Wikipedia talk:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards

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comments on "peer review" and PhD.s

I have a major problem with much of the discussion. It hinges on this: the peer-review process used by major journals, relying on PhD.s, is based on the notion of journals as publishing original research. Wikipedia is not a place for original research. Therefore the PhD. peer-review process is not a great model. I thiknk we need to be very careful about what peer review does and does not accomplish. But more importantly, I think we need to work through what is wrong with Wikipedia and what we hope to accomplish first, before deciding how to do it. For example, I don't care whether wikipedians editing my work are PhD.s or not (and I personally don't want to have to submit a CV for any reason to Wikipedia. I do not think it matters whether wikipedia articles are written by PhD.s or not, and I do not think it matters that wikipedia articles have been approved by PhD.s or not. What is important to me is that Wikipedia articles be based on serious research, which often involves reading articles and books by PhDs, or that have gone through peer review. I continue to like Wikipedia's somewhat anarchic and egalitarian culture. I don't want that to change. I just want editors to learn to rely on books in libraries, and books by serious scholars, over web-sites. I do believe this requires some policing and education -- but I do not think the journal system of peer review is either necessary or best-suited to these goals. Slrubenstein

Damn straight. I agree completely. john k 18:33, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'm not advocating a journal system of peer review or a system of article approval, but rather setting up an alternative to the Arbitration Committee to settle disputes based on editorial considerations as opposed to just process. This would not be any more of a change to Wiki's anarchic structure than the emergence of the conflict resolution process; this would just rationalize the way disputes are settled... Would you and Slrubenstein favor a more limited proposal along these lines? 172 20:46, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I like the idea but still have mixed feelings. The arbitration committee's findings are (relatively) final -- I am not thrilled by that but in such an anarchic community as this, I see the need and good of that. Would this committee you suggest make "final" rulings? That's something I feel much less sure of. I understand the need for it (e.g. in my problem with CheeseDream the mediators and AC aren't supposed to jusge content). But what I love about Wikipedia is that the process truly matches the scientific value that the truth can never be known in its entirety, that knowledge is the product of an ongoing process of debate, speculation, testing, and re-considering. I wouldn't want to sacrifice this either. Belive me, I see the merit in your specific proposal. But I see that merit because I see a serious problem. When I reject "peer-rview" it is not to turn your proposal into a straw-man, it is merely to open up other possibilities. Slrubenstein

I don't expect editorial arbitration to stifle the process of open debate and reconsideration that makes producing articles on Wiki unique. I'd expect it to intervene in more clear cut areas, such standardizing German-Polish nomenclature, and technical terminology; and settling disputes of factual accuracy... I do understand your reservations, though. If this proposal is to go anywhere, I suppose that it'll have to come along with suggestions for limiting its jurisdiction. 172 21:11, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I agree with much but not all of this. That is, casually produced material usually isn't the best source. But different sources, including personal knowledge and experience, are useful for different topics. For example, if I write on topics my experience that are not documented elsewhere, but not disputed by people of similar experience, I don't see that information as problematic. Maurreen 18:42, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I am afraid you would have to be clearer/more specific about the content and context. Wikipedia is simply not a place for original research, or personal essays. Look, if you are part of the crew of a sailboat and know everything about how to rig a sloop or something, I suppose you can write an artricle on how to rig a sloop without citing other books as sources (although honestly, it might help readers if you cite books they can turn to for more information). I suppose I can think of other articles where your own experience may be enough. But I know oh so many cases where this is simply inappropriate. Slrubenstein

Can you give a few examples? In fact, I think you raise a point that I believe should be the work of people involved in this project. Rather than peer-review articles, I'd rather see this group as a kind of think-tank to address thorny issues in enforcing "verifiability" and other related standards. Maybe you could offer ten examples that represent a diverse range of kinds of articles, and we can discuss which one of them fails (is original research, personal essay, unverifiable) and which ones succede, or which ones are flawed but can be salvaged by real research. If we can come up with more specific rules of thumb on just this issue, I think we would be serving Wikipedia very well indeed! Slrubenstein

I think it's a bit of an effort/benefit tradeoff. If the article is non-contentious (ie nobody is contesting its accuracy), is the lack of sources that big a deal? I would say it's not. Sure, someone could spend hours tracking down an exact source for every single little claim. Or they could spend those hours writing another dozen articles. I know which one I think is a better use of time. Citing sources is important when it comes to articles that people can't agree on, but for the rest (the great majority of articles on wikipedia, I might add), it's probably not worth the time it takes for the benefit it gives.

