Wikipedia talk:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards/Archive 1

message: How does this differ from a community of peer review editors? Neutrality (hopefully!) 02:47, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)
:Thanks for taking a look... I'm hoping that this will stimulate discussion on drafting new policies that will encourage higher standards and encourage subject-area expects to stay with the project. In the past there have been proposals for creating a system of editorial review. The initial statement is very broad; so please elaborate on it if you want or come up with some ideas for the page. 172 03:01, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: How does this differ

message: I have left a message for User:Adam Carr and I suggest we ask his input, as he had written up careful articles about the Holocaust and then withdrew, due to his frustration with having to put up with non-encyclopedic edits to his highly academic work. See his comments at User talk:Adam Carr#Note to visitors: "I have decided to scale back substantially my involvement in the Wikipedia project, since I no longer believe it is capable in its present form of achieving its objectives...When and if Wikipedia adopts a structure that protects serious editors and prevents fools and fanatics from sabotaging their work I will return to editing in other areas. I will be posting a longer piece giving my views on Wikipedia soon. Adam 14:24, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, Many valuable and talented editors with goodwill like Adam left because of the actions of a few dozen or so trolls and malignant POV pushers. GeneralPatton 10:43, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: I think that he had been upset with trolls and POV pushers for a long time, and this was just a symptom of that. Jayjg 19:50, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contacting [[User:Adam Carr]] 

message: I've found that simple citation of sources is insufficient in making a case for the use of those sources.  Too often, single person sources, like personal websites, blogs, opinion pieces are given too high of a weight.  Any ideas on improvements to the current guidelines which we could use to appropriately compare those sources, and give them appropriate weight within an article? -- Netoholic @ 06:14, 2004 Nov 16 (UTC)
* One possible partial solution to this might be an additional namespace in which the strengths and weaknesses of various sources can be discussed. Really major sources deserve an article in the Wikipedia itself (such as the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica), but most don't. 
** The real problem with Wikipedia, IMHO, is lack of proper sources (or poisonous false and nonexistant sources), not the reliability of sources. Let's face it, most of the changes posted to Wikipedia have no references whatsoever, and those references that are made are often in a form that can't be easily verified (e.g. my favorite so far was an extensive quotation out of an academic review that didn't actually exist, reviewing a journal article that didn't exist, attributing a primary source that never made the statement quoted anywhere. Cost to falsify the source: about $25, cost to the bastard that made the quotation up: priceless). The primary purpose of citing a work is to establish a "lineage of knowledge," where an idea of fact came from. The authority of a source arises from consensus about its correctness borne from subsequent debate. Academics have these principles bred into the bone and defer to consensus by default in most editorial decisions. Non-academics seem to often rely on pre-socratic methods for reconciling truth. Its not about elitism and anti-elitism as some would suggest, its about standing on the shoulders of giants versus the tiresome process of sorting through the giants toenail lint. Wikipedia too often retreads debates that were had generations before us, and I'd suggest that the real elitism of Wikipedia is thinking just because we are the latest to have the debate that we somehow are possessed with a knowledge or intelligence unpossesed by our forebearers. That's a historically common form of cultural chavunism that frankly requires a bit of education to overcome. If you can't instill that kind of education in Wikipedia's users before they start contributing, you need a systemic mechanism to enforce encylopedic standards. It seems to me that relying on people's goodwill will ultimately prove to be ineffective and economically infeasible. --Modemx 19:08, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dubious sources 

message: As someone who edits heavily in a variety of areas (with varying degrees of competence, heh), I'd like to observe that there are large areas of the encyclopedia that see little or no conflict between editors. For instance, naval stuff has dozens of editors with varying levels of knowledge, and I  can only think of one edit war (over whether John Paul Jones was a war criminal) in the past two years. Tree of Life is another such area - thousands of articles, many high-quality and in-depth, and the fiercest dispute I know of has been over - I kid you not - the capitalization of species names, and it turns out we're not alone, the world's top authorities on systematics are fighting over the very same thing. Conversely, areas like politics and modern history are a daily battleground, and to someone who only works in those, WP is likely to seem more like a losing cause. So it might be useful to think about why some areas are more problematic than others, and focus on solutions specifically for those. Stan 01:21, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The bigger conflicts on Wikipedia seem to follow along the bigger conflicts in the world: the longstanding feuds in the Israel/Palestine articles; the disputes surrounding everything relating to Jesus; etc. (On the other hand, I have avoided developing the articles in my area of greatest interest due to worries about the sheer breadth of jargon requisite, since there *have* been conflicts about jargon.) - Amgine 05:42, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Specialties