Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia
Regardless of the history, Sanger does have a viewpoint that would be worth reading even if the author were anonymous. In particular, the following claim is quite accurate to my experience: Over the long term, the quality of a given Wikipedia article will do a random walk around the highest level of quality permitted by the most persistent and aggressive people who follow an article. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] VfD against every article in Category.Outlines
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 02:38:49PM -0800, Scientia Potentia est wrote: > The Wikiproject about it is quite new. The way I see it, topic outlines are > more of a topical glossary that lack the subcategorizing that a regular > category would have. They could be of some use. The pages I familiar with here used to have names such as [[List of basic algebra topics]]. These can be viewed in several ways: * As a topic glossary highlighting the most important basic topics in the field * As an extended 'see also' list that is linked from the main article on the field. So [[Algebra]] links to [[List of basic algebra topics]] These lists are clearly of some value for readers who are interested in learning the basics of a topic. And the lists have some support among current editors; see [[Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Topic_outline_of_algebra]] which was closed this week. I don't know as much about the country articles, such as [[Topic outline of France]]. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Low citation quality in BLP articles
On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 04:58:01PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > Remembering that the thrust of this argument was specifically the use of > Encyclopedia Brittanica, news magazines and newspapers. That doesn't > necessarily sound like a low standard to me. Does it to you? It seems like a low standard to me: * Using encyclopedias for inline citations isn't a reliability problem, but it's a symptom of shallow research and generally bad scholarship. Citations should lead readers to sources that cover the cited topic in greater depth than the WP article, rather than to other encyclopedias which are unlikely to do so. * Building the majority of an article from newspaper sources is not a reliability problem at the level of the individually-sourced pieces of information. However, it's exactly the type of synthesis of primary sources that has been decried for academic articles. And, in many cases, it suffers from the bias of newsmedia to cover things that will sell papers in much greater depth than topics that are of less popular interest. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Low citation quality in BLP articles
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 10:14:52PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > Can you point to any source in a BLP which comes from a "peer-reviewed > publication" ? I mean any of them at all? That's exactly my point. There is no lack of academic analysis of politicians, of artists, etc. But we do not seem to use any of it. For example, I can find numerous articles on George W. Bush on JStor. And once he is out of office there will be no lack of biogaphies written to analyze his presidency. We could argue about whether these journals and biographies are "peer-reviewed" but they are certaily of a higher caliber of scholarship than the average MSNBC web page. If, as you have argued, our role is to wait for other scholars to decide what's important, and then report that, why don't we do so in BLPs? Why not wait a few years for analysis to emerge before we report on things? - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Low citation quality in BLP articles
(Subject changed, since this is drifting from the original topic.) On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 09:46:53PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > I don't see why you claim on the one hard that the standards are lax, and > then you say "Encarta and Encyclopedia Brittanica". > You've lost me. Are you claiming that Brittanica is not a reliable source? I would say it is an unsuitable source and we shouldn't be using it. Imagine if I included a reference to Encarta in the next research paper I write... > The standards for sources on BLPs are not lax imho, they are stronger > than anything else. Perhaps if you made your point more clearly. The standards are stronger in the sense that a higher percentage of sentences have an inline citation attached, but the average quality of those inline citations is often very low. The vast majority of citations are to newspapers, new magazines, and online news and opinion sites, while very few are to peer-reviewed publications. We do not write BLP articles, in general, by starting with someone else's explanatory framework and fleshing it out with some references. Because that would require a pre-existing explanatory framework, which will not develop until after the person's death. Instead, we assemble a mishmash of random news stories into what we hope is a coherent article. Or we write a coherent article and then go back and source it from a mishmash of cherry-picked news stories. This practice directly contradicts arguments that other articles cannot be written by arranging an original synthesis of material from primary sources. I don't accept "but some of those newspaper stories are secondary sources" as a strong objection to my argument here. > My point is specifically primary versus secondary, not any other point. Dividing sources arbitrarily into primary/secondary ignores many of the actual distinctions good researchers make between sources. For example, we should not be debating whether a particular story in the New York Times qualifies as a primary source or secondary source. Instead, we should ask whether the type of analysis done by the New York Times is appropriate for the sort of claim that we are making in the article. