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I tried to edit the entry for my own great grandfather, once a notable member of government and the military, to include some of his current living relatives wh
by sandworm101 5y ago
I tried to edit the entry for my own great grandfather, once a notable member of government and the military, to include some of his current living relatives who work in government and military jobs today, many of whom carry the same name. My father's generation was listed and I wanted to add my own generation to the tree. I though it was a basic edit to update a very minor article. I gave up after I was asked/told to present documentation. Presumably, they wanted birth certificates or military ID cards.
- hackernewds 5y agoWhy would they allow just anyone to edit the article? They probably could be a better process, which goes beyond the scope of Wikipedia, to verify identity but why would they not ask for this?
- sandworm101 5y agoBecause wikipedia was meant to be open. When the article was first created it had zero documentation. Someone just wrote from memory and published it. It then sat for a decade without additions. Now it cannot be touched because editing an old article draws mod attention. I guess if I cared I could hire someone to make the edit, someone with a longstanding wikipedia account. Such things do happen. I guess that is the real future of openness.
- tptacek 5y agoWikipedia publishes in exquisite detail what it's meant to be; it's one of the most rigorously documented communities on the Internet. Again: if you can cite a specific topic you've had problems with, along with the time the problems happened, we can probably see whether there was abusive administration happening (that definitely does happen sometimes) or whether you were just not careful about following their process (far more common).
- davidgerard 5y agoThe complete history of most articles is right there on the wiki. You've made several comments like this, you should be able to provide multiple examples to substantiate your claims.
- passerby1 5y agoFollowing the logics of requiring an official government-issued docs, is it required for any fact written in Wikipedia, or where they draw the line? In other words, how exactly is the "common knowledge" separated from the "controversal" one, which requires a proof to present to self-appointed guardians of the True?
- justsomehnguy 5y ago> where they draw the line? Where the king of the article hill would decide.
- teddyh 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_don%27t_need_to_cite_that_the_sky_is_blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_don%27t_need_to_...
- techdragon 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_do_need_to_cite_that_the_sky_is_blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_do_need_to_cite_...
- kens 5y agoThe official Wikipedia rule is that all material must be verifiable from a reliable source. There is a whole lot of policy and debate behind that rule; for a start see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
- dghughes 5y agoNo offence but that is shocking that someone would even ask that. The entire point for the existence of Wikipedia is anyone can contribute or edit anything. Wayback machine capture of Wikipedia from Mar 31 2001 > Welcome to Wikipedia, a collaborative project to produce a complete encyclopedia from scratch. We started in January 2001 and already have over 13,000 articles. We want to make over 100,000, so let's get to work--anyone can edit any page--copyedit, expand an article, write a little, write a lot. See the Wikipedia FAQ for information on how to edit pages and other questions.
- shadowgovt 5y agoThat was 21 years ago. The nature of Wikipedia has evolved over time as the web has evolved over time. In fact, it followed the pattern of most large web institutions: open and freewheeling when nobody cares, consolidating and conservative as it becomes infrastructure.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> That was 21 years ago. Somebody should tell Wikipedia. Their banner still says "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." And we're asking "why would they let just anyone edit a page?"?
- setr 5y agoAnyone can edit a page… but not all edits have to be accepted. The problem, as it usually is with anything open on the internet, is that a malicious user can do ridiculously more damage with less effort and time than a benevolent user can prevent or supersede. The scales are lopsided. So it inevitably becomes that the onus falls on filtering out the crap before it hits (rather than cleaning it up afterwards)… and thus inevitably more policy, bureaucracy and requirements placed up front. And while anyone can choose to meet these requirements, it becomes cost-prohibitive to learn and adhere for a drive-by editor, whereas it gets amortized out for long-term users. Thus it becomes open to all, yet open to few.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
- charcircuit 5y agoTypically everything on wikipedia must have a source where the information comes from.
- sandworm101 5y agoEvidently not all sources are acceptable. Government and military websites with people's names were not enough. I was asked for realworld non-internet documentation as "Those might have the same name but not be actual relatives". At that point I just gave up.
- asvitkine 5y agoI guess you'd need a source for the relationship, which understandably might not really exist in an accessible manner....
- tptacek 5y agoIt sounds like you were doing original research: you were collecting evidence from primary sources (like rosters on military websites) and deriving claims (WP would call them "synthetic claims") from them. But Wikipedia is a tertiary source, not a secondary one: it's the job of books, journal articles, magazine articles, newspaper stories, and the like to present original research. It makes more sense if you understand encyclopedias the way Wikipedia does: as a sort of directory or survey of secondary sources, and little more than that.
- Tao331 5y agoSo what you do is write an article with your findings, citing your sources. Then edit wikipedia citing your article.
- tptacek 5y agoYes. I mean, getting your article published somewhere is even more effective, and WP is, with good reason, jaded about citing blogs (everyone who has ever wanted to spam WP has realized that they can claim a blog they wrote is a reliable source). But yeah, that's the system working. We have a variant of that here! People want to control the titles of their submissions, but HN doesn't generally allow editorialized titles. But it will happily allow you to submit your own blog post about any subject, with any title you choose.
- chris_wot 5y agoIn other words, they wanted primary sources, something they frown upon. They are fairly hypocritical.
- EE84M3i 5y agoIt sounds to me like GP was asked to present documentation and assumed they wanted ID cards or birth certificates. But that doesn't make much sense to me, because an ID card wouldn't prove a familial relationship anyway, which is the fact in question. In fact, uploading an ID card or Birth Certificate of a living person (potentially even your own?) to Wikipedia is almost certainly a violation of the Biographies of Living Persons policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#Privacy_of_personal_information_and_using_primary_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...
