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When a Primary Source Isn't Good Enough: Wikipedia
unixluv writes "Evidently, Wikipedia doesn't believe an author on his own motivations when trying to correct an article on his own book. A Wikipedia administrator claimed they need 'secondary sources.' I'm not sure where you would go to get a secondary source when you are the only author of a work. Thus, in a lengthy blog post for The New Yorker, Roth created his own secondary source. He wrote, 'My novel The Human Stain was described in the entry as "allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard." ... This alleged allegation is in no way substantiated by fact. The Human Stain was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years.' The Wikipedia page has now been corrected."
Convince someone else first, then convince Wikipedia.
I don't pretend that I understand the internal machinations or politics of WikiPedia, but I have had several edits reverted because someone out there didn't like certain information being revealed. I included proper references for those edits, but when they go against the agenda of someone on the inside, you can't compete.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This is how Wikipedia is like a failed software project: they value their process more than their goal.
I could go out and make the most amazing, society-altering discovery ever, but I wouldn't be allowed to tell Wikipedia about it, because it would be "original research" and it would require "secondary sources."
If or when Wikipedia dies, this, along with the oft-reviled entrenched fiefdoms, will be the reason.
This reminds me of the Rodney Dangerfield movie "Back to School".
The English professor gives and assignment to read and write and analysis on a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Dangerfield's character hires Kurt Vonnegut himself to write the analysis.
The professor, during fit of scorn, throws the paper at Dangerfield and yells "and you don't understand the first thing about what Vonnegut meant!"
Vonnegut himself has a non-speaking cameo where Dangerfield tells him he's stopping payment on the check and Vonnegut flips him off.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The article in the NYT, directly from the author in question, is a primary source. Wikipedia has no problems using primary sources. What Wikipedia isn't is a primary source itself, nor should it be.
IMO, this is exactly how Wikipedia should work, with the exception that the unsupported statements about Anatole Broyard should have been removed when it was pointed out that they were unsupported.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Somebody at Wikipedia was too heavy handed when enforcing editing rules. The issue has since been resolved to the satisfaction of the updater, who happens to be the subject of the article.
Big deal.
While it sounds dumb on Wikipedia's part, it does make sense when you think about it. WIkipedia is more like a Factoid Aggregator, listing information that can be backed up elsewhere. They don't want to become the sole source of information, because then it isn't backed up and can't be referenced - say, in case someone needs to verify something or restore it after a clumsy edit (looking at edit history isn't good enough since you still need to verify the fact is true).
It may sound weird that some guy's blog is more trustworthy than Wikipedia, but in this instance that does seem to be the case.
It seems reasonable to me that the guy's blog should be the source, not his user account on wikipedia. otherwise Wikipedia would have to verify user identities, which is insane.
Back in the 19th century people believed in science. Science is based on the belief that there is a real world out there that has properties anyone can discover. What made this world "real" was that these properties did not depend on anybody's opinion, so you didn't have to give a damn about anybody else's opinion of your research either; you could discover the truth yourself, and be right even if everybody in the world disagreed with you.
In the 21st century we no longer have science. Now we have social science. It's based on the belief that reality is defined by majority opinion. Naturally, one man's opinion is worthless, and only when a consensus is reached can you state that you know anything.
unixluv writes: "...you would go to get a secondary source when you are the only author of a work. Thus, in a lengthy blog post for The New Yorker, Roth created his own secondary source. He wrote, 'My novel The Human Stain was described in the entry..."
How would one cite Roth's direct edit on Wikipedia...without citing Wikipedia?
"Personal knowledge of Author, 07 September, 2012"?
This is where the argument of "why can't he just change Wikipedia?" falls apart.
Here is the wikipedia talk page.
Wikipedia embraces "experts in the community," inflates them far beyond their objective worth when it comes to defending its credibility among legitimate encyclopedias, then goes all "Vonnegut in Back to School" when faced with legitimate experts who normally have little use for their sandbox.