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 08:57:30PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > I also dispute that many of OUR biographical articles are written > entirely from primary sources. If they are they should be flagged as > problematic. This is partially because the standards we permit for sources on biographies of living people are incredibly lax. I view this as an unfortunate side effect of the desirable goal of having thorough sourcing. For examples of the actual sourcing we use for biographies (forget about primary/secondary for a moment), scroll through the list of references at [[George W. Bush]] or [[Barack Obama]]. In addition to the majority of references to newspapers and newsmagazines, I see referneces to MS Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica. And these are high-profile bios that presumably represent some of our best work in sourcing. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 08:50:45PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > New textbooks are being written *every year* on every topic > imaginable. The idea that a person cannot find a new textbook on say > "Differential Equations" published in the last *five* years and > therefore must refer to Journal articles simply to establish > notability, and then to introduce 14 new concepts, never published in > any secondary text, is simply untenable. The greater likelihood is > that they didn't try :) Textbooks labeled "Differential equations" will contain the same thing next year that they have for the past 50. In the same way, books labeled "Calculus" will not be amended to cover contemporary research in mathematical analysis. The "textbooks" that might cover contemporary results are graduate-level monographs, many of which are themselves primary sources because of the volume of unpublished material they contain. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 08:23:48PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > The very definition of "important" is, that many people cite it. > If no one cites it, it's not important. Remember that I do not count a "name check" of a theorem as an actual source for the theorem (since it is not actually a source in any ordinary meaning of the word "source"). This may be leading to some misunderstanding. Another issue is the cyclical nature of academic research. It's perfectly possible for a microfield to spring 25 peer reviewed papers in a decade and then pass out of fashion or have all the accessible results exhausted. Some of these microfields will get a book written about them, some will not. All are of encyclopedic interest. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 08:35:34PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > If the community has decided that it doesn't trust an article built using > solely primary sources, than that is what it has decided. If by "community" you mean "WP policy" then no such decision has been made. It is perfectly acceptable to write certain articles entirely from primary sources. Indeed, many biographical articles are written entirely from primary sources. But I agree that most articles that can be based mostly off of secondary sources should be based off of secondary sources. I think we're drifting away from the original topic, which was not whether secondary sources in general are preferred. Nobody disputes that they are. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 08:21:18PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > It's not our place to decide *for* the community, what sholuld come to > the top of the pond. It's our place to just skim the top of the pond > and write up what we find. We can also use our actual knowledge as members of the relevant community of physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, etc. to judge for ourselves how "prominent" a particular viewpoint is, in order to decide whether to go along with some particular content addition. The idea that we have to wait a few years for secondary sources to sort things out before we write about a piece of news would be very surprising to the people who edit biographical articles about current politicians and articles about the latest release in the Harry Potter series. The general practice on wikipedia is simply that if material is verifiable and a consensus of editors on a page favors it, then it can be included. Why would academic articles be different - why would we have to wait for history to judge a new mathematical theorem, when we don't have to wait for history to judge some political scandal? - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 01:03:12AM +, Carcharoth wrote: > Why not both? Wikipedia requires editorial judgment for some things, > but selection of primary sources is one of the more tricky ones, and a > secondary source showing that you are not cherry-picking the primary > sources is a good safeguard. I wouldn't cite a source that just says "Thoerem X was very interesting" because such a source is of no interest to someone who is trying to learn more about Theorem X, and because such a source would never be cited in the scientific literature. The point of sources is fundamentally to enable readers to learn more about the topic. A reader who knows nothing about