User talk:Three-quarter-ten/Ponderings

Comments on the ponderings.

A pleasure to read your thoughts.

I found you through your work on Relationship of automation to unemployment and the reactions you've had to your work there illustrate the problems you talk about in your musings about original work vs. Wikipedia policies. I agree on the problem and am equally bemused about the right solution. Your suggestion of a separate venue (or more likely venues) is good but there's another issue as well.

Investigative discourse (e.g. science, philosophy, cultural criticism, etc.) is shifting from pre-publication review (gate keeping) to post-publication review (citation, criticism, etc.). The motivations are obvious, the same one that make Wikipedia inevitable in some form. The publishers are fighting back, more strongly than in the case of Wikipedia because their current lock in via network effects are stronger and they have a lot more at stake. But they are losing and the end is inevitable.

But this creates a problem for Wikipedia policy. At some point most potentially authoritative material will be "published" in very open forums. For example, PLoS today will publish any relevant article that doesn't raise methodological red flags, and it is one of the leading bio-medical venues. A PLoS article shouldn't be cited as authoritative without indications from post-review that it is sound, but how does Wikipedia codify that requirement? Similarly for articles in arXiv, SSRN, etc. which may not be published elsewhere.

I don't have an answer, but it probably lies in the domain of crowd sourced authority, which is basically votes, links or something like that. Essentially the same as the real authority in investigative work which is citation and community acceptance of validity. You would have a much better sense than I of how this could fit into Wikipedia. Jedharris (talk) 18:16, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

A bit more thought on that. I went off and read the relevant Wikipedia policies. My sense now is the "firewalls" that will hold up are dependence on secondary sources and/or demonstrated expertise -- these should survive even in an open publishing world.

But then we need (1) better ways of generating secondary sources (synthetic overviews) and (2) better ways of detecting demonstrated expertise. This is something I'll think more about.

It does seem to me that to a large extent Wikipedia has to generate synthetic overviews to fulfill its mission. So probably referencing external secondary sources won't hold up as a strong criterion in the long run -- at least for deeper, more marginal or more rapidly evolving areas.

Jedharris (talk) 22:51, 3 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for weighing in, Jed. I agree with your lines of thinking above and have had similar thoughts myself. E.g., the fact that the very nature of what "publishing" is (and isn't) is inevitably going to change, and that it's going to move in a direction toward syncretizing the best of what Wikipedia and open access are (not saying that Wikipedia itself will necessarily keep leading the way—hard to tell so far), and that pre-"publication" peer review is going to be largely (if not entirely) replaced (augmented?) with post-"publication" peer (and non-peer) "voting" and "commenting" (and voting on the comments) of one kind or another. Here's a similar theme that I would throw into the mix (and I suspect you may have already thought this yourself): the very distinction between preprints and postprints cannot last in its current form, because it rests on the assumption that the "printing" (publishing) event (point on the timeline) is significant, final, value-adding ... whatever adjectives one might want to apply—whereas it seems obvious to me (and many others) that its identity as such has mostly crumbled. The publishers are putting up a fight, for example by attempting recently to add more markup value to the content than anyone else does. Semantic markup, data mining or mine-ability, etc. Personally I hope academia wakes up and decides to kick the price-gouger oligarchs of the publishing industry out of the equation. The authors of papers don't have to be the experts who do that markup/linking/mine-ability work themselves—they just need to hire such experts for the back end—ones that have no strong oligarchy on the front end. Simply a supplier of a service, among many, following public-domain, dynamic industry standards and mixing in a little added creative smartness for their competitive edge. Not a fucking oligarchy of a few 800-pound gorillas with coke habits to support (which is what the biggest publishers have become, although they deny it). Many little Davids could slay a few big Goliaths. Or maybe the image of Lilliputians tying down Gulliver is more apt. I could go on ... anyway, you probably know what I'm saying. Once again I am up too late ... Later ... — ¾-10 06:25, 4 September 2011 (UTC)