Like I've always said: Want a wonderfully comprehensive summary of the 5th Season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or exegesis on some nearly forgotten Geek meme? Wikipedia's the place to go. Anything else? Not if your serious about it.
If a biased party *lies* about what a book or group actually says but the biased party's statement is published in a "reliable source" like a journal heavily supported advertising, perhaps 98%, merely quoting what the book says is a primary source and not accepted since it is not a secondary source. Used to be "patently false" would get crap removed. Ran across this with advertising journals, the largest advertisers vs their competitors.
Wikipedia's content has often been captured by various commercial interests, including the pharmaceuticals and their proxies, witting or not.
Just ask George Lucas whether or not Han shot first...
A few months back I saw people having trouble editing the page for a court case. The citation they had provided was the actual court findings as published by the court. There were a couple of Wikipedia moderators that didn't like the topic at hand, so they slapped a big banner saying something to the effect of "Warning: this is all unsubstantiated hokum and will burn down your house if you read it" at the top of the page. They said that the court findings as published by the court were not good enough, that you actually needed an article written about the court case published by a journal instead. They supplied an article published by a journal. This was then also rejected because it was published by a law firm. Kafka would have been rolling his eyes at this point.
People seem to have lost sight of the fact that a wiki is effective because it drastically lowers the barrier to editing. Wikipedia now fetishises process and is about as far away from the spirit in which wikis were conceived as possible. It's not a wiki if bureaucracy makes it impossible to contribute without reading hundreds of pages on process and you have to fight somebody who seemingly devotes all of their time to controlling their favourite subjects.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Did the author provide some sort of collaboration that other people could verify? Or was this due to correspondence between him and a Wikipedia admin? After all, if I changed a Wikipedia article to claim a fact that nobody else could check, does that serve Wikipedia's fact checkers?
Do you want George Lucas to go edit the Wiki pages on Star Wars and note that Greedo always shot first? Enforcing a secondary source means he first has to convince some citable source that it's what happened, which provides a check that Wikipedia's crowdsourced model on its own can't.
http://compsoc.man.ac.uk/~shep/
If you actually read the New Yorker article, you'll find that Philip Roth is just using this Wikipedia thing as an ironic way of introducing a piece that's really about his book and not about Wikipedia. It isn't a serious complaint.
It's a tertiary source. Always has been. This is by design.
It relies on things that have been recorded and documented. The benefit of this is that if something is in dispute, you can go to the secondary source and verify it. The primary source may change his mind, or may not be around after a certain time.
This seems the most obvious rationale anyway. There's no particular reason to make an exception here.
It seems in this particular case that Wikipedia editors wanted something they could cite. This strikes me as rather reasonable. If I read the statement "according to the author, the book was inspired by an unhappy event in the life of his late friend Melvin Tumin," with no citation, how could I possibly verify that? If the citation was "the author sent Wikipedia private correspondence, trust me," is that any better? For all you criticizing this decision, is that what you want the encyclopedia to look like?
Asking the author to put a previously unknown fact into a citeable public record before reflecting it in the Wikipedia article is a process that I am personally in favor of, since it now allows me to follow up and see exactly where that information came from and why it's in the article.
Wikipedia does have its problems with overzealous and protective editors, but this particular case doesn't seem to be one. Perhaps there is some additional detail that I've missed in this case but reading TFA actually makes me more confident in the information in Wikipedia.
The real issue is when Wikipedia editors actively obfuscate well researched but highly inconvenient (for some anyway) facts:
http://www.deepcapture.com/tag/wikipedia/
IMHO a root problem with Wikipedia is that there is no effective check on the so-called Wikignomes --- people who mindlessly edit for form instead of content, claiming they are enforcing wikipedia rules. Some no doubt do a good job but many misunderstand those rules, or willfully distort them for their own perverse ends, as happened in the original post. There's no efficient way to police these sick little gnomes, or wasn't the last time I encountered them.
Brilliance: An online repository of knowledge on pretty much anything.
Idiocy: Having to know someone in the editor cartel or have someone who knows nothing about a subject corroborate actual authorities trying to share real knowledge.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Just because an author makes potentially self-serving claims about his book doesn't mean that Wikipedia should just uncritically adopt them.