the material is in no position to worry about whether the sources have been cherry-picked, and has to trust whoever wrote the article. This is true for both secondary and primary sources. There are many discredited secondary sources that no knowledgable writer would use, but which would seem perfectly reasonable to an untrained reader. > >> What I was suggesting is that an article with no secondary mentions > >> (of any kind, whatsoever) is probably a good AfD candidate. > > > > Every topic I am intrested in having an article for will some sort of > > oblique secondary mentions - but I don't consider those to be sources for > > the article, and would not include them when I add material. > > Consider those oblique secondary sources to be "notability sources" to > "allow" the use of the primary sources. I usually only mention the notability sources at an AFD, when someone needs an infusion of clue. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 07:44:58PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > It is *already* covered in a text. In fact, I note, just on Google Books, > at least six print secondary sources which *mention* it, and a few go into > details. A book which only mentions a theorem but doesn't go into depth is useless as a source. I would always cite the original paper in preference. > What I was suggesting is that an article with no secondary mentions (of any > kind, whatsoever) is probably a good AfD candidate. Every topic I am intrested in having an article for will some sort of oblique secondary mentions - but I don't consider those to be sources for the article, and would not include them when I add material. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 07:02:47PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > Sure. 150 to 200 years ago, Sophie Germain published a very valuable > insight into Fermat's Last Theorem. It isn't necessary to go so far back. A large part of the important mathematics of the 1980s and 1990s does not appear in textbooks, or does so only implicitly, because there is little incentive for anyone to rewrite it. I believe the situation is similar in many areas of the humanities and social sciences. This has never meant that wikipedia does not want to include this work. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 07:02:47PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > Just because everybody has heard of something, doesn't mean it's > encyclopedic. Doesn't the NPOV policy, specifically the "due weight" part, demand that our articles include exactly those things that people educated in the field all know about, and avoid including things that people educated in the field feel are not important? - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 06:51:10PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > I'm not comfortable with the idea that Wikipedia is going to be the *source* > for a new summary and synthesize of primary source material. > That is the very position that we strove to exclude in the policy language. An issue here is that there is a continuum between "list of" articles and "prose" articles, not a discrete spectrum. On one hand, we probably all agree that [[List of cathedrals]] is permitted to draw from as many primary sources as desired provided that there are clear and appropriate criteria for inclusion. That is, nobody would say we have to directly copy our list of cathedrals from a list someone else has compiled, or that it even has to cite secondaryu sources at all. One step removed from this are articles like [[List of cohomology theories]]. These, again, are permitted to draw from primary sources at will, provided the standards for inclusion are valid. One step further are articles that consist of a series of summary-style paragraphs on several related topics. These are essentially glorified disambiguation pages. One example is [[Reduction (recursion theory)]]. In this particular case there are plenty of secondary sources, but if we were to really tighten up the referencing some things would need to be cited to journals. And none of the sources presently included would be readily understandable by an untrained reader, apart from the verification of direct quotes. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 06:51:10PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > Specifics would be helpful. The result described at [[Green-Tao_theorem]] was groundbreaking and of extraordinary scientific interest. It will no doubt eventually be covered in a text some day. The present article is just a stub, but if we were to expand the article to something longer, the main sources at the moment would have to be journal articles. There is a 0% chance this article would be deleted at AFD. The stub [[Ω-logic]] describes a much more esoteric theory [1]. There is a "secondary" source for this - a survey article written by Woodin himself. Again, any expansion of the article would need to use journals as its main sources. I think this has a much lower chance of being covered by a text any time soon. I picked these because they are already existing articles. I can also think of several research programs that could have a wikipedia article but do not. Going farther, there's a large collection of articles for which there are secondary sources on the broader topic, but only journal sources for large sections of the technical material. I will write a separate email on the topic of creating new survey articles on Wikipedia. - Carl [1] If the Unicode link doesn't work, pick the second article in the list at [[Omega-logic]], the one with a capital Omega. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 02:14:52PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > When a secondary source brings forth a statement, it can be balanced > by a primary source. What would be wrong would be to present a > brand-new claim directly from a primary source, which no secondary > source mention whatsoever. What would you make of decades-old papers that are well known and accepted by everyone in the area, but not covered by review texts because nobody feels a need to do so? This is the situation with much mathematical research. It's simply impossible to include every fact about a topic in a text, so the author chooses a certain perspective and set of topics. Results that don't fit are left out. More briefly: the assumption that all journal papers include contingent results or experimental data that might be invalidated later is not correct. > "The Neutrino has no mass. In other news, it's been recently found > that the neutrino is made of Spam." The only difficulty here is that the "made of Spam" claim should be attributed to the authors: "The Neutrino has no mass. Jones and Jones (2009) have recently published a paper in which they claim the Neutrino is made of Spam." That is assuming that the Jones/Jones result is of interest to people in the field and not just a crank paper of some sort. For example, if they published their paper in Science, that would be a sign it is of interest. As another example, if some new researcher claimed to have verified [[cold fusion]] and published in a respected peer reviewed journal, we could certainly include that in the article even if no other source had commented on it - but with appropriate attribution. This is assuming that all journal papers are actually primary sources in the NOR sense, of course. My own position is that NOR makes non-experimental papers "secondary sources", and in those cases there is no issue. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 11:04:39AM -0800, Delirium wrote: > But I'd also be skeptical of a general mathematical article, on > something like [[calculus]] or [[statistics]], which was constructed > mostly from journal articles. Of course. Articles like [[Calculus]] are sufficiently elementary that they can be (and universally are) written almost exclusively from textbooks. Moreover, any result that might be of interest but is not in elementary textbooks would probably not be included in these articles because of their scope. Such results would be in more specialized articles. These are the articles that I am concerned with in this thread. They are also, I believe, the articles Phil is concerned with. Apart from sources cited only to maintain the historical record, the main reasons for citing primary sources in the math articles I have worked on are: * For results that are of sufficient encyclopedic interest to be included, but not of sufficient interest that textbooks cover them. These often unproblematic because the claims made in the article are just brief summaries of results. * For results that are sufficiently new that they are not yet covered by secondary literature. I can think of several research programs with numerous papers by numerous independent authors, with significant scientific interest, but no coverage outside of journals. These areas have no sources that on their face are accessible to a reader without specialized knowledge; the wikipedia article may be the most accesible writing on the subject. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 11:11:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote: > I think it's perfectly applicable to journal articles as well. I > personally, at least, think it's usually inappropriate to directly cite > a new-research result to the journal article, since evaluating journal > articles, and placing them in proper historical and disciplinary context > is itself a quite difficult bit of original research. That sort of research is usually known as "writing" and is what we are supposed to use talk pages to discuss. Mark already hits on the main point in his next quote: what is appicable to medical articles may not be applicable to mathematics articles (and physical science articles will have their own issues, and so on). One thing to keep in mind as we move forward in this discussion is that analysis of sources is only "original reasearch" in the sense of WP:NOR if the analysis is actually included in the text of the article, or is implicit in the arguments there. In order to assess the due weight and neutral point of view for various topics, we have to consider the historical and disciplinary context of our sources using our broader knowledge of the subject. This is research in some sense, but it is not prohibited in any way. > An exception might be important but entirely uncontroversial results, > which are not likely to ever get a whole lot of critical analysis. So if > some mathematical theorem is proven, I don't have a problem with citing > the paper that proves it. This is exactly the situation. Being "encyclopedic" means that our articles will often include slightly obscure (but still relevant) results and facts, the type of results that will not appear in an introductory textbook. These can sometimes be cited to gradtuate textbooks, but other times the primary literature is the best source. This is especially true if we're looking for a source that comes out and says something directly, to make it easier for a half-trained reader to verify the citation. The situation with medical research is entirely different, unless there are some medical journals publishing papers that employ the axiomatic method. > That's what survey articles, textbooks, summary mentions in other > papers, works like Mathematical Reviews, and so on are for---much > better to cite those. Mathematical Reviews should be cited extremely rarely on wikipedia (I could go on about this issue, since I'm a mathematician, but I won't). If other papers are classified as "primary sources" then we run into the problems Phil has been complaining about. Also, it's possible for several articles to talk about the same "idea" without explicitly mentioning each other, depending on how meticulous the authors' citation practices are. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV
