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."

Comments

Working as intended

[Anonymous Coward]

Convince someone else first, then convince Wikipedia.

Re:Working as intended

[hvm2hvm]

Nobody said anything about suing for money. Typical thinking of today, someone wronged you - time to cash in. No, some people just want the mistake fixed and I'm pretty sure the author would have been OK to just have the modification permitted.

Douches

[Lord Kano]

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

Re:Douches

[Daniel Dvorkin]

At one college and one university that I attended, I was told outright by several professors that Wikipedia won't be accepted as a source.

And I was told in high school, well before Wikipedia existed, that any encyclopedia was unacceptable as a source. The message was, "Read the encyclopedia article to get an overview of the subject if you want. Then go out and find actual citable sources for your paper. If you cite the encyclopedia, you'll fail." It's a whole lot easier to do this in the modern world, since Wikipedia links to sources, and there's always Google (especially Google Scholar, if you're looking for sources of academic quality) for a broader view, so there's really no excuse.

Primary source

[Hatta]

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.

It's just "pedia" now

[Bogtha]

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.

Odd but necessary

[sheepe2004]

As a comment on the ars technica article pointed out

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.

Re:Credibility over Knowledge

[ShanghaiBill]

I could go out and make the most amazing, society-altering discovery ever

Crackpots make "amazing, society-altering discoveries" everyday. Almost none of them are noteworthy. Those that are noteworthy get mentioned in peer reviewed scientific journals, or at least a few newspapers. These are the "secondary sources" you dismiss. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a newspaper, and certainly not a peer reviewed journal.

Re:Credibility over Knowledge

[__aarzwb9394]

If you had a science altering discovery it would be published in peer reviewed journals and you could use those as references.
Until they are published somewhere reputable, no-one has a good reason to believe science altering claims

Re:Back to School

[Solandri]

What was the problem with the grade? Wasn't there symbolism, which you missed?

You can't mark someone down just because their perfectly valid answer wasn't the answer you were looking for. Giving the paper a D was punishing the student for the teacher's failure to give clear directions. If the teacher was only going accept an essay on the symbolism of going South on the river as the correct answer, then he should have asked for an essay on the symbolism. We are trying to teach children to be critical thinkers, not psychics.