- psyc 5y agoI have a friend and former boss who has a Wikipedia article. He has two careers in which he is about equally Notable, but the article is all about one of them, and contains not one sentence about the other. To someone who knows him, it's very weird. But to someone stumbling on the article, they don't know any better. Of course I thought (for about 5 seconds) hey I'll edit the wiki. But I know better than to waste my time on it. It wouldn't work. There's nothing to cite. Just my personal knowledge, because I was there. His other accomplishments took place before the Web took off. Before stuff got written about everything. There's probably something in the way of sources I could track down if my life depended on it, but it doesn't. So I left a comment on the talk page. That was probably 8 years ago, and nothing happened. I mean, even if maybe his other career wasn't quite Wikipedia-Notable, it would still make a really interesting couple of sentences given that his Wikipedia page did make the notable cut, and he was also super successful in this other field that you'd never ever guess he'd been involved in because it has zero to do with what Wikipedia thinks his main thing is.
- tptacek 5y agoIt sounds like Wikipedia is working the way it should work here. If there are no reliable secondary sources that wrote about your boss' other career, there's nothing for Wikipedia to cover about it. The alternative, of people who believe they have firsthand knowledge about subjects just writing free-form in encyclopedia pages, obviously wouldn't work.
- psyc 5y agoSure, sure. Obviously. My frustrations with Wikipedia stem from having begun editing and delighting in it in 2001, and having ragequit circa 2006. I'm well aware that I definitively "lost" my side of that battle well over a decade ago. Just spinning a yarn.
- zo1 5y agoI also gave up around 2008/9. It was such an amazing, wild west of people contributing in any which way they could, illuminating bad edits, and trying to coordinate it all among the chaos. Now it's just solidified into maintenance and administration mode. If they allow anything wild again, they risk losing their position and every organization seeks to propagate and continue its own existence, so they don't allow anything anymore.
- KarlKemp 5y agoFamily members two generations down from some famous person generally aren't relevant for the article or, if they are, someone else will at some point add them to the article. Seriously: you are surprised that someone may believe you have a conflict of interest when you're making an edit that has your name in it?
- DoreenMichele 5y agoto include some of his current living relatives who work in government and military jobs That's a form of doxxing and generally considered to be malicious behavior across most of the internet.
- samatman 5y agoExcept on, for one example, Wikipedia, where including relevant information about noteworthy relatives of people with entries is totally normal provided it can be cited from a reliable source.
- SkittyDog 5y agoIf these relatives are already publicly acknowledged to be working for or assigned to those organizations, there's nothing malicious or harmful about citing those already public sources. Put this another way... If a news reporter published a story about this person, would you call that "doxxing"? Probably not... That's just what "reporting" is. Doxxing requires malicious intent, and an attempt to cause harm to the subject by placing their personally identifying information in the path of some kind of expected public shitstorm. Unless there's reason to believe these relatives are going to suffer, then it seems like a stretch to call it doxxing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- SkittyDog 5y agoNo, WP specifically doesn't want birth certificates or military ID cards, which are a form of primary source. WP wants you to cite other published works (ideally a URL to another reputable source) that document the facts in question. For military or government officials, their office or command often will have a web page noting the names of their current/former executives, COs, XOs, etc. They might also have issued a press release when a notable person joins their organization, or which quotes the person in question. If there are zero public sources documenting where your relatives are employed or assigned, then it's arguable that these relatives are not actually notable enough to warrant mention in the WP article. WP ia not intended to be a directory of all facts or people.
- skissane 5y agoIt sounds like you have somewhat of a misunderstanding about what kind of content Wikipedia aims to include. It does not aim to include every fact, only those which are “notable” - that is inevitably somewhat subjective, but the idea is it doesn’t want an article on every single government and military employee - only the particularly notable ones, who are generally going to be limited to elected officials (and even then generally only national and state/provincial, with local elected officials generally only being article-worthy for major metropolises), agency heads, generals, etc. Unless these relatives of yours hold one of those very senior positions, or has some kind of media profile/etc independently of their government/military job, they probably are not noteworthy enough to mention-even if they are relatives of someone noteworthy, Wikipedia isn’t trying to be a genealogy, so genealogical information is generally only included if the ancestor/descendant is independently notable, and otherwise is generally only limited to a generation or two (which may be why your father’s generation makes the cut but not your own.) Furthermore, the demand for documentation is important, because how do they know you are not just making stuff up? (You’d think people would never contribute blatantly invented information, but people actually have done it-some people get some kind of twisted pleasure out of it, in other cases people have done it out of mental illness.) Reliable secondary sources (so not birth certificates or military IDs, which are primary sources) also help in distinguishing what information is “encyclopaedic” from what isn’t-if reliable secondary sources aren’t interested in a topic, Wikipedia will not be either.
- sandworm101 5y agoWikipedia has a list. The list is out of date. I was adding to it to bring it up to date. There was never any suggestion that these people shouldn't be there. There was never any mention of removing material from the original article. As for notability, every US senator, General or head of even the most minor agency seems to have a wikipedia page these days, along with all their wives/husbands and kids. I don't see those pages being deleted when they leave office.
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- _Algernon_ 5y agoThey wanted a secondary, publicly available source, which is the standard for sourcing on Wikipedia. It is a good thing that "facts" that aren't publicly verifiable can't be added to Wikipedia, both because it protects people's privacy, and because Wikipedia is not the place for opinion pieces.