On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 07:07:37PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > Our policy was fashioned in a deliberate way to prevent the use of primary > sources where there is no secondary source mention. > That was deliberate. We have always permitted the use of academic research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. These are crucial both for the results they contain and for their link to the historical record. The difficulty is that these sources have to be considered "secondary sources" in order to mesh our best practices with the literal wording of NOR. But many people like to consider them "primary sources". The idea that these sources should be avoided entirely would simply be silly. The idea that it's better to avoid primary sources entirely is more applicable when "primary source" means "blog post". But as long as we try to treat * Inventiones Mathematicae * Being and Time * drudgereport.com as the same type of "primary source", we're doomed to an incoherent policy. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 11:15:10AM -0500, Phil Sandifer wrote: > I am not sure the point applies as well to NOR, where we do actually run > into the problem that we need to have some way of differentiating > between an acceptable interpretation of a source and an unacceptable > one. The only method we have is to engage in discussion on the talk page. I often say something like "Anybody can edit Wikipedia, but not everyone can edit every article". In practice, I find that it's not specialized topics that are more difficult, but topics that are associated with actual political or religious debates. One incident I remember involved an article where an editor wanted to introduce a certain type of proof that the editor found more intuitively clear. In the editor's opinion, the way that the proof is ordinarily presented in the literature is non-ideal because of the way that certain basic parts of the field are organized. Responding to this sort of proposal is extremely difficult without a broad knowledge of how the literature as a whole deals with a particular topic, because there's no single source that can be consulted to settle the debate. This type of high-level decision about the fundamental organization and due weight of ideas in a certain article will always require a broad knowledge of the field. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus
Phil, This is a On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 10:01:01PM -0500, Phil Sandifer wrote: > Yes. I agree. (Though I quibble with your use of interpretation) It's a general fact of life that Wikipedia talk is out of touch with critical theory. This is partially because the population at large is not well educated about it, partially because CT is stereotyped as pomo navel-gazing by some critics, and partially because Wikipedia was founded by an Objectivist. So, even if we all know that every act of writing is an act of interpretation, and that there is no such thing as a pure uninterpreted source text, for the purposes of WP the terminology in WP:NOR is meant to be read in a naive, uneducated sense. This makes some sense, as NOR would not be improved by adding a long introduction to critical theory at the top. This topic came up on this list a while back, and Jimbo Wales posted what I thought was a very reasonable opinion at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2008-April/092995.html - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 09:56:07AM -0500, Phil Sandifer wrote: > An article that heavily relies on Searle to summarize Derrida would be a > disaster. And yet the best ways to counterbalance Searle involve primary > sources. I see what you are saying. I have the same issue with mathematics research papers, if they are considered "primary sources". My personal solution, which allows me to reconcile NOR with actual practice, is that Derrida's essay in response to Searle is not a "primary source" from the point of view of NOR. According to NOR, primary sources are: "Other examples include archeological artifacts; photographs; historical documents such as diaries, census results, video or transcripts of surveillance, public hearings, trials, or interviews; tabulated results of surveys or questionnaires; written or recorded notes of laboratory and field experiments or observations; and artistic and fictional works such as poems, scripts, screenplays, novels, motion pictures, videos, and television programs." Note that "peer-reviewed papers making analytic or synthetic arguments" are not included in that list. If "primary source" for NOR actually included Derrida's response to Searle, but not Searle's argument, then the problem you see would be genuine. However, if Derrida's argument is considered a primary source, then Searle's should also be considered a primary source. Unfortunately, due to the wide range of things that are considered "primary sources" by different fields, I don't think there is really much hope for a clear PSTS section in the NOR policy. Recently I have just been ignoring it. If you make any progress in clearing up the language on the NOR page, that would be wonderful. