User:El Sandifer/Verifiability

All quotes are from WP:V.


 * "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth."

Not factually wrong as such, but how, exactly, WP:V became a notability guideline I am not sure. More to the point, though, this obscures a fundamental aspect of verifiability - we use it because it's a good way of ensuring truth, not because we prefer it to truth.


 * "If no reliable, third-party (in relation to the subject) sources can be found for an article topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it."

This, of course, has been done to death. Suffice it to say that there is no evidence whatsoever that this line has the in-practice support of the larger community.


 * "Do not leave unsourced information in articles for too long"

This is supported by a quote from Jimbo that simply does not say "Do not leave unsourced information in articles for too long." At the risk of overreading the tea leaves, the quote in question is about "random speculative 'I heard it somewhere' pseudo information," and later in the post this is explicitly linked with bad writing. That is *not* equivalent to "every single statement requires a source." There is (and always has been) an implicit matter of judgment involved in what information should and should not be removed. This captures the heart of the problem that infests WP:V at the moment - it has become a guideline not about the nature of the information being presented but about the specific presentations of it in a way that creates excessive pressure to get it right on the first try and inhibits the collaborative editing structure that is implicit to our process.


 * "In general, the most reliable sources are peer-reviewed journals and books published in university presses; university-level textbooks; magazines, journals, and books published by respected publishing houses; and mainstream newspapers. "

This is not untrue as such, but it is a weird bias - mainstream newspapers are very odd sources from our perspective, as they by their nature cover ephemeral material and do not attempt to provide a detached overview. The rest are all good, but weirdly biased towards academic topics in a way that is at times problematic. I'm very active with the peer-reviewed journal of ImageTexT, which focuses on comics studies. But I'm loathe to suggest that articles published in ImageTexT are the single best sources for their subjects, just because academic criticism in the humanities is a marginal part of the overall context of a given text.


 * "Material from reliable non-academic sources may also be used in these areas, particularly if they are respected mainstream publications."

The word "respected" here is doing an awful lot of work for a word that is utterly unclear. Respected by whom and for what?


 * "Questionable sources are those with a poor reputation for fact-checking. Such sources include websites and publications that express views that are widely acknowledged as extremist, are promotional in nature, or rely heavily on rumors and personal opinions."

This is currently phrased to suggest that websites are inherently questionable. I suspect that this is an accident, but who knows.


 * "Self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications." "

This is simply untrue. The "established expert whose work has been published elsewhere" clause is just a mess. The Gray's Anatomy Writers Blog is self-published. Not all of the writers have published elsewhere on Gray's Anatomy. Therefore they are not reliable sources? Um, no.


 * However, caution should be exercised when using such sources: if the information in question is really worth reporting, someone else is likely to have done so."

The "if the information in question is really worth reporting" statement is also insane and gets at one of the major problems with our current model of verifiability - it is based excessively on a commercialized definition of viable information. Secondary sources are, in most cases, going to be published with an eye towards profit of one sort or another. Or, more to the point, they are published with an eye towards something more complex than the worthiness of information. This is true even of peer-reviewed non-profit journals. I've seen a number of articles rejected from journals not because they make inaccurate observations or observations that are not worth knowing, but because they make observations that are too obvious, too historical, or otherwise just not quite what the journal was looking for.

There are many cases, however, where that information would be wholly worth including in one of our articles. But, to use the oft-cited television example, few television series have the particular sort of fan-base that makes publishing a book of episode summaries a good idea. That isn't a comment about the worth of the information, unless we're tying worthiness to commercial profitability, in which case our systemic bias problems are worse than anyone thought.

This is also related to a fundamental shift in the nature of information distribution. The Internet means that information that is accurate but niche can get published. All of which worsens the aforementioned profitability issue - since there are plenty of people who will publish the information for free on the Internet it is much less of a good idea to try to commercially publish it. We are an example of that trend, but there are others. There's a real problem with the attempt to minimize the amount of discretion granted to self-published sources. It is increasingly the case that secondary and third-party sources are simply inadequate to the task of providing an encyclopedic overview of a topic. Other things need to be introduced - self-published sources are one option. So is credentialism. There are probably others, but the path we are choosing here *simply does not work*.


 * "Self-published sources should never be used as third-party sources about living persons, even if the author is a well-known professional researcher or writer"

Unless the phrase "third-party" is being used misleadingly (and I doubt it based on the list of acceptable uses of self-published sources below) this is insane. Let me put this in a real context. J. Michael Straczynski, creator, producer, and primary writer (writing over 80% of the episodes) of Babylon 5 has self-published the scripts for B5 that he wrote. These scriptbooks contain introductions in which he talks about the production of the show, including stories about the actors.

There is *no justifiable reason* why these introductions are not reliable sources for the articles about the actors. The information should be explicitly credited - J. Michael Straczynski says that Actor X did Y - but the blanket ban is simply bad policy that does not reflect any good practices whatsoever.

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