Sigh. What would a secondary source do? Just regurgitate what Roth tells them?
The dickhead Roth was corresponding with doesn't understand WHY secondary sources are preferred in an encyclopedia: they're preferred because they're impartial fact-checkers (this is why Wikipedia has a "reliable source" guideline at WP:RS - so you know which secondary sources are OK to cite and which ones aren't). If you're writing something that necessarily CANNOT be objectively checked (in this case, a novelist's inspiration for writing a novel), then which "secondary sources" are going to exist?
This is a good example of process over product.
Salon.com critic Charles Taylor argues that Roth had to have been at least partly inspired by the case of Anatole Broyard, a literary critic who, like the protagonist of The Human Stain, was a man identified as Creole who spent his entire professional life more-or-less as white.[1] Roth states there is no connection, as he did not know Broyard had any black ancestry until an article published months after he had started writing his novel.[2]
I can't see why Roth threw such a fit over that. The article stated that one guy said one thing and that Roth contradicted him - I can't see any mis-statement.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Leaving out the risk of impersonation and all that crud:
There is no such thing as a primary source on Wikipedia. Words written on Wikipedia are not attributable to any writer. An authoritative source can log on to Wikipedia and say something, while making a grammatical mistake. You have to fix it, because articles must be written in correct English. In fact, you are encouraged to rewrite even correct texts if they can be expressed more clearly. And perhaps it fits better into a different section. And a different paragraph. So when an article contains an uncited statement "The author intends..." you have to search backward through a thousand revisions if the spirit of this statement faintly resembles that of a sentence written years ago by an account that could possibly belong to the real author. It's not an authentic source.
If you need to put material on Wikipedia, and you're not famous enough to give interviews: Just get yourself a blog, establish its authenticity beyond reasonable doubt, then publish an article on it that explains what you want to say. Then you can cite it on Wikipedia.
I'm afraid you completely misrepresent both science and what you call social science (but isn't). The problem is not whether the world is real: the problem is how can we know what these properties are.
Truth is not self-evident, as you imply. In fact, science does not produce "truths" at all: it produces theories. Scientists gather evidence and construct theories to explain the evidence. This is inductive reasoning: it can never be 100% certain.
Science isn't something "anyone" can do, as you imply: in many cases it takes a lifetime of expert training to be able to assess scientific evidence - and even then, there are honest disagreements and mistakes. Take your field of expertise. Can anyone make sound judgements? Is the common sense of the amateur dependable? I'll wager not.
So, we have scientists evaluating evidence, but they don't all agree. There is always evidence that doesn't quite fit. A scientific theory is never perfect. (If they did agree, if everything fit, then they would move on to something else because that particular problem would no longer be interesting!) With these scientistific experts disagreeing, how are we to decide who is correct?
Consensus. Communication. Agreement does not make things true in the world, but it is the best method we have for trying to judge whose truth is the right one. And it is imperfect.
You have fallen into two errors: First, of believing that once Truth is found that fact can be known and reliably communicated. Second, of believing that the only alternative is to believe nothing is true and reality is the invention of majority opinion. You are wrong on both counts.
Such misunderstandings lie at the root of anti-evolutionary belief, and sustain conviction that climate change science is a fraud. A non-expert believes he has found the one critical piece of evidence that disproves the consensus, and becomes convinced that this overturns the science. Science isn't calculus. It doesn't work like that.
The debate over evidence and whether it is possible to know Truth is an ancient one, reaching right back to Plato. One of the most important and influential scholarly works of the 20th century (and the source of the term "paradigm shift") is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. I highly recommend reading the whole book: every scientist should read it. There is a pretty good recent overview at The Guardian, of all places. (Though the last bit about science being data- rather than theory-driven is bunk. It is both.)
