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As an administrator in my sixth year now, I thought I'd weigh in on one of the issues you brought up. It is a widely held (and enforced) belief that, when want
by Perceval 16y ago
As an administrator in my sixth year now, I thought I'd weigh in on one of the issues you brought up.
It is a widely held (and enforced) belief that, when wanting to state that something was said in a book, only a secondary source can be cited. So they would prefer a newspaper's review to the actual book itself, for example. This is, for most cases, simply absurd.
I think you're right, and I think that type of behavior is a misinterpretation. There's obviously no need to cite a secondary source about what a book literally says. In fact, in this case, rather than citing the primary source and paraphrasing, the best thing would be to directly quote the book.
The problem arises when "stat[ing] that something was said in a book" involves an implicit judgment, synthesis, interpretation, or analysis of the book. In this case, although you are trying your best to neutrally paraphrase a book's content, you are in some way introducing your own judgment into the process.
In most cases if the editor is acting in good faith then there is no big problem here. But on controversial subjects or articles working for featured status, it is better to avoid the possibility of "original research" (for those unfamiliar with this Wikipedia policy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:OR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:OR). Putting an editor's judgment about a book is original research, but putting a verifiable and attributed judgment from a secondary source isn't—secondary sources represent the 'state of the debate' about an article's topic. It's the job of tertiary sources (i.e. encyclopedias) to represent the state of the debate, not to write original assessments of the topic.
I agree with you that too strict an enforcement of this rule ends in an absurd, frustrating, and dispiriting situation for all involved. But on controversial articles there is often a good reason to insist on verifiable secondary sources.
- mdisraeli 16y agoObviously, I agree with you on this. As I said in reply to another comment, I believe that the reason for this absurdity is probably because it's the lowest common denominator solution. I can't remember if we crossed paths when I was active: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LinaMishima http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LinaMishima
- derefr 16y agoIs a Wikipedia user allowed, in an article, to quote any arbitrary text that exists in some permanent location (with an attribution and datestamp), as long as it's not Wikipedia? Even if they themselves wrote it? Couldn't there just be developed a bookmarklet for Wikipedia edits that takes a text selection, posts it to the user's personal blog, and then turns the selection into a quote from the blog? What would be the difference?
- tokenadult 16y agoCouldn't there just be developed a bookmarklet for Wikipedia edits that takes a text selection, posts it to the user's personal blog, and then turns the selection into a quote from the blog? What would be the difference? Blogs wouldn't be the sources I would want to see more of in Wikipedia. Dead trees, because of their expense, still prompt more fact-checking and editing. I'm an editor of an article that is before the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee just now. (I happened to wander by, as a newbie Wikipedian, just as the article went from failed mediation to arbitration.) There is enough making stuff up already on Wikipedia. The last thing it needs is more ease in using blog posts (generally very unreliable) as sources.
- derefr 16y agoI didn't mean to suggest that it would be a good thing :) That's the point—it's a parasitic corner-case of the rules, and should probably be patched up somehow.
- joeyh 16y agoWith the amusing result that Wikipedia will cite newspaper articles that cite information from blogs, rather than directly citing the blog. (Happened to me and my blog. And as a data point, out of some hundreds of newpaper etc articles about a blog post, the total number that seemed to involve any kind of value-added fact checking was 2.)
- mukyu 16y agoI have seen cases where news articles are written using the wikipedia article but not citing it and then the information in the original wikipedia article is citing using the news article that got the information from wikipedia in the first place.