Plus I agree it's often very difficult to find sources for a lot of things. For example, finding detailed information for albums released before the age of the internet is often impossible unless you happen to own a huge stack of music magazines. This leaves you with very little worthwhile you can put in such an article, unless you're willing to wing the sources requirement and write at least partially from personal knowledge or potentially unreliable (read random website) sources.

Which brings me to another point: random websites. Although not always reliable for factual information, I think they are a good way to measure some degree of "public opinion" in certain cases. We're aiming to capture the sum of all knowledge, and one of the wonders of the internet is that there is more variety human knowledge exposed than there ever has been before. We shouldn't discount it out of hand, it is a useful resource if you're willing to acknowledge the limitations. Shane King 07:01, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

Sourcing options

One example of using a nonpublished source: I used to work at HMX-1, a U.S. Marine helicopter squadron. I added the following to the article: "The presidential and VIP flights fall under 'whiteside.' 'Greenside' operations include support of Marine Corps Combat Development and operational test and evaluation, such as with the V-22 Osprey, a vertical take-off and landing aircraft."

If that information is not published anywhere, is somebody going to tell me I shouldn't have added it? Maurreen 07:58, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The question is if it really was unpublished. Was this a standing order, a military operational procedure, etc., all of which are written down someplace. Most of these actually have a source, but you may need to go through extensive hoops to track down a reference. In the meantime, if the element is particularly relevant, a footnote of the timeframe you can personally report from and "reported by Name on date" is a method of citing yourself. This citation is, of course, ripe for abuse and is generally poor practice. - Amgine 17:13, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

"is somebody going to tell me I shouldn't have added it?" Yes, you shouldn't have added it. If it's not published, how is anyone else going to verify it? What if someone maliciously interchanges "whiteside" and "greenside" with the edit summary "Maurreen is ignorant"? How can anybody adjudicate that kind of a dispute? I personally accumulated lots of juicy stories about the GNU project, but won't put any of it in WP until it's been published elsewhere. Stan 05:13, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It seems to me that a Talk: page would be the right place for this - write an entry of the form (in this case) "I worked in this unit during xxx-yyy and this is what I saw".

It's nice to have the ideal of always going back to something written, but alas, not everything worth covering in an encyclopaedia always gets written down. E.g. one I have personal experience with is very early Internet history (late 1970s); a lot of it didn't get written down, or written versions (e.g. old email from the late 70's) is now lost. For this reason you often see books (e.g. Hafner's book on the ARPANET) which rely heavily on interviews - and not just technology fields, anything where the participants are still alive to give "oral history". Nobody is saying "don't use this book as a source because it relies on interviews", that would be silly. Why do we have to have a higher standard than that? Personal memories of participants are an accepted source in academic circles. Yes, I know it's gone through an extra step of review in being published, but at the same time, fundamentally the origin of the data is still human memories.

Also, not everything worth covering is going to get turned into a book. Do we only cover topics that got turned into books? Yes, it can get close to the line of no original research, but if you read that page, it's actually talking about e.g. new scientific theories, not documenting history. -- Noel (talk) 14:36, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I followed Noel's advice. Thanks. Maurreen 16:56, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The book that publishes the interviews is the original research; it's exactly the sort of thing that history professors do to get tenure. The step of review and publication is to a degree artificial, but it's the only thing that stands between WP and the armies of kooks who would like to put all their mumblings online here. In practice, we do accept plausible-sounding websites in addition to books and news articles, although I look for some kind of credential, such as a real name that is attested elsewhere as an expert in the topic, etc. See primary source, etc, for our own material on all this (which I note is itself unsourced, tsk tsk :-) ). Stan 20:22, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This is great

I've been pushing a lot lately to help get the articles cited better with sources. I especially feel all featured articles should have good references. You may be surprised to find out that many, if not most, featured articles currently have no proper references. I am making a list of them and will post that somewhere soon. I feel all wikipedia articles should be properly researched and cited, so the featured articles are a good place to start. See the ongoing discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Featured_article_removal_candidates. (Currently I seem to be losing :) - Taxman 18:49, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)

Well, I agree we need better references/sourcing/etc! Noel (talk) 16:35, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Responding to Neutrality's suggested template

A couple days ago Neutrality posted a template that warns the reader that an article has no sources. I like this idea very much--it really should be a no-no to post stuff on the Wikipedia that isn't backed by sources, and this template might give people the right idea. I have two little suggestions and one bigger one:

No need to say "this important article"--all articles should have sources
No need to mention this Committee; all can source
Figure out some way to gain prior community assent before posting this template all over the place, otherwise people will feel bullied.