As for social science, fifty years ago it was caught up in the belief that it could discover scientific laws of society akin to Newton's laws of physics. Then in the 1980s and 1990s there was a widespread rejection of this position, which in many cases resulted in an extreme postmodern rejection of science as a special way of acquiring knowledge. Thankfully, both extreme positions have now been widely rejected.
I forked an open source project a while back...the Wikipedia page on that project mentions the fork, but has nearly nothing about the motivations behind it. People are even asking in the discussion page if anyone could expand on that section -- which I certainly could, but since there would be no citation for it, it'd get removed.
Not that the motivations for the fork were mine alone; but who better to comment on them than the person who actually initiated it?
Anything nonsensical, unsourced, reaching reference under:
In Anime
In Western Animation
In Manga
In Comics
Then there's the classic spam for shitty bands that have never performed outside of their local pizza place but feel the need to spam an article with some ridiculous mention:
In Music
GarageBandThatFormedLastTuesday recorded a song called "Roth's Child" that was written about a month after their lead singer saw the trailer for "The Human Stain".
and if he was the originator of the old "hot grits" meme.
Ever wondered why there are so many more biographical entries on athletes (even 2nd rate ones) than academics on Wikipedia?
That is because athletes are much more likely to be interviewed and have biographical information published.
Contrast this with finding biographical data on some researchers. Even high profile ones with a long publication record will usually at best have some self-reported biographical data if any (e.g. Facebook). Hence it will be rejected by Wikipedia due to their secondary source policies.
And so the largest Internet encyclopedia operates like your local high-school where all the attention goes to the sport jocks and nobody cares about the nerds.
I'm ancient by the standards of both Slashdot and Wikipedia.
One thing that is pretty much forgotten on Wikipedia is that Primary Sources used to be preferred for references. There were a series of edits over time to the reliable sources policy, each one appeared mostly grammatical at the time, and nobody really picked up on the fact that Primary Sources had been demoted in priority and Secondary Sources had been promoted in priority. There was basically zero discussion at the time that a fundamental sourcing policy had been radically changed.
Those changes went unchallenged, newbies joined the project and were taught that Secondary Sources were preferred, and eventually most people forgot that the policy used to be effectively the reverse and that the change had been made accidentally without significant review.
You sound young and inexperienced.
Hopefully, grace and rational thought will come to you with age.
Every few months, there is an article about wikipedia-admins being edit/control-nazis.
Nothing NEW here.
With trivia sections, you get articles with a small main body followed by a very long list of unrelated facts under Trivia because it's easier to add one line to the existing list than to integrate it into the article. That's just a bad way to organize an article.
The content in the trivia sections is usually fine, you just need to find a way to include it in the main body of the article so that it reads like an encyclopedia entry should.
Absolutely this!
This is why I stopped giving a shit at Wikipedia. I would make simple good faith edits, that would get reverted and require me to become a Wiki lawyer to overturn. The bureaucracy on some pages was so crushing that the core principle of "Be Bold" was completely lost.
I found a serious error on a wikipedia article for a piece of equipment - old instructions (from the '50's!) that are now known to cause fatalities. I edited to say don't do this, and linked the manufacturer's warnings. Primary source, so got deleted. Last I checked the bad info's still up. (FWIW Ball canning jars, and incorrect processing for to kill botulism.)
"You sound young and inexperienced." - by radiumsoup (741987) on Saturday September 08, @03:57PM (#41275391)
Ahem: Well - You sound like a "wannabe chinese fortune cookie" (lmao) - answer the question in my subject-line above...
---
"Hopefully, grace and rational thought will come to you with age." - by radiumsoup (741987) on Saturday September 08, @03:57PM (#41275391)
Hopefully, being an off-topic troll will stop being your way of responding on forums boards with age...
* Once more/Lastly - Answer the question in my subject-line above...
APK
P.S.=> We'll go from there...
... apk
The restriction against use of primary sources is silly, and one of the main reasons I have my own wiki (for naval history).
