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I personally agree with that, as I do not believe that the notability requirement is leading to increased article trustworthiness. I struggle to follow this be

by ErrantX 14y ago

I personally agree with that, as I do not believe that the notability requirement is leading to increased article trustworthiness. I struggle to follow this because Wikipedia doesn't consider "notability" to relate to article trustworthiness. It's instead intended to act as a soft margin for the topics that deserve a standalone article (remember, noteworthiness is only related to whether an article should exist or not). I would rather see the idea of "notability" replaced with an "article score" based upon the history Interesting idea, and I'd like to hear more of this idea! However, from this I suspect you are mixing up the reliability of an article and the specific phrase "notability" (about how deserving a topic is to have an article). When deciding if an article is notable it will usually have little or no history! I imagine this is determined heavily by the field? Yes, a point Wikipedia admits. I can't imagine in either mathematics or algorithmic computer science there being any need to wait until a review paper is published "drawing conclusions" (whatever that would mean) from the information in the primary research. Then you would, I am afraid, be wrong :) In such a field many papers are published contending a theory, and then other experts review the contention and submit responses/reviews/criticism. the kind of material that we are explicitly discussing here, Diggnation, is not going to be covered in anything remotely approaching a scholarly source. Yes, which is the key to the problem. Can you provide me a reference to where Wikipedia is claiming that you can only depend on sources that "have their own review process"? Yes, the core sourcing policy requires a "reliable source" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS). "Articles should be based on reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOURCES#Reliable_sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOURCES#Reliable_sour... goes into more detail. Instead, what we are comparing are situations like 1) referencing a New York Times article stating that "person Y said X" and 2) directly linking to the blog or Twitter feed of person Y and demonstrating first-hand that they said "X": in these situations, removing a layer of required trust. Is it? Now I agree that if the NYT has simply asked Diggnation for those figures then Wikipedia should note that is where it comes from. However citing it to NYT is intended to demonstrate that someone other than the editor inserting the material trusts its veracity. Its difficult because we simply do not know where NYT got that info: if Diggnation showed them some real figures (say, a screenshot) then the NYT article is better than a tweet! Which is why this is not a simple problem.

saurik 14y ago
> Interesting idea, and I'd like to hear more of this idea! I managed to dig up one of the examples: IBM's History Flow. I believe it was in a course in Cognitive Science that I was taking back in 2004 where I first heard of this research. http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf I feel like there was something similar that was much lighter-weight (as in, not so "large") that I had seen presented at one point, but I had a hard time finding even this one. :(
saurik 14y ago
> I personally agree with that, as I do not believe that the notability requirement is leading to increased article trustworthiness. > Interesting idea, and I'd like to hear more of this idea! However, from this I suspect you are mixing up the reliability of an article and the specific phrase "notability" (about how deserving a topic is to have an article). When deciding if an article is notable it will usually have little or no history! The reason I am "mixing this up" is that the only argument I have ever heard for why Wikipedia needs a notability policy at all is the one that was cited by britta earlier in this thread: that without such a clause there would be tons of articles that are hardly ever looked at by anyone, hardly ever edited by anyone, and containing information that is difficult to verify. I believe that there are numerous better solutions to this than attempting to use the "notability" filter, as I maintain that "notability" does not actually lead to "veracity". To be very clear about this, I will repeat the context from britta that started my involvement in this discussion: >> The notability guideline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability) is closely related to the verifiability policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability) — from Wikipedia's perspective, if a subject has not been covered by multiple reasonably reliable secondary sources (in other words, if it isn't "notable"), we can't write a reasonably verifiable article about that subject. Every article has to include secondary sources as references, so that editors and readers can quickly fact-check. Going back to your response: > Its difficult because we simply do not know where NYT got that info: if Diggnation showed them some real figures (say, a screenshot) then the NYT article is better than a tweet! I must apologize here, as I was intending to be using a different example, but you took me to mean the Diggnation example: this is my fault, I should have been more clear. What was coming to mind with relation to the "Twitter post" example, is that there is a ton of journalism on topics I directly care about that is based on the Twitter feeds of people I work with: a lot of "person X said Y", which is then translated into some article on what is or is not possible with a tool that person X builds. The fact that a reporter read that statement and repeated it doesn't make it more true, and in fact the opposite is quite common: they are paying sufficiently little attention and have sufficiently little background knowledge that they repeat it wrong. Please understand: I am not talking about a situation of "interpretation" or "research", but more like establishing dates on when things happened... I understand that this feels pretty blurry (but it seems equally silly to go into a detailed example of something where my example is itself biased; I am happier sticking with the examples such as Diggnation and RSA); it is simply a situation where "that dude at Wired that finds this stuff gets him readers" is not somehow more trustworthy than the place he got the information from... either the information shouldn't be published at all (I believe this is probably a quite reasonable course of action), or "that dude at Wired" should be skipped and the original source should be used. That said, part of your comment doesn't rely on that misunderstanding I caused: it is true that we don't know where the NYT got that information, however that uncertainty really doesn't make it any more true; while it means there is some possibility that the information was gathered in a way that we should indirectly trust, as we can't see it we can't verify it, and it is honestly not in any way better than if some random person on Wikipedia just asserted it to us... reporters for major publications (such as the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which I have first-party experience with due to articles written about my work) really do trust that you are a reliable source on things that you control, and really do attempt to fact check by calling you back for verification.

