5 ms·

This is a great comment; I'll just add one other thing, which is something I've mentioned before in arguments about Wikipedia: Wikipedia's goal is verifiability

This is a great comment; I'll just add one other thing, which is something I've mentioned before in arguments about Wikipedia: Wikipedia's goal is verifiability, NOT truth. "Truth" is explicitly a non-goal of the Wikipedia project. For any given subject, Wikipedia is not meant to provide the truth about that subject, it's meant to be a summary and distillation of the existing reliable sources about it. If there are none, that's neither Wikipedia's fault nor its problem. You can take issue with this goal, but that's how it works, and it's also how encyclopedias have always worked.

ghaff 7y ago
>and it's also how encyclopedias have always worked. Well... Hopefully verifiability and truth have some correlation. Otherwise I'd argue that verifiability isn't worth much. What is different from traditional encyclopedias is that they did make determinations about what was important (which is at least akin to notability) and would allocate articles and pages as appropriate. From today's perspective we might dispute the judgments of importance but they were there.
- tptacek 7y ago
  The Wikipedia meta article this is drawn from does a better job of answering this concern than any of us can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t... Argue with it if you must, but let's try not to make the thread tediously recapitulate it.
- btilly 7y ago
  Hopefully verifiability and truth have some correlation. Not as much as you would hope. I have two sisters with Wikipedia articles. Let's pick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Tilly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Tilly for one of them. It claims that her mother was Irish and Finnish, and goes on to list how many siblings she has. Those statements are verifiable but false. You can find an article written by reporters that said those things. She isn't Irish, her step-father (my father) was. She also has 2 more brothers than are listed in that article. That is true, but not verifiable. Nor will they ever be verifiable. And therefore Wikipedia will never be corrected. The problem here is that the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (see https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge... for an explanation) guarantees that there will be lots of verifiable statements that aren't so. Wikipedia builds a coherent view of a subject on that sand, and it is very hard to find what it is mistaken about. But it is riddled with errors that will never get fixed because they were wrong in a verifiable primary source. And information not captured in a verifiable primary source will never make it in. For example her grandfather was the T in https://www.cmtengr.com/ https://www.cmtengr.com/. Good luck verifying that one!
  - tptacek 7y ago
    The "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" being the banal fact that reporters are sometimes wrong about things? Have you tried leaving a comment on the Talk page of the article saying that you're Jennifer Tilly's sister, linking to something about you (you're obviously bona fide), and asking for a correction? WP has special reliability rules (WP:BLP) for "Biographies Of Living Persons". It doesn't look like CMT has a Wikipedia article at all. Should it?
    - btilly 7y ago
      The "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" being the banal fact that reporters are sometimes wrong about things? Sometimes? I've yet to read a feature article written by a reporter on a subject that I know well which didn't have multiple mistakes. Have you tried leaving a comment on the Talk page of the article saying that you're Jennifer Tilly's sister, linking to something about you (you're obviously bona fide), and asking for a correction? WP has special reliability rules (WP:BLP) for "Biographies Of Living Persons". Actually I am one of the brothers that Wikipedia does not know about. Back in the 2007-2008 period I decided to make some obvious corrections. They got rejected. I left some comments in talk. A couple of my comments are still there on Jennifer's talk page. If you want to try to fix the page, you could use http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/megs_made_up_muffins/ http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/megs_made_up_muffins/ and http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/hell_in_a_hand_basket/ http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/hell_in_a_hand_basket/ as evidence that Meg has at least one brother that Wikipedia doesn't know about. Good luck getting it changed. As for CMT, you tell me. It is a civil engineering company that has existed for decades and has a significant presence in multiple states. But there isn't much about them online other than the company website. Which, by definition, is not considered reliable.
      - tptacek 7y ago
        I have it in for the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" (is there even evidence that Gell-Mann believed in it?), but your point is well taken: Wikipedia's rules do heavily privilege journalism, and journalism is merely the first draft of history, not the camera-ready final. It's possible that Wikipedia has carefully balanced this; if they didn't privilege reporting, a lot fewer articles would get written, about a lot of things people actually do want to look up in the encyclopedia. Reliance on journalism means they'll routinely get some bad facts, but there's a bound on how bad things will be that there wouldn't be if they just got rid of WP:RS altogether. It's much more likely that nobody has carefully thought about this, and it's just a shambolic volunteer project taking advantage of what they have to work with. My basic take about Wikipedia is that it's hard to argue with the results. However obnoxious their policies are to nerds like us (and I commented upthread about obnoxious experiences I've had working on it --- I no longer contribute!), it's a tremendously successful project, perhaps one of the most successful in the history of the Internet. It's bad when they have bad facts, more so when those facts pertain to living people, even more so when someone has the correct facts and can't get them accepted, and especially so when that person is a family member of the subject. It's less bad, to me at least, that an encyclopedia happens to lack a page, for now, on Apache Arrow.