Opus33 01:54, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Isn't it usually kind of obvious when an article entirely lacks sources? I think that's why people would feel bullied - the reaction would be "well, duh". Also, something painfully obvious, like the title of a album with the scan of its cover right there, is sort of "self-sourcing", if you will. I think a better way to phrase would simply be "please add more references", because many article have one or two dead links as references :-), and we want for those is "more and better". Stan 04:54, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The article isn't meant to be put all over the wiki. It's only meant for very important articles that don't have sources, such as England and Blackshirts. [[User:Neutrality|Neutrality (hopefully!)]] 05:01, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

I think the template has potential but it's probably premature right now. Maurreen 07:44, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Based on discussion on the Village Pump when WP:Bias tried adding templates to articles about being (for example) overly US-centric, something like this will be a lot more welcome on talk pages than in the articles themselves. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:59, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, the Talk: page is the right place for it. That's where the editors communicate about the article, and it is the editors who need to know that it needs sources. The only reason to put it on the article would be to warn readers - and we already have a number of standard warnings that would be more appropriate if there is any concern about the contents. (Not to mention that until we get some sort of "known good version" system working, any page could always contain vandalism anyway...) Noel (talk) 14:44, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Is it time for a cabal?

In a sense, what is being proposed here -- and I don't necessarily think it is a bad idea -- is to actually form the cabal some of us are often accused of belonging to. However, unlike your classic cabal, I recommend that if we do this we should be very careful to operate openly, and in particular if a group of us operating as a team take on particular articles, we should be very clear that we are operating as a team, and we should be systematic about having our communications about that article in an open forum such as a talk page, not by private back channels like email. -- Jmabel | Talk 08:07, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

Oooh! I've never been in a cabal before. How exciting! :) Maurreen 08:31, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I don't agree about forming a cabal, unless you mean something like a common interest group with open membership. Slrubenstein

Exactly. I was just joking about how many of the people who are often accused of being a "cabal" have signed on to this already. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:52, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

My apologies. All my good humor is being sapped on another page. However, it seems that after a period of growth Wikipedia is at a time of transition and I think now more than ever we need to be careful to make clear to everyone what some basic principles are, including open membership and (as I know you did take pains to emphasize) transparency. Slrubenstein

Possible test cases

I'd like to suggest that rather than indulge at great length in hypotheticals, we should set up some (self-organizing) teams of about four people; each team would take on a few articles and try to bring them up to what we consider acceptable standards, then look at each other's work and see what we can learn from it.

I believe that appropriate candidates for these first experiments would be articles that are believed to be at least generally accurate, are not subjects of current active controversies, but are currently under-sourced. We should certainly try for articles in different subject-matter areas (because many of the teams would presumably organize by subject-matter area), and within each should probably try for articles of various lengths.

I have some more concrete ideas along these lines, but before I take time to detail this, I want to make sure that at least a few people think this is an interesting enough suggestion to be worth my fleshing it out. -- Jmabel | Talk 08:18, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

Taxman is compiling this list of featured articles that are insufficiently referenced. Would this list form a suitable test corpus? There are featured articles on many different topics, and it would be good to make sure that they all have proper references. -- ALoan (Talk) 14:50, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Might be a good place to start (although I wonder at the notion that it is a problem, for example, that Leet gives only online references). I'd also like to add to the pot:

A few articles that look basically on the mark, but totally (or almost totally) lack references of any sort. For example, I just translated the bulk of History of Catalonia from the Spanish, which gave no references.
A few article from popular-culture areas -- especially foreign-language popular-culture areas -- which I think are going to be some of the toughest things to get non-web references for. For example, to name two major Romanian bands, where are we going to find references, especially academic references, for gangster rappers B.U.G. Mafia or for Spitalul de Urgenţă (sort of a Romanian Pogues)? My suspeicion is that we are going to have to have different standards in these areas, and we might as well know it up front. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:09, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

Same players, different roles

Trying to raise an article to encyclopedic standards is going to involve taking on a "role" for a period of time, at least with respect to a particular article, that may be distinct from other roles one plays in editing Wikipedia. I'm sure that most, or all, of us involved in this conversation are serious about turning Wikipedia into a better reference work; probably most, or all, of us feel we are doing that by most of our edits.

