to be a better way.
1. Notability of facts is a red herring. Text is easy to compress and storage space is cheap.
2. The need to summarize topics is a red herring. Having a summary "front page", or "top", or "above the fold" etc, combined with more in depth, detailed sections, is a standard way of organizing information on the web. An electronic encyclopedia really ought to use that kind of presentation strategy.
3. Primary sources, new research and minority opinions would naturally be part of the lengthy, detailed version of a topic.
And if you want to go completely crazy you could do things like allow voting. Allow people to sort what the default view is by general popularity.
Even crazier, sort by popularity based on experts opinion, work out a way for experts to electronically sign or approve articles, and allow people to choose a set of "experts".
Go totally bonkers and verify the experts so that someone could choose to see the top evolution articles as rated by Richard Dawkins.
Or alternatively re-crate all the limitations of a physical set of encyclopedias.
However, how many people are going to write about the subject in the OP? Textbooks (another tertiary source) continue to repeat things that have been known (and even rigorously proven and published) to be false by experts 30 years later.
Maybe it's just an inherent flaw in tertiary sources, but I'd like to see people at least try to come up with a way to fix it.
Er, you realize how poorly this reads to the uninitiated, right?
Contrary to some of the replies your comment has received, I agree that Wikipedia is a tertiary source, and it is not a place of first publication for new research findings. That's what Wikipedia is, because that's what Wikipedia says it is,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not
This is consistent with everyone's understanding of what an encyclopedia (ANY encyclopedia) is, as you point out in your further replies to comments.
Indeed an expert in some subject should spend time building up primary and secondary sources, and leave compiling useful reference works like encyclopedias to people with editorial experience who are familiar with the good secondary sources on various subjects. But of course one problem with Wikipedia today is that volunteer editors of Wikipedia ("Wikipedians") are not selected, and by the way the project is mob-managed basically CANNOT be selected, for their editorial experience and familiarity with secondary sources. My first attempt to contribute to the Wikipedia project was to post some source lists (what a librarian might call "pathfinders") in user space
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...
and post links to those in article talk space so that editors could refer to good-quality secondary sources as they revised articles on controversial subjects. I can't say that those source lists haven't been used at all, but I can view the page access statistics for those source lists, and they are certainly underused by other Wikipedians. Meanwhile, there are whole broad topics on Wikipedia that are frequently subject to edit wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...
with sockpuppets and meat puppets continually reappearing to push fringe points of view. There is no sustained management response to this, despite the desire of the Wikimedia Foundation to improve content quality.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate...
After edit: I had earlier posted the same article that was submitted to open this Hacker News thread on my Facebook wall, and one commenter there recalled his experiences trying to correct blatant factual errors on Wikipedia, which eventually led him to the Lamest Edit Wars page in Wikipedia project space,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LAME
where one has to laugh to avoid crying.
The only rational course is, once it has been established that you're dealing with a crank, to completely disengage and smack them down with the official policy. (They never have any reliable sources/citations to support their edits.) It's tempting (since they are usually provably, mathematically wrong) to try to convince them of their errors, but experience shows that never works. I saw a lot of people just burn themselves out doing that -- in this case, expertise was being driven away by reluctance to rely on policy.
I am not quite sure about this. In my view Wikipedia tries to negotiate a middle ground between all the different people who think they have a claim on the "facts" or "truth". Just imagine Charles Murray presenting his research that the economic problems of America's working class are largely its own fault, stemming from factors like the presence of a lot of lazy men as a fact on Wikipedia. (Quote from: http://chronicle.com/article/Charles-Murray-Author-of-The/13... - currently most popular Cronicle article). I truly believe that people have most of the time good intentions with their edits, but there are a lot of different versions of "truth" around - especially in Social Sciences.
As ZeroGravitas points out, consider the case of a crank who links to his own blog as a source, and that blog post cites primary evidence. The Wikipedia editors now have a job that is identical to academic peer-review. I don't think that should be their job.
From reading that, it appears that there was just a misunderstanding -- all the author had to do was link in the wikipedia article to the reliable sources. Instead, he linked on his blog to the reliable sources.
To me, this simple misunderstanding pretty much makes the Chronicle article lose all credence -- if I'm reading a wikipedia article and I find a factual assertion dubious (or just wonder where it came from) I don't want a link to some blog (especially since it appears that I can't even read the link -- I get some sort of login page). Instead, I want the link (or reference) to the original sources. For factual disagreements, any sort of primary or reliable secondary source is more than sufficient to have resolved this.
Then why have editors? God forbid that, if you take on the mantle of vetting articles, you actually exert some intellectual effort.
Wikipedia is not a place for original research for exactly this reason. Once something has gone through peer review, and is published somewhere, then it can be used in Wikipedia. I think that's reasonable. Wikipedia editors are then relying on a particular subject's community of experts instead of having to be those experts themselves.
I think it's also important to note that this model is the same as any other encyclopedia.
