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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."
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
Sometimes it's necessary - you can find "references" for almost anything these days. Three examples: Evolution, Obama being born in Hawaii and global warming all have opponents with pages to quote and an axe to grind even though the facts strongly support all of these and there isn't any real controversy surrounding them.
I'm not a Wikipedia editor or contributor (other than financially), and I don't know your issue either, but I do believe that some manual oversight is needed.
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 Wikimedia Foundation almost never gets involved in disputes about content or users thumping each other's chests in some show of primal dominance. That is entirely dealt with on individual projects unless it becomes something like a project bureaucrat that is going rogue and being a real pain in the behind.
There is even a group of "overseers" that are volunteers (using Wikimedia terms, they are called "Stewards") who have broad powers across multiple projects to clean up messes of this nature. Usually their main purpose is to "promote" somebody to the status of a "bureaucrat" when one doesn't exist on a local project or to grant some special privileges like the "oversight" rights that permit some users to dig into page histories and determine who might be sock puppets with information that generally isn't available to the general public.
About the only thing the Wikimedia Foundation does, besides frivolous spending of donations, is to maintain the server farms running the website. On a very rare occasion they do get into some broad policy discussions, and they are also involved in accepting new projects such as the move of Wikitravel community to a Wikimedia sister project. The Wikimedia Foundation also manages the development of the MediaWiki software, but that is more like the Debian Foundation or even the Free Software Foundation for similar kinds of software projects. Jimmy Wales used to be much more into local project administration (particularly English Wikipedia) but even that has all but stopped. Larry Sanger is nowhere to be found and isn't even involved in the Wikimedia Foundation at all, certainly not on this level to be sued for content on Wikipedia.
Besides, thanks to the DMCA, you can't sue the WMF for defamation. Read up on the law, it might be educational. You might be able to sue an individual contributor to Wikipedia for defamation, but if you think suing some 16 year old kid is going to make any bit of difference (assuming you can even find the actual identity of "User:RockStarz421" or whatever the name is that they are using, and assuming they are even in a jurisdiction where you can sue them), good luck.
What you are complaining about here is just one other fellow editor being a prick. You should be aware that there are all sorts of pricks in this universe, so live with it. They don't have any more authority to act than you do, just try to be nice and don't be a jerk yourself.
Then you revert the Edits back into the article with a note: "It is a violation of wikirules to remove properly cited material. If you think it should be removed, goto Talk page and justify your case."
And then you get accused of starting an "edit war", and punish with a week or two of "time out".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
There are a bunch of folks on Wikipedia that seem to think that primary sources are evil and should be avoided at all costs. Many of these same folks also seem to think that paper sources don't exist, so if you can't Google the information or reference it from a URL, it doesn't exist.
Regardless, sometimes you need to stand up to these bullies (that is what they are) who hang around Wikipedia and act like idiots. More often than not they usually get what is coming to them as somebody does stand up to them and either gets them to back down or perhaps they even get brought forward to an ArbCom case and get slapped down real hard or even banned from the project. The problem is that they do a whole lot of damage in the meantime and sadly drive away people like yourself.
I've encountered more than a few idiots on Wikipedia over the years like this. Karma can be a bitch when it bites them back, and I sometimes get guilty pleasure seeing them on their way out the door. I'll also note that it is a very small minority of the Wikipedia editor community who act like this as well, even if sometimes they seem to dominate discussions. Because anybody can slap on warning banners and complain or even revert all sorts of edits, realize that there are a bunch of people who do stuff like that who are just being trolls too.
The sad part is that often a great many people just don't have the time or energy to fight these trolls. I certainly understand if you don't. Hopefully they don't damage the project too badly before they get their hand caught in the cookie jar and kicked out.
Actually, the Wikipedia primary source policy including the ability to reference web pages, blogs, and forums even includes exceptions to include material like this. It just sounds like there were a bunch of anal retentive idiots editing the page who were more caught up in policy than trying to actually write an article with useful information.
There are some editors who act as gate keepers from time to time on Wikipedia articles. They are called "article owners", and something that is also considered against Wikipedia policy. Sadly they don't get slapped down often enough even when what they are doing is contrary to policy.
It is important to note that the information is reliable, and a talk page is certainly a good place to discuss such things. I've quoted blog entries and stood up to people who pulled things like this out (reverting their edits and responding on talk pages) where I've had these kind of "no blogs are allowed" believers to re-read the actual policy and back down. It does take weighing sources and judging them for credibility, and sometimes people are just lazy not wanting to put in extra effort to verify the source for themselves.
That in your case it was put into a secondary source sort of makes life easier, but I've seen secondary sources misquote the primary sources as well. The key work here is "scholarship", which sadly is not an easy skill to acquire. Writing a quality encyclopedia article is hard work and harder than it looks. It can be a learned skill acquired by participating on Wikipedia and learning from "the school of hard knocks", but it does take time and effort.
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.