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 09:12:26AM -0500, Phil Sandifer wrote: > "a primary source may be used only to make descriptive claims, the > accuracy of which is easily verifiable by any reasonable, educated > person without specialist knowledge." The way I have always read that par of NOR, books ''about Derrida'' are secondary sources, which do not have this "without specialist knowledge" proviso. It's only if you want to write your article directly from Derrida's work that the primary sources issue comes into play. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 08:40:27PM +1100, Mark Gallagher wrote: > Phil has hinted at it, but the primary reason we should be able to summarise > and rephrase the words of humanities experts is that if we don't, our > articles > won't make any gosh-darned sense ... Not only the humanities. This same issue appears in technical science and mathematics articles equally well. And the current practice is that we can indeed summarize and reword technical material to make it more accessible. There are three main requirements (all informal, nowhere spelled out). (1) the summary should be in agreement with the consensus of written opinion in the field N.B. The only way to tell if an article satisfies (1) is to have a very good sense of the overall consensus in the literature. In practice this means actually being familiar with a large chunk of literature in the field. But this is already implicit in the principle of undue weight - how can you decide if something has undue weight without knowing how that thing is covered in the literature? (2) the summary should not introduce new theories or new interpretive frameworks For example, contemporary mathematics is all about finding very general systems of which various specialized systems are just concrete examples. But in WP articles we avoid creating any ''new'' general systems, even if it appears possible to do so. This is a common error in new editors, who may try to develop an entirely new taxonomy of some area, or try to replace theorems with more general theorems that don't appear in the literature. That would be OK in print, if you could get it published, but not on WP. (3) when there are several conflicting opinions in the literature, the article's summary should give due weight This is not a very common issue in mathematics except for certain philosophical aspect, and fringe/pseudoscience topics. But I think it would be more important in writing about Derrida. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus
On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 10:01:01PM -0500, Phil Sandifer wrote: > But current policy explicitly forbids even summary of sources that > require expert knowledge to understand. I use such sources all the time for mathematics articles. There's simply no way to require verifiability but also exclude the best sources as "too technical". If there is a policy document that actually forbids these sources, that can be changed. But I don't think that NOR actually does forbid them, at the moment. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Scientists told "publish in Wikipedia or else"
On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 08:50:28PM -0500, Jonathan Hughes wrote: > > Of course some people will complain that it's too technical, but > > that's an issue to take up at WP:PEREN. > > I'd imagine a simple solution would be to ask if the authors can tone down > the technical language a bit. Something along the lines of "we layman be > not learned enough to understand". Yes, that's a reasonable suggestion. The debate about "too technical" has been going on for years and will not stop anytime soon. The question on the other side is, "if you don't already know what these basic terms mean, how can you understand what's being said in this article?". If the authors just remember to link all the technical terms that may be unfamiliar, that would be a good start. Also, keeping the lede as untechnical as possible is a good practice. Even if someone cannot read the rest of the article, a good lede conveys the basic points as a sort of micro-article. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Scientists told "publish in Wikipedia or else"
On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 10:24:01PM +, David Gerard wrote: > http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081216/full/news.2008.1312.html This is very exciting! The first article appears to be [[SmY]], and I don't see any glaring problems with it. The two diagrams could use a footnote in each of their long captions, but there are three references provided that seem reasonably on this topic. Of course some people will complain that it's too technical, but that's an issue to take up at WP:PEREN. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Serious problems with interlanguage links