I'm not even sure the guy isn't a crank, but if he isn't he needs to understand that Wikipedia needs a system that takes cranks into account. If he's simply a false positive on the crank detector because it turns out that everyone else is actually wrong about this historical event then he'd have to demonstrate that the cost of false positives outweigh the good to effect a change, not just go in a huff because his pet subject isn't presented in the way he would like in Wikipedia.
His opinion in this matter isn't as relevant as the fact that he cited actual testimony. That alone should lend enough weight to the edit that it should not have been reverted simply b/c of the Wikipedia "undue weight" policy.
Actually if you look at the page, he only cited his own blog post. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_af... (His blog post cited those other sources, but that doesn't really add to WP.)
To say a fact is subjective to popular, to say nothing of demonstrably wrong, opinion is the completely antithetical to the goal of being an encyclopedia.
If you come up with a new theory that disagrees with scholarly/scientific consensus, an encyclopedia is not the place to publish it. You publish it in a journal; if it becomes a consensus, or at least generates significant serious response in that community, then it will be documented in an encyclopedia.
If every single crank theory was accepted into Wikipedia, you'd have a wiki consisting entirely of holocaust denialism, homeopathy, Electric Universe, and woo-peddling. Wikipedia is not in the business of deciding what's true and what isn't; that's what the academic community is for.
Of course the Wikipedia admins were buttheads and weren't constructive at all.
Well, not necessarily. Unfortunately consensus is hard to change, even if it's wrong.
But you still have to try. If everyone who thought the consensus was wrong edited Wikipedia to reflect their opinion, the result would be a less accurate encyclopedia.
For example, a lot of publications have been made about Newtonian physics. I mean a lot. We're going all the way back to Newton here. And yet, from the perspective of a 1940s Einstein it would appear that Einstein is definitely correct, going purely by the academic and secondary source community. The problem is just the proliferation of years and years worth of outdated information on Newton.
In other words, maybe Wikipedia would benefit from a decay mechanism? Newer academic publications would earn proportionately more worth and newer scientific consensuses would be favored stronger than old ones.
This isn't a change to the fundamental policies of Wikipedia, it only makes it a more timely encyclopedia with a smaller reaction loop. Given the constant realtime editing happening every day, this seems more appropriate for Wikipedia than, say, Britannica.
Consider the case in point. The myth the Chronicle author was refuting was a political myth: that the Haymarket defendants were innocent men railroaded by a biased prosecutor who was not "credible." This myth had been repeated by generations of pro-labor historians with a big ol' axe to grind.
As for the anti-labor historians? Oh wait, there aren't any anti-labor historians. At least, if by "historian" you mean "individual funded by the US Government to teach history." Thus, Wikipedia is simply recording in its pages the depressing result of a political power struggle in academia.
Now that labor has become the establishment, an honest historian who is not pro or anti labor, just interested in the past, can discover from primary sources that gee whiz, the prosecution actually had a case. It's 2012 so he won't be purged for this. On the other hand, it's not clear how he's supposed to purge all his axe-grinding colleagues who continue insisting that the sky is green.
Academia is just a thing called "academia." Science is just a thing called "science." The Soviet Union had both. Ours are better than the Soviet Union's, but they're still de facto government agencies. Jeebus didn't come down yesterday and make our government systematically infallible.
Imagine Wikipedia in the Soviet Union. Would you want it to be a crowdsourced version of the Great Soviet Encylopedia? Or would you want it to do a little better?
Wikipedia has done a great job of being a tertiary source, mostly. That doesn't mean it can't have higher ambitions for the future. When I stop being a child, I put aside childish things. It's childish to assume that "reliable sources" are reliable just because everyone says they are. Is Wikipedia all grown up now? If so, maybe it should at least think about starting to address its utterly circular definition of a reliable source.
If there is no conceivable mechanism to distinguish between homeopathy and medicine, how do our existing mechanisms work? Are these mechanisms unique? Are they perfect? Can they be duplicated, improved, advanced?
Outside of the hard science "truth" is a very negotiable subject. Just imagine how difficult it would become to find the "truth" between the opposing parties around the currently most popular The Cronicle article ( http://chronicle.com/article/Charles-Murray-Author-of-The/13... ).
This "inertia" is nicely described by the histogram of new admins. Those who seized power in the middle of the last decade are running with it. (5)
(1) http://gwen-gale-heidi-wyss-tinpot-auteur.blogspot.com/
(2) http://english.sxu.edu/sites/kirstein/archives/1443
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gwen_Gale
(4) http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/271257
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Successful_requests_f...
If the author was essentially trying to unwrite the popular account, rather than supplementing it with a well-sourced minority view, the wiki editors actions become far more understandable.
Also, if he were throwing his credentials around as a substitute for clear and concise citation, the wiki editors' actions, again, become more understandable.
It is a bit of an odd process but, basically, "Good Article" consists of a semi-formal review of the article by an uninvolved editor to assess it for neutrality, completeness and language (etc.).
"Featured Article" is a more involved formal review involving multiple editors. It's those that get then picked for appearance on the main page.
The intended progression for an article is supposed to be something like: Peer Review, Good Article review, Featured Article review.