Still, I think this is something distinct. It requires (for example) willingness to acknowledge the inconvenient fact as readily as the convenient one, and to strengthen the citations for even positions we disagree with (something that few Wikipedians normally do: normally we rely on a mildly adversarial system to solve that). It almost certainly is not a role that any of us will easily take in an area where we have strong feelings. For example, I was recently chewed out by someone -- not a very likable someone, but not a fool -- for editing the article about the college I attended as an undergrad. Frankly, if people didn't ever write about the college they went to, I suspect we'd have rather few articles about colleges, so I'm unapologetic, but I would not be the best person to judge that article dispassionately. Similarly, with all due respect, I would doubt that Jayjg or Xed, who I think are generally good contributors to Wikipedia, could take a dispassionate approach to the article Arab-Israeli Conflict. Their roles there are already staked out. I'm sure there are other areas where they can be much more objective. (Jayjg, Xed, I hope you don't feel I'm singling you out in a negative way: I am trying to pick an example from people who are already signed up on this project.) -- Jmabel | Talk 08:40, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

Hmm. While my approach may not be dispassionate, my edits are NPOV. Is dispassion required? Jayjg 23:17, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

For this task, probably so. And I agree that you try to be NPOV. Again, I think it's fine that you edit those articles, but I think you are too engaged to be an even-handed arbiter, which is what we seem to be talking about here. I believe that you are too engaged to give the same scrutiny to a new addition that tends to be favorable toward Israel that you give to one that tends to be critical of it. And, again, I didn't particularly mean to single you out, I was just trying to pick an example I was familiar with pertaining to people within this project, because I felt that the example I could point to about myself was too narrow to illustrate the problem. I'm sure someone else could identify a broader area where I tend to be other than evenhanded. I think the nature of this is that one tends to be unaware when one is doing it, and it's more obvious to others than to oneself. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:43, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

An example of one of Jayjg's 'NPOV' edits "The Jews against Occupation spokesman went on to rant about Israel": [1]. - Xed 23:54, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Oh, that was just a tiny joke during an edit war. I knew you would revert it, that was during your "stalk Jayjg's edits, and whenever he's in a dispute with anyone, revert him" phase. And you did revert it, four minutes later. Sheesh, where is everyone's sense of humour? Jayjg 00:06, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Clearly you find vandalizing pages hilarious. So hilarious that you reverted it right back to "The Jews against Occupation spokesman went on to rant about Israel". - Xed 00:35, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Oh Xed, you laughed yourself. Chill out. Jayjg 02:55, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Deletion

Because it is un-Wikilike and does not appear to have consensus, I am deleting the following paragraph. Maurreen 08:45, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

We believe that the objective of Wikpedia must be to produce a viable online sourcebook worthy someday of a citation in a scholarly journal. We are calling on organizations governing Wikipedia (such as the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee) to adopt policies that cease privileging process over product and cease privileging editors over readers. We are calling on Wikipedia to adopt a structure that protects serious editors and prevents problem users from sabotaging their work. In practice this means that Wikipedia's structure must change so that certain subjects have some kind of editorial oversight by a review panel of expert writers.

I'm with Maurreen here. On the other hand, I'd love to see a process to identify and make available "released" versions of articles, which have been through a review process, just like happens with open-source software. -- Jmabel | Talk 08:54, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

I agree with much of the paragraph. I don't know how realistic it is to expect Wikipedia articles in general to be worthy of citation in a scholarly journal (though there's no reason individual articles should never be worthy) but I strongly agree that serious editors should be protected from users sabotaging their work. I feel we do need a panel of expert writers who can be called upon in case of disagreement, and who will be in a position to judge the quality of the articles, not just mediate between the different personalities. Slim 10:06, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

I would be ecstatic if a scholar just used WP to get background on an area tangent to his/her specialty, then read and cited the references found in those articles. Stan 05:20, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

While I don't agree with each and every sentence/idea in the deleted para, I'm in sync with the general concepts, and with most of it. Wikipedia needs to be something that people can rely on; we need to recognize that content is more imporant (in the end) than even-handedness, and that not all editors of an article have equal levels of knowledge/etc about a subject, and that really knowledgeable contributors are valuable and we need to keep them; and that to reach these two goals will probably require some changes, which will inevitably have to be rooted in the Wikimedia foundation. So I wish we'd try to fix any problems with that para, rather than simply deleting it. Noel (talk) 16:43, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I interpret the paragraph as seeking to change the nature of Wikipedia. An add-on system could be acceptable. Maurreen 17:09, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Purpose or mission statement

Do we want to develop a consensus on a purpose/mission statement like the above? I think most of us are interested in developing Wikipedia into a respected resource worthy of citation at the personal, business, and educational levels, although I do not think there is consensus for developing Wikipedia into an academic research resource tool except for background material. It's the elements regarding when and how an article is protected from change which are in question here, and not the end results of this (desired/opposed) process.

I think it would be good for the group to develop such a statement. But I don't see any consensus on protecting articles. Maurreen 18:03, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Foreign-language wikipedias

Is anyone aware of good work in these directions in Wikipedias in other languages? In my experience, I've encountered higher standards on sourcing and fact-checking in the German-language Wikipedia and a level at least comparable to ours in the French-language Wikipedia; in others, my experiences have varied and sometimes been disappointing. I've had people view it as an insult when I ask for their sources. -- Jmabel | Talk 08:51, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

Brief summary

This page is all over the place. But it appears that we have consensus in the following general areas.