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 12:16:47AM +, Ian Woollard wrote: > Well, let's take an example, like: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket > > Down the side are a huge number of links including the French one: > > http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fus%C3%A9e_spatiale > > This title translates as 'Space Rocket'. > > Now straight away we are in trouble. The English wikipedia's Rocket > article is about the general case of rockets- any vehicle that is > propelled by a rocket engine, including a rather awesome Russian > torpedo, some drag racers, aircraft, and the worlds fastest train > (Mach 8.5!!!), whereas the French article is about only space rockets. Indeed - so the enwiki article should not link to the french one, since they are not about the same topic. > But there's nowhere else to go. And this feature is working exactly as > intended. Could you explain what you mean by "intended"? I have long thought that the intention of ill links is for articles that cover exactly the same subject. > The problems are many fold. Linked articles can have a definition that > makes them a subset, partial overlap or superset. In each of those cases, it seems to me that no interlanguage link is appropriate. > There is absolutely no reason to think that these links are > transitive in practice or theory. In theory, there is plenty reason for the links to be transitive. Since that is the best way to automatically extend the links to other wikis via ill bots. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Serious problems with interlanguage links
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 09:08:55PM +, David Gerard wrote: > Yeah. The common usage of interwiki links on en:wp is "that article > over there is roughly equivalent to this one." I have seen en:wp > articles pointing to two de:wp articles, quite reasonably. I disagree with the "quite reasonably" part. Interlanguage links ought to represent a closer connection than that. If one enwiki article "corresponds" to two dewiki articles, then neither of the dewiki articles should be links from the enwiki article. Perhaps a disambiguation page on dewiki could be linked from the enwiki page. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Serious problems with interlanguage links
On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 01:53:49PM +0100, Lukasz Bolikowski wrote: > Let me clarify a couple of assumptions that I've made: > i) there should be at most one article on any given topic in a language > edition, which is not true in sh:, az:, ku: and possibly others. > ii) the sum of interwiki links should form an equivalence relation > iii) an interwiki link to a redirect is treated as an interwiki link to > the target of the redirect (ii) and (iii) look to be inconsistent with the idea that every article should have interwiki links. For example, enwiki has a single article on [[eigenvector, eigenvalue, and eigenspace]]. If another wiki were to have three separate articles on these topics, and we wanted to keep the interlanguage links as an equivalence relation, then we cannot link those three to the main enwiki article. How would you propose handling a situation like that? - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Serious problems with interlanguage links
On Sat, Dec 06, 2008 at 11:40:13AM -0500, Gregory Maxwell wrote: > Lukasz analysis depends on linking being communicative, but this can > only be true when there is only one kind of link (x is the same > subject no more, no less as y). If we limited ourselves to that it > would preclude the "x is covered by broader article y" link which is > absolutely necessary if we want to produce useful interwiki links from > bigger projects to smaller ones. I was saying in another message that this seems like a case where a redirect would be desirable. Instead of linking from [[en:Specialized topic]] to [[tlh:General topic]], we should created a redirect at [[tlh:Specialized topic]] and point the interlanguage link at that. Then human navigation will work smoothly, through the redirect. But automatic analysis of the interlanguage link system will not follow the redirect and will not think that [[en:Specialized topic]] is the same as [[tlh:Generalized topic]]. Especially with the advent of unified login there is little difficulty in creating redirects on other-language wikis, if you know the other language. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Serious problems with interlanguage links
On Sat, Dec 06, 2008 at 03:22:55PM +0100, Eugene van der Pijll wrote: > Lukasz Bolikowski schreef: > > A short introduction: let's say that two articles are connected if there > > is an interlanguage link from one to the other in at least one > > direction. Next, let's say that if A-B and B-C are connected, then A-C > > are too. > > Hold it right there. That assumes that every wikipedia divides its > content into pages in the same way. Since content policy is made at > the level of individual projects, this assumption is incorrect. The assumption that if A-B and linked and B-C is linked then A-C are linked is perfectly reasonable. If page A on wiki A is not on the same topic as page B on wiki B, there really shouldn't be an interlanguage link. For example, if wiki A has separate articles on "Beer" and "Wine" and wiki B has only one article on "Alcoholic beverage", no interlanguage link is appropriate. Otherwise, we run into the sorts of problems described by L. Bolikowski above. I realize that, historically, this principle was violated, and some interlanguage links were set up on the principle of "find the closest article that does exist, even if it is not on the same topic". I don't think that's sustainable given the current sizes of the wikimedia projects, because we will need to rely more on automated tools to manage interwiki links. We can resolve the issue of different divisions of material, to some extent, by pointing the interlanguage link to a redirect that ''would be'' the exact same topic if the article were located there. In the example above, that means creating redirects on wiki B from "Beer" to "Alcoholic beverage" and from "Wine" to "Alcoholic beverage". Then we can set up the interwiki links from A to B as desired. - Carl ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