But this isn't even right, because Wikipedia is a not an encyclopedia. It's like Johnson & Johnson saying Q-tips are for applying makeup or detailing cars and shouldn't be put in the ear. 99% of people who buy Q-tips put them in their ears. 99% of true claims on Wikipedia are contributed by experts and are either unreferenced, cite a source that doesn't really support them, a source at the other end of a broken link that nobody's read, or a source that doesn't meet the guidelines this historian was held to. Career editors spend more time checking for citations than checking citations. And they spend more time checking for citations when they personally don't believe a claim. The policies are applied hypocritically, with the result that opinions of non-experts outweigh the opinions of experts. The only thing limiting the damage has been the relatively small number of career editors. With massive decline in casual participation in recent years, this balance is starting to shift. I just noticed recently that career editors have started to tag mathematics articles.
We should be honest that the encyclopedia contrivance is really just a way to avoid flame wars, and is an imperfect one, especially when editors 'merge with their cover story' and blindly enforce it. Wikipedia will be its best when it is recognized for what it is: a truth engine, a first source, and a very important public good.
Editing Wikipedia needs to be about more than writing long policy documents and bludgeoning contributors with them. It is an important form of scholarship. The project could benefit greatly by a reputation model more subtle than "barnstars", such as [1]. But a fancy reputation model alone isn't enough. The culture of Wikipedia is in trouble and needs to be revitalized.
I don't know what that is, but I think if it ever existed it would be in the service of something foul and malign.
Humans have facts. Humans have evidence. Humans even, in mathematics alone, have proofs. Humans do not have truth. Woe betide anyone who thinks we do.
1. It is a decent repository for bare facts that can be easily verified elsewhere, but assembled there in convenient form. E.g. if you need to know the population of Nepal, Wikipedia article about Nepal is a good way to go, even though multiple other sources are available.
2. It is a decent source of links for more complex material - e.g., if you want to get a quick idea about what suprematism is, without knowing anything about it, and how to start researching the topic, you can use Wikipedia article, extract such keywords as "visual art", "Malevich", "russian avant-garde", etc. and take it from there if you're interested.
3. It is a somewhat useful, but a dangerous source about any concepts that are in any way controversial - you should verify all claims and read all links, but you can use it as an assembly of links and keywords, without assigning too much importance to any narrative.
4. It is absolutely useless for understanding any seriously controversial topic, as at best controversial articles would selectively present facts, reflecting biases of the writers, at worst - explicitly promote specific approach to the topic, which will be ruthlessly enforced by either the mob of opinionated editors or the wiki bureaucracy masterfully exploited by biased insiders.
To the defense of Wikipedia, some mainstream encyclopedic sources, especially ones published in non-free countries, suffer from even worse bias problems. I don't think there's a solution for this, except using one's own mind and take everything told to you with a grain of salt and check it when possible. Obviously, the topic described in the article falls into the third or fourth category, and so expecting Wikipedia to have anything but bare facts (like dates when it happened, names of the participants, etc.) right would be a bet, and not a safe one. In most cases it'd be whatever the random Wikipedia "guardian" or anonymous mob of agenda-bearers wants it to be. Sometimes the experts make the fuss that hits some popular media and particular article gets better, but most would give up and decide not to waste their time.
In specific cases it might seem stupid, but I think in general it makes sense. It goes hand in hand with the "no original research" policy.
(Like everything in wikipedia that policy can be misapplied by small minded people, though.)
While I agree that the wikipedia gestapo are often overzealous with reverting good edits - it basically requires a case-by-case basis of deciding what 'facts' are, which is never easy. If his 'primary sources' are better than the secondary sources that say the opposite, then talk sense to the person who is doing the reversion, or raise it with someone higher - don't just continuously attempt edit-wars...
I am reminded of the "paradigm shift" approach to the history of science, as flawed as it may be to some (look it up, sigh, on wikipedia). It implies that the dominant point of view is held as fact until a preponderance of evidence shifts the minority view from "flawed" to "edge cases" to "the new paradigm". Then it cycles again. What was the sworn truth with history behind it is now the "old paradigm" and disregarded.
For wikipedia, I've never felt there to be a requirement for "article completeness", just an eye to be "well rounded", and so it often feels that whatever the dominant paradigm is currently will be the primary driver of inclusion and presence in an article.
Wikipedia is in that interesting tension between sticking to it's original mission, which was pretty wonderful, and potentially becoming more, but at the risk of becoming useless. For all it's flaws, I still think the world is better with it than without it, and at some point, I suspect a way to let folks contribute more original research and have it coexist on wikipedia will evolve.
Hypercritical #53: Brad Pitt Gets to Contribute http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/53
Google's Knol would have avoided a bunch of procedural mess, but it's been shuttered. http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/23/googles-knol-the-monetizabl...
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/google-announces-plans-to-s...
that mentions Google abandoning Knol.
That's why history books in middle school are completely screwed up with lies. You can't empirically test history. If wikipedia is to survive it will have to make a principled stand against official propaganda machines, official government sources and popular truth, myth and political agendas.