Concerns about sourcing;
Interest in editorial approval, dispute resolution or both; and
Interest in best-of-both worlds approach toward flagging "approved" articles.

Areas of division:

Sourcing,
Who is "qualified," and
Where to start. Maurreen

Where to start

My suggestions for further development, in no particular order:

Best-of-both worlds approach toward flagging "approved" articles,
"Approval" process,
Dispute resolution process. Maurreen 09:22, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Editorial disputes

One way to resolve editorial disputes could be to help at WP:RfC. Or we could build on that. I think RfC needs help. It doesn't even need to be anything formal.Maurreen 16:36, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Article "approval" process

Should we develop guidelines for these or decide them case by case? Should we start at Featured Articles or elsewhere? Who will decide? Maurreen 16:43, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Article candidacy

Articles should be suggested as candidates, similar to FAC. Candidates should meet certain criterion which differ from the criteria applied for FAC - while quality of writing/readability should be emphasized, verifiability would be the primary focus of this process.

citations/footnotes for statements of fact
ascribe opinions
quotes footnoted
bibliography of supportive and relevant source items, articles, texts, websites.

In short, articles should report rather than state. - Amgine 17:03, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Sounds good overall. Maurreen 17:08, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Weekly collaboration

Because there is so much to do, a weekly collaboration might be good. I think that could add a lot of focus. Maurreen 17:08, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yes. Wikipedia seems to be getting more and more of these. I think they are generally helpful. It's not a bad place to start, but I would suggest two other alternatives:

That more people with this orientation get involved in some of the existing collaborations.
That if we start doing collaborations out of this forum, after it gets its legs I'd rather see four or five proceeding simultaneously for a month than one singled out each week. This is often slow work -- a week may not be enough -- and depending on the subject-matter area, very different people will be involved: not a lot of people know abstract algebra, Eastern European history, and Japanese pop culture. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:16, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

"Approval" flagging

I'd like to encourage further development of Noel and Forsetti's ideas. Maurreen 16:43, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

A democratic alternative to a two-tier system

I agree with the objectives behind a two tier system of articles. There must a way of judging the quality of an article and informing the reader of how much credence an article can be given before they read it. However I have misgivings about the praticality of its implementation and the philosophical implications. A multi-tier system would require a bureaucratic structure consisting of "experts" in all fields of knowledge. Assessing the quality of articles would take far too much time and be very expensive. Worst, it really dosnt solve many contentious problems because on many of these issues experts do not agree. We are left with the decision of which experts to believe. A two-tier system would also reflect a substantial philosophical shift. From its inception, Wikipedia has been built on democratic principles. A multi-tier system implemented by a experts clearly reflects a shift to patrician principles. I would accept this shift only as a last resort. I would like to see all possible alternatives explored before we consider such an approach.

The alternative I have in mind is user based rating system. I would like to see every reader have the ability to rate every article. This can be done with a side bar button that gives the reader the option of rating the article (say from 1 to 5). The result would be an automatic quality rating system that would greatly reduce the amount of time spent on Feature article voting, VFD, cleanup, and would eliminate the need for a bureaucracy of paid experts. There are a couple of technical questions to work out (such as how to prevent a user from multiple voting on an article, and how to refresh the rating scale as articles change), but these issues can be resolved.

mydogategodshat 17:54, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Strongly disagree that a voting system is relevant. There may be room in Wikipedia for a popularity contest, but this is something else entirely. I can just see the POV warriors mass-voting for biased articles in the middle of NPOV disputes, or the fans of a rock band flooding to increase the ratings for the article about the band. That will have nothing to do with the quality of the articles. And where did this thing about "paid experts" come from? -- Jmabel | Talk 19:21, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Jmabel on democracy issues.

Mydogategodshat, please understand: the worst accusation raised at Wikipedia is that of its unreliability. Because of this it seems that would-be serious contributors stay away of it perceiving it as "toy encyclopedia". Of course it isn't because of hard work of many contributors. However we have observed far too many trolls, POV-pushers, even fanatics to count that those serious contributions won't be spoiled at random moment.

This is a project to back the serious people's effort with tools and procedures that provide a way to ensure that valuable content stays while unvaluable is eliminated with minimal effort and annoyance of serious contributors. Indeed, my proposal does divide the Wikipedia into two worlds: stable, governed by meritocracy for trusted content and the other development, governed by present-day... well, benevolent anarchy.