by ErrantX 14y ago

saurik 14y ago

> Interesting idea, and I'd like to hear more of this idea! I managed to dig up one of the examples: IBM's History Flow. I believe it was in a course in Cognitive Science that I was taking back in 2004 where I first heard of this research. http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf I feel like there was something similar that was much lighter-weight (as in, not so "large") that I had seen presented at one point, but I had a hard time finding even this one. :(

saurik 14y ago

> I personally agree with that, as I do not believe that the notability requirement is leading to increased article trustworthiness. > Interesting idea, and I'd like to hear more of this idea! However, from this I suspect you are mixing up the reliability of an article and the specific phrase "notability" (about how deserving a topic is to have an article). When deciding if an article is notable it will usually have little or no history! The reason I am "mixing this up" is that the only argument I have ever heard for why Wikipedia needs a notability policy at all is the one that was cited by britta earlier in this thread: that without such a clause there would be tons of articles that are hardly ever looked at by anyone, hardly ever edited by anyone, and containing information that is difficult to verify. I believe that there are numerous better solutions to this than attempting to use the "notability" filter, as I maintain that "notability" does not actually lead to "veracity". To be very clear about this, I will repeat the context from britta that started my involvement in this discussion: >> The notability guideline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability) is closely related to the verifiability policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability) — from Wikipedia's perspective, if a subject has not been covered by multiple reasonably reliable secondary sources (in other words, if it isn't "notable"), we can't write a reasonably verifiable article about that subject. Every article has to include secondary sources as references, so that editors and readers can quickly fact-check. Going back to your response: > Its difficult because we simply do not know where NYT got that info: if Diggnation showed them some real figures (say, a screenshot) then the NYT article is better than a tweet! I must apologize here, as I was intending to be using a different example, but you took me to mean the Diggnation example: this is my fault, I should have been more clear. What was coming to mind with relation to the "Twitter post" example, is that there is a ton of journalism on topics I directly care about that is based on the Twitter feeds of people I work with: a lot of "person X said Y", which is then translated into some article on what is or is not possible with a tool that person X builds. The fact that a reporter read that statement and repeated it doesn't make it more true, and in fact the opposite is quite common: they are paying sufficiently little attention and have sufficiently little background knowledge that they repeat it wrong. Please understand: I am not talking about a situation of "interpretation" or "research", but more like establishing dates on when things happened... I understand that this feels pretty blurry (but it seems equally silly to go into a detailed example of something where my example is itself biased; I am happier sticking with the examples such as Diggnation and RSA); it is simply a situation where "that dude at Wired that finds this stuff gets him readers" is not somehow more trustworthy than the place he got the information from... either the information shouldn't be published at all (I believe this is probably a quite reasonable course of action), or "that dude at Wired" should be skipped and the original source should be used. That said, part of your comment doesn't rely on that misunderstanding I caused: it is true that we don't know where the NYT got that information, however that uncertainty really doesn't make it any more true; while it means there is some possibility that the information was gathered in a way that we should indirectly trust, as we can't see it we can't verify it, and it is honestly not in any way better than if some random person on Wikipedia just asserted it to us... reporters for major publications (such as the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which I have first-party experience with due to articles written about my work) really do trust that you are a reliable source on things that you control, and really do attempt to fact check by calling you back for verification.