I had to beg and plead to correct the page on USS Constitution which asserted that the ship's wheel was still one removed from HMS Java in 1812 because some idiot wrote that in a book. You can look at the wheel and tell that it is plainly under 30 years old. You can email the very person at Navy History and Heritage Command who is in charge of maintaining the vessel who can tell you when that wheel was installed, and when the one it replaced was installed, and... they want someone to write a book. And what exactly would that do except create "a lack of consensus"?
Wikipedia is a great thing, but when it becomes a means of preserving and disseminating falsehood, a great opportunity is grossly diminished.
tone
I can understand that you don't want to waste any more of your time fixing what was a casual edit. If the edit gets accepted, be grateful, otherwise don't let it piss you off.
Let's say you donate money to charity... Would you say "If they accept your money, be grateful. If they choose to instead throw the money to a well, don't let it piss you off"?
If you like a project enough that you actually choose to donate your time or money in a way you're told you can (and encouraged to) help, and then, instead of being thanked, face the equivalent of "f*** off!", you have all the right to be pissed.
Personally, I've tried making a Wikipedia edit once. I fixed something that was very clearly just a typo. There was no reason I should have added or modified sources, no factual errors I could have introduced, no way I would have broken some guideline... I just fixed a typo and stated so clearly in my edit comment. Later on, my fix was reverted. After that, I've never bothered trying to improve the articles.
This problem reminds me of the situations when the government decides for one reason or another that you are dead and declares it thus so (cue Captain Picard "Make it so"). Then the very much alive person (aka the primary source) engages the bureaucracy in a battle of wits to rescind that declaration. If we could all just write a letter to the New Yorker to resolve the problem, life would be good.
Those with the most spare time on their hands.
Many people have given up trying to make corrections to articles with factual errors - often glaring ones - because others have assumed the role of killer attack dog, defending "their" territory to the bitter end.
The result of even trying is always a revert war, and the killer attack dog always wins, because they seem to do nothing else besides defend these articles from others, and because it seems every other Wikipedia mod all the way to the top of the Wiki food chain is just like them.
Sanity only ever prevails on Wikipedia by accident.
There are many reasons for free speech. A democratic society can't work without a marketplace of ideas where you can also express ideas that the current ruler doesn't like. Any system gets overrun by corruption when people can't call politicians/bureaucrats out on it. A right to free artistic expression should be a basic human right. I could go on and on when listing reasons for why it's generally a bad idea to limit the right to share/express ideas/information/opinions...
However, any of the reasons I can think of doesn't justify the right to spread false information that you claim to be accurate and factual, when you know that's not the case. In fact, most of the reasons for why the constitutions includes the right to free speech just make it more important that the speech is not outright lies.
The unfortunate wording of the right to free speech is why the supreme court has had to actually rule on whether you have the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater just for lulz... As the right isn't actually to free "speech" but rather to free expression of ideas, spreading of factual information, expression of opinions and so on.
is people like you: 17,000 edits, seriously?
Persistence is wiki currency, not truth: hence this post.
(How many comments did you make on this thread?)
Androids don't poop. (mirror)
Why would I need to read a biography on a Victorian English novelist when writing about the career of an American illusionist?
I've seen an editor who repeatedly deleted a comment, even after a photo depicting situation described in said comment was referenced. From the editors comments, it seemed clear that he was truly reveling in his power to piss people off.
Secondary source does not mean what the author thinks it does. A primary source means the material itself such as the book. A secondary source means a the opinion of the primary source such as a review of the book.
I understand why the author got upset, but.. I still think Wikipedia policy is reasonable.
In this case, everyone seems to agree that the author is reasonable, psychologically stable enough to know his inspiration, and not likely to lie for whatever reason. Nobody seems to dispute his statements about the inspiration for his story.
That's not the case for every author. There are plenty authors who would lie to generate publicity, or think it is cool post-modernist or whatever to lie about it, or have such mental issues that discussions about their inspirations are best left to professionals.
It's probably best that they don't get the last say about their Wikipedia pages.
The Wikipedians have at last altered the policy that discriminated against truth: "Verifiability, and not truth, is one of the fundamental requirements for inclusion in Wikipedia;" (here is a link to the revision history of the 'Verifiability' policy http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia3AVerifiability&action=historysubmit&diff=511066476&oldid=483539130.)