This doesn't mean the unpassable gap however as there is an egalitarian way for promoting the article to stable status: just write according to policies. This way the serious contributors would see their work rewarded while troublesome POV-pushers and like would rather see rejection and would (optimistically) either reform or vanish seeing that their subversions are only mildly effective as they have little chance to reach audience.

However, we don't take anything away with this proposal, we add a value and significance to our work. The old system exists in the background as a foundation of Wikipedia's growth. It exists with all its peculiarities, edit and revert wars and so on. If one wishes to participate in mayhem, he can there and ops still have to stop him. It is just hidden from view of reader we should cherish. I only hope that this proposal will work towards toning the mayhem down as its perpetuators will see no significance and exposure paid to their spoiling work.

I've never thought of paid experts. I trust that we have enough experts already contributing for free we don't have to pay for their services. We don't really need Ph.D.s at the moment - a small step of review by competent holders of any university degree will do for now showing that we do care for our reliability and that we do show signs of maturing. Perhaps this would draw to us more competent authorities that would want to point us inconsistencies, drawbacks etc. Just that would be great.

However, there is a problem with non-academic issues. Take an example from my field of interest: the Role-playing games be it paper or computer. There are no university degrees nor publictly known experts on this field and many like. Should we use famous marriage quote: 'if somebody knows any objections, let him speak or be silent forever" or there is another way?

-- Forseti 20:07, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Concur that open voting isn't the way to go, for exactly the reasons Jmabel gives. Which means that whatever mechanism does it has to have a line of authority to the Wikimedia Foundation, as "benevolent dictators". (And before anyone objects, they set rules in other areas - of course, always after listening carefully to what all Wikipedians have to say - so I see no reason it would be a problem here.)

However, that does not mean that it cannot be transparent, and in fact I think that it is vital that whatever we come up with is transparent. Noel (talk) 14:26, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Absolute discrimination

Members must be PhD's or graduate students? How utterly elitist and condescending. Rick K 22:48, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

I agree. I think the whole point of Wikipedia is that people without academic credentials can and do do great research. We must hold to this bedrock principle. Now, the fact that people can do great research doesn't mean that people can't do poor research, and I thought the whole idea of this forum is to work on that problem. But it shouldn't be based on the credentials of the editors. Slrubenstein

Those of us who "only" have bachelor's degrees, or even 12- and 13-year-olds who are VALID editors are going to feel mighty unwelcome here if this process proceeds. Rick K 22:56, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

I'm a student (currently working toward my IB diploma) and a member of the project. I don't think anybody (except Adam Carr) is proposing a Ph.D or graduate student requirement. [[User:Neutrality|Neutrality (hopefully!)]] 23:00, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

I didn't propose any such thing. Adam 23:05, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I see the "PhD/grad student" phrase as a sort of shorthand for "discerning editor". It's not something that can be formally defined, although people who've been around here a while have at least an intuitive sense of who is careful and who is not. It's a trust thing - if my watchlist shows an edit by someone I trust, I probably won't look at it, if it's someone I don't trust, I'll look at it to see what they screwed up. 1/2 :-) Academic credentials are a traditional way of developing trust, because universities have collectively agreed to train students in a certain way. If we decide not to pay attention to academic credentials, then we have to invent another way of deciding who we trust, whether by voting, reputation scoring, in-person meetups, whatever. Stan 05:45, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

An excellent point. The thing is that the "I know this person" model breaks down as the contributor pool gets larger. People who have been editing off in a corner one doesn't know about, and garnered a good reputation there, may be unknown elsewhere. Some sort of system to indicate such things would be good to develop. Noel (talk) 16:55, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The "Phd and grad student" requirement was apparently put forth by 172 on the project page. Maurreen 16:22, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

So am I allowed to sign up as a member, or not? I only have a Bachelor's degree, but I am a professional tech writer and editor. Rick K 20:50, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)

"Approval" rough proposal

Here's an outline of a possible plan, submitted for your suggestions. One advantage is that the computer part of it is simple. Maurreen 06:49, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

An article could be "approved" with at least 10 votes and no more than 10 percent of the votes objecting. Only registered users could vote. Users with multiple accounts should only vote once. Voting for each article would be open at least a week.
To allow appropriate time for review and possibly improvement, no more than three articles would be considered at a time. Others nominated would be compiled on a "pending" list.
Nominations would be accepted only from registered users who agree to maintain the article. So, in a sense, we would be voting on the nominators also. The commitment to maintain the article would allow the article to still be edited, but give us some assurance that the article wouldn't deteriorate.
"Approved" articles would be compiled on a list, along with the names of the maintainers.
Possibly the nominations or list could refer or be limited to a specific version of the article. That is, the article at such-and-so date and time.
"Approved" articles could have some indicator of that status on the article itself.
Guidelines or standards for what is worthy could be determined before voting ever starts on articles.
Nominations would be encouraged from featured articles and peer-reviewed articles. Initially, general topics (such as Electronics) would be preferred to more-specific ones (such as Ohm's Law). That could work toward the "approved" material having a broad and even general base.
Nominations of contentious articles would be discouraged, at least initally.