ghaff 7y ago

>and it's also how encyclopedias have always worked. Well... Hopefully verifiability and truth have some correlation. Otherwise I'd argue that verifiability isn't worth much. What is different from traditional encyclopedias is that they did make determinations about what was important (which is at least akin to notability) and would allocate articles and pages as appropriate. From today's perspective we might dispute the judgments of importance but they were there.

tptacek 7y ago
The Wikipedia meta article this is drawn from does a better job of answering this concern than any of us can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t... Argue with it if you must, but let's try not to make the thread tediously recapitulate it.
btilly 7y ago
Hopefully verifiability and truth have some correlation. Not as much as you would hope. I have two sisters with Wikipedia articles. Let's pick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Tilly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Tilly for one of them. It claims that her mother was Irish and Finnish, and goes on to list how many siblings she has. Those statements are verifiable but false. You can find an article written by reporters that said those things. She isn't Irish, her step-father (my father) was. She also has 2 more brothers than are listed in that article. That is true, but not verifiable. Nor will they ever be verifiable. And therefore Wikipedia will never be corrected. The problem here is that the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (see https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge... for an explanation) guarantees that there will be lots of verifiable statements that aren't so. Wikipedia builds a coherent view of a subject on that sand, and it is very hard to find what it is mistaken about. But it is riddled with errors that will never get fixed because they were wrong in a verifiable primary source. And information not captured in a verifiable primary source will never make it in. For example her grandfather was the T in https://www.cmtengr.com/ https://www.cmtengr.com/. Good luck verifying that one!
- tptacek 7y ago
  The "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" being the banal fact that reporters are sometimes wrong about things? Have you tried leaving a comment on the Talk page of the article saying that you're Jennifer Tilly's sister, linking to something about you (you're obviously bona fide), and asking for a correction? WP has special reliability rules (WP:BLP) for "Biographies Of Living Persons". It doesn't look like CMT has a Wikipedia article at all. Should it?
  - btilly 7y ago
    The "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" being the banal fact that reporters are sometimes wrong about things? Sometimes? I've yet to read a feature article written by a reporter on a subject that I know well which didn't have multiple mistakes. Have you tried leaving a comment on the Talk page of the article saying that you're Jennifer Tilly's sister, linking to something about you (you're obviously bona fide), and asking for a correction? WP has special reliability rules (WP:BLP) for "Biographies Of Living Persons". Actually I am one of the brothers that Wikipedia does not know about. Back in the 2007-2008 period I decided to make some obvious corrections. They got rejected. I left some comments in talk. A couple of my comments are still there on Jennifer's talk page. If you want to try to fix the page, you could use http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/megs_made_up_muffins/ http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/megs_made_up_muffins/ and http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/hell_in_a_hand_basket/ http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/hell_in_a_hand_basket/ as evidence that Meg has at least one brother that Wikipedia doesn't know about. Good luck getting it changed. As for CMT, you tell me. It is a civil engineering company that has existed for decades and has a significant presence in multiple states. But there isn't much about them online other than the company website. Which, by definition, is not considered reliable.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      I have it in for the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" (is there even evidence that Gell-Mann believed in it?), but your point is well taken: Wikipedia's rules do heavily privilege journalism, and journalism is merely the first draft of history, not the camera-ready final. It's possible that Wikipedia has carefully balanced this; if they didn't privilege reporting, a lot fewer articles would get written, about a lot of things people actually do want to look up in the encyclopedia. Reliance on journalism means they'll routinely get some bad facts, but there's a bound on how bad things will be that there wouldn't be if they just got rid of WP:RS altogether. It's much more likely that nobody has carefully thought about this, and it's just a shambolic volunteer project taking advantage of what they have to work with. My basic take about Wikipedia is that it's hard to argue with the results. However obnoxious their policies are to nerds like us (and I commented upthread about obnoxious experiences I've had working on it --- I no longer contribute!), it's a tremendously successful project, perhaps one of the most successful in the history of the Internet. It's bad when they have bad facts, more so when those facts pertain to living people, even more so when someone has the correct facts and can't get them accepted, and especially so when that person is a family member of the subject. It's less bad, to me at least, that an encyclopedia happens to lack a page, for now, on Apache Arrow.