On Wednesday 22 February 2012 06:59 PM, Thomas Morton wrote:
On 22 February 2012 13:11, Achal Prabhala<aprabh...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wednesday 22 February 2012 03:45 PM, Thomas Morton wrote:
Jokes aside :) the problem here is exemplary of what Wikipedia *doesn't*
do well, which is to find ways to assess the legitimacy of
not-yet-legitimised knowledge
I'm not seeing a good argument that we *should* assess the legitimacy.
This
seems to be being cast in the light of "verifiability not truth" (a really
silly maxim) but, in reality, it goes more back to our idea of "we use
reliable sources because they are *peer reviewed*".
Well actually, we use newspaper sources very frequently, as well as
non-scholarly (and therefore non-peer-reviewed) books, so in fact, we rely
on *printing* (or to put it more kindly, publishing) as a signal for
peer-review, not peer-review itself. In my opinion, this is a poor signal.
Well realistically, yes, we consider something that has been reputably
published to have a basic level of reliability. But that is not the end of
the test.
This idea of "published" can (and is) relaxed though. Indeed it is my
perception that in many topic areas we rely far too heavily on online
sources - there can be a distinct prejudice against offline source material.
However I am interested in whether you have a specific idea of what you
would change? Can you express a reason for why using the published test is
a poor signal?
Tom
I think it's a poor signal when it's the only signal, when it wholly
occupies the phrase 'legitimate knowledge'. In a cross-cultural context,
and especially on English Wikipedia, it's notoriously fraught - it's
very difficult for someone with no experience of a place to distinguish
between 'printed' and 'respectably published' - or even more simply,
between a lunatic fringe newsletter and a mainstream newspaper. I
thought what Tom Morris had to say here was very useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tom_Morris/The_Reliability_Delusion -
that we could well deepen our own understanding of currently
unimpeachable sources - like the Guardian or the Observer.
So the helpful starting point here is that printed, published work is
fallible and variably reliable too.
In real life, each of us has figured out ways to filter the legitimate
from the illegitimate in terms of received knowledge, whether in
newspapers, conversations, or on twitter. But on Wikipedia, we've only
figured out a way to sort the published, and maybe a little but more.
Published knowledge though, is a fraction of what there is to know as a
whole. That sounds terribly high-minded but it's not really, and some
more on this is available here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations
My point is not that we should discard what we have in terms of
policies. My point is that we may benefit from acknowledging what the
policies lead us *not to do well*. And that would be to find a system to
sort out the unreliable and fake from the reliable and legitimate when
it comes to oral citations, or social media citations or primary sources
- in exactly the same way as we've figured out a system to sort the
unreliable from the reliable in another fallible knowledge system -
printed publishing. And if we think that these things we don't do well
are important and that we can figure a way to bring them in, then we
should find that way. (Which is to say - to add to what we've got, not
to forego the current system).
An aside: there are millions of oral testimonies hosted at thousands of
extremely reputable organisations - on Native American life at the
Smithsonian, or Holocaust history at Yale - which currently have no
place on Wikipedia, because they're primary sources. Often but not
always, these primary sources relate to power relations - and so you are
far more likely to find the lives of women, Native Americans, Holocaust
survivors or Jazz musicians in oral testimony than in the printed word.
Sometimes, foregoing these primary sources may be the right decision,
but other times this will not be so - and by disallowing primary sources
in entirety, or not figuring out a system to use them sensibly, I think
we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Related point: there's this project proposal that you might be
interested in -
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships/Project_Ideas/InCite
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