Comments

It could help to refer to the numbers above when making your comments. Thanks. Maurreen 06:49, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Are you all aware of Wikipedia:Approval_mechanism. It seems rather silly that you are working on a new approach without reference to existing suggested schemes. :ChrisG 13:29, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

New and detailed proposal for an approval mechanism

After rereading all the various suggestions for approval mechanisms (for what seems the hundreth time) I had a brainwave and ran with it. The outcome is this proposal is here. I look forward to comments. :ChrisG 19:15, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I am confused

There is a lot going on on this page. Different people have different ideas of what the purpose of this page is. Have we reached any consensus on the most general aims of this page/group? I see that most recently people are working on an approval process. Okay, I can see why some would find this interesting and important. But I thought there were other ideas being bandied about -- e.g. mediating conflicts based on content, and reviewing articles with an eye towards giving editors activiely working on an article good critical feedback and constructive suggestions. Have we decided that these are not really going to be an important part of our work? Or is it all three of these things? Or are there things I have missed? Frankly, I have been distracted with my own edit problems with another "user" so I apologize if I am missing something. But I think that before we expend a lot of energy coming up with a mechanism or procedure to achieve aim "x," we need to be clear that we all agree what the aim, or aims, of this working group are. Then perhaps we can have a division of labor or figure out a way to work on meeting different aims simultaneously but without confusion ... Slrubenstein

I guess Wikipedia policy joins sausages and laws as something one shouldn't watch being made! :-) Well, that's the way rough consensus gets created. Yes, this is a little disorganized, but... So. just because something hasn't figured in recent postings doesn't mean that we don't like it as a goal (and I suspect most people here agree with the two points you mentioned - I certainly do). If something seems to contradict a goal that's important to you, but hasn't been mentioned recently, say so, and see what people think. You have have seen something others missed. Noel (talk) 21:12, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think I agree with all that. I'm not sure we've decided anything, other than perhaps we'd like to raise the overall quality. But "Brief summary" and "Where to start", above, might be useful. Maurreen 08:36, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Google Scholar

Copied from the Village Pump, thought this might be of interest here. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:51, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)

Google Scholar at http://scholar.google.com/ looks like an interesting new tool for research into scientific publications on the Internet. It is described as " Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research." At first glance, this seems to be far more helpful for finding relevant refences than other search engines. Please try out, and please give feed back. Should Scholar be recommended in our How-to pages? Kosebamse 15:21, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Shouldn't we get someone to contact google and add us as a publisher? I see we're listed as some of the citations, but google doesn't (yet) know where the actual work is. anthony 警告 19:17, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I haven't tried it, but I copied it to Wikipedia talk:Google test. Maurreen 08:06, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia 1.0

People watching this page should probably all look in at User:ChrisG/Approval mechanism, a proposal for how to get to Wikipedia 1.0. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:11, Nov 20, 2004 (UTC)

Against a democratic review

I can see the notion to make the process of reviewing the articles democratic. This means estimating their value by popular vote. Let's examine it (if you don't want to read all of this, please read just last paragraph).

Now, please consider article that is correct with exception to one minor but noticeable flaw. Question is: who can notice it and is he able to correct it (as it is the subject of review). We can expect that (according to bell curve) more edecated people are increasingly hard to come by while in democratic type of review we can expect a medium level of competency on average. So it is quite possible that party that is right will lose.

You may say that that is not a problem because that competent person can just state his objections and work it out his way. But on the other hand: is this any different from normal mode of improving an article? IMHO review should not be a way to improve a quality of article. It should merely be assesment of its value. The outcome of this assesment should be PASS, REJECT (why) , and RETRY after: {list of cleanup jobs like typos} . Else we will have queues like those in gold years of communism. It's not that bad however, because voters are free to go and edit the article in present day mode - if them just deem it necessary.

You can still state that if someone known for his competency states his objections, others will follow. This is quite reasonable asumption but it makes the other one: that the competent expert will engage in shows of their competency (and clashes with trolls along their way). Well, I've seen reaction of some biology graduates on creationist propaganda recently and I doubt that they will be willing to democratically club with creationists when it comes to reviewing for long. And in democratic scenario the review would be most watched and contested stage of article life.

