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.

Re:Working as intended

[Teancum]

Who decides who these official arbiters are? Does it have to be an established, traditional publishing house? What if it's a self-published e-book?

The "who decides" is those who give a damn enough to help write the article and help to determine what counts as a reliable source. That is sort of the point of the article talk pages, where things like this is actively discussed. Sometimes it may simply be a blog that is accepted, other times it may need to come from a published scientific journal which has been cited by other publications a number of times.

Hopefully those who are active on the talk page of a given article are sufficiently interested in the topic to also be knowledgeable about most of the available sources which can discuss the topic in the first place, so they are after a fashion "subject matter experts" who can properly evaluate what is a reliable source and what isn't. Discussions about what counts specifically as a reliable source are extremely common debates on article talk pages, including where there are multiple opinions as to what counts and what doesn't.

I fall into the camp that thinks primary sources are just fine... within reason and as long as they don't dominate the article. But the funny thing about Wikipedia is that it depends on those who are active and willing to join into the discussions about such things. It isn't really some hierarchical authority but rather simply those who care to chime in can, and if for some reason you disagree with the decision being made you can also "appeal" to the greater Wikipedia community... particularly when a group of people are acting against general Wikipedia policies.

If somebody is being a real asshat and doing constant edit wars, ignoring discussions or group consensus on what works, they can be "moderated" by wiki admins. There is even a formal judicial procedure called "ArbCom" (the "Arbitration Committee") where you can lay your disputes out before a group of very experienced users who can make a final determination and take action if necessary including imposing a user ban or editorial restrictions like "User X can't edit or participate in Comic Book discussions and articles for the next six months". BTW, the ArbCom is an elected office determined by the Wikipedia community and needs to be re-elected in order to maintain the position. Generally Arbcom doesn't get into disputes about individual sources though but rather dealing with users who don't care about what is happening on Wikipedia but know enough of the rules to stay on the fringe and not get immediately banned.

Re:Working as intended

[Teancum]

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.

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

[cpu6502]

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."

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.

Back to School

[chill]

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.

Re:Back to School

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar exchange with an English teacher about Huckleberry Finn. In the book, he and Jim choose to go south down the Mississippi river before heading north to Ohio. We were told to write a paper about why Mr. Twain would have them go south. I talked about how the Mississippi river was almost impossible to navigate north at the time (even for steam ships) due to the swift currents and huge amount of water during that part of the year. I cited several scholarly works, and quoted Mr. Clemens himself as to why he made that decision. Got it back with a "D" because, while the mechanics and citations and the rest were all correct, I missed the "symbolism" of that choice and blah blah blah. It took a meeting with the principle for the grade to be set straight.

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.

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