-- but as Philip Roth found, it still looks as if any old gossip or fable can still find its way in, and it can then be hard to get removed.
There still seems to be something like an erosion process: A once-good-quality Wikipedia article gets doctored by editors who have preconceptions rather than information. The noisy ones just keep on putting their stuff in, and sometimes they delete good material with reliable citations in support. This is probably against Wikipedia policy, but policy is theory, and practice can be something else. The cleanup can be much more difficult to do than the contamination.
But WP can still be a good source of links to really reliable information.
-wb-
The probability of him being accused of racism escaping any documentation is rather low. Roth hunting down some of that documentation and citing it for Wikipedia would help settle the mini-feud properly, strengthen the public record for future historians and make Wikipedia that much better.
Then there's the question of motivation: Whether or not Roth is speaking honestly about the source of the books central incident, he could have reason to deny the Broyard allegation: If Roth's explanation is true he'd want the record set straight. If it's false he might want it erased to hide his embarrassment.
I'll ignore the fact that the source of the book (the 'spook' comment), and the source of a major sub-plot (the fictional 'fact' that Silk was part Black and 'passing' as white) are two entirely unrelated issues.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Wikipedia is not a "failed social experiment". It generated content several orders of magnitude faster than many of its starry-eyed supporters predicted, and an order of magnitude more reliable than the median projection of the poo-poo brigade. Then it matured and succumbed to human nature.
What else shall we throw on the junk heap of failed social experiment? Government? Religion? Law? Agriculture? Peer review? Fermentation?
Every one of these human institutions contains horrific problems. Of these, I'd say the law is in worse shape than Wikipedia. A bad sentence in Wikipedia can be beaten down or at least successfully harassed (the people who keep restoring the bad version run the same risk of getting shut down for edit wars--though with determination and practice they might run this risk more astutely than Johnny-come-lately). A bad law just sits there and festers, never entirely off the books.
So your syllogism is that Wikipedia is a failed experiment because you can try to fight against the crap, but law is a miracle of human civilization because you can't even try to do anything about the woefully incompetent and ugly bits?
take a look at the german wikipedia. there everything gets deleted, when only one admin thinks its boring.
this is nothing new, wikipedia is a collection of rumours accepted as fact by the majority, not actual facts based on science and credible sources.
I've seen some outrageous claims, such as tweeter speakers being capable only to produce upto 20kHz, not even a picture of a *TWO* retail tweeters (tweeter + retail packaging with specs) promising 30kHz made them change their mind back then.
I stopped trying to fix all the errors in the english wikipedia ages ago because "the elite of editors" seemingly knows better than anyone.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
They claim there are no designated "editors" or "monitors" in the Wikipedia site. But you just try to add a new article or edit an existing one... At least a couple editors (who were watching) will jump all over you, practically call you names, change you article around (a lot), then threaten you to not violate the site's protocol again or you'll be banned from making contributions again. This has happened to me more than once. Note: My contributions were right on point an inoffensive in every way
I am alive [citation needed]
The parent contains the most basic truth of Wikipedia, which is that the owner of the most obsessive, damaged mind will always triumph in the end.
The thing is that Wikipedia is terrified of been in a position of being a primary source. They have made it a religion to have external citations because that way they can pass the blame of being wrong to the source. Which doesn't really except them from the burden of being wrong, but in their mind, if they can share the blame it's alright.
But... the future refused to change.
This is something new and I think that we should try how it works? Nebudet injury, and the benefits can be great.
The "best you've got" is *trying* to "hide" my post via bogus downmods? U FAIL, trolls -> http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3103659&cid=41274491
* I won't ALLOW it, so get over it!
APK
P.S.=> Keep "burning up" your mod points to do unjustifiable downmods to my post - Doesn't bother me since you'll "run dry" of them, sooner OR later, & then? Then, I'll win anyhow... & you won't be able to *try* to "hide" my post which was nothing more than facts!
... apk