This leads us to another question: that of POV. As seen above, even most scientific articles can be contested on grounds personal beliefs. Biology has its creationism, physics - its subtle and free energy fans. And vice versa: alternative medicine articles can have hard time when estabilished physicians will get on them. Yes, we have policy of NPOV but at the same time we have vandals, trolls, POV-pushers and fundamentalists of various kinds. Abortion, Arab-Israeli, Polish-Czech-German, USA-and-its-diabolic-govt and the like articles are clear showcase of fact that Wikipedias policies are no match for determined contributor with commitment to his not ours agenda with little good will. As stated above the review process is likely to attract contributors proportionally to their commitment to the article and/or its cause. This mean that extremists will be the first, most sure to pop-up and most determined to forcing their vision of article. Are we here for extremists' interest? Are we here to deter them? No, we are here to provide good content above all!

This leads to conclusion that dedicated body of experts would be much more adequate to our needs:

It would be professional because they will have to be screened before their admission to experts' body
It would be more NPOV because only persons approved by the community as worthy would become experts
It would be permanent thus element of chance in review process (will any expert be present or not?) would be eliminated invreasing its reliability
It would be seen as authority - if this authority will behave as benevolent one, it would create a spirit for creative competition. As they would measure the high standards, their acceptance will be a sign that contributor(s) of acceepted article do really good job. Their position and fame would increase, perhaps making them eligible for next cadency. Thus both meritocracy and real aspiration for higher standards would appear because a prize is quite good motivation.

I hope I assured you that democracy's place is out of judgement process. If not, consider the example of real three-pillar democratic system. The pillar of Judgement isn't democratic, relying instead on professionals with help of few virtuous representatives of society in some countries.

-- Forseti 00:44, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This argument is based on the presumption that the wiki process is fundamentally broken. EB and the media would not be taking Wikipedia so seriously if that was true. The German wikipedia indeed was found to be superior to mainstream encyclopedias in one case study, though we do not have a comparable English study, so we cannot make the same assumption. Obviously there are issues with some articles especially when an article reaches a high standard or it is controversial; but for 99% of articles the wiki process clearly seems to be working.

This democratic approval mechanism I put forward seeks to stay as true as possible to that wiki process, while putting versions of articles through a quality check. As such it is a minimalistic approach which tries to apply the collective, anarchist, democratic approach that works so well in creating articles to the process of reviewing articles. We do not want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. :ChrisG 12:30, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Like I said before on this page, review process with meritocracy of experts would be an added value for Wikipedia not something that would interfere or making obsolete current practices. I don't think that wiki process is broken. It allowed development in nearly 400.000 articles in en: wiki alone. But this project page is a witness to fact that there are valuable contributors that aren't happy with current state of article state and strive for perfection. It is remarkable that WP has gained so much attention from EB and others but reliability is still an issue. You can be entirely right with those 99%. Problem is that one cannot be sure if an article belongs to that 1% or not.

Perhaps the objections raised at meritocracy come from simple misunderstanding. I don't propose an oligarchy of experts, some mysterious and unfathomable cabal of They that is like employer and overlord in one. What I propose as body of experts is indeed a form of representative democracy. However, I think that criterion for measuring of fitness for that body of experts should not be only commitment, opinion and fame on Wiki but real expertize in given field of knowledge. With the body of experts, the higher house in WP's parliament, and normal WP process continuing on current level I don't see any real threat to our goose. Perhaps threated would be POV-pushers that would see their pushing pointless.

-- Forseti 13:11, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Draft of mission statement

Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards is a place where discerning Wikipedia editors can "meet" to discuss, develop and promote encyclopedic standards.

We envision developing or refining:

A set of goals for articles,
A system to indicate articles or article versions that have attained those goals, and
A quality-based method of resolving editorial disputes.

Maurreen 09:10, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Comments

Checking facts

I think there's a Wikipedia fact-checking group that we might want to coordinate with, but I can't find it right now. Maurreen 09:19, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check Fred Bauder 12:40, Nov 20, 2004 (UTC)

Jurisdiction of the arbitration commitee

The characterization of the arbitration committee on the project page does not fully represent the actual situation. I think everyone involved declines acceptance of disputes over specific article content, which I gather this project also wishes to avoid. We do accept cases which involve edit warring over content and try, not always successfully, to deal with editors who either cannot or will not reference their additions or deletions from articles. This is seen by some, but not all of the arbitration committee, as within our charter. Please look at Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Lance6wins/Proposed_decision#Proposed_findings_of_fact for an example of how this works out in practice. Please especially note the negative votes at Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Lance6wins/Proposed_decision#Significance_of_Lance6wins.27_viewpoint. Fred Bauder 12:40, Nov 20, 2004 (UTC)