Wikipedia:Cite your sources debate

discussion from rules to consider regarding the keycited or assumed source distinction

"intellectually honest"? What does that mean? It sounds suspiciously like an attempt to frame a debate. Suppose I call this rule "intellectually paranoid." Wouldn't that strike you as curious? (I am being serious, btw--what does it mean?) --KQ

It's typically considered intellectually dishonest to pass off another person's work as your own. "Intellectually honest" in this case means "honest about representing what one's sources are." Wikipedia is an interesting case, however, in that we don't claim most of the articles as our own, nor do we claim that the articles are original work. If, therefore, the only reason for citing sources is to make sure that no mistakenly believes that an article is the author's own work, we might as well not cite sources, because no one can labor under that misconception on Wikipedia--because there are no authors per se!

But there is value in acknowledging other creative individuals as the source of Nupedia's information. We just looked stuff up, in some cases anyway, and we did it without citing what we looked up. We aren't taking credit for this, but someone might mistakenly think that we are just really smart and we did all this research ourselves.

Maybe the better argument for citing sources is just to give people good links to further reading. :-) --LMS

I hadn't considered the fact that we aren't claiming individual ownership of what we write. It just felt icky to me to use others' work and not acknowledge it. I also found myself consulting outside sources when I doubted some articles (and usually found the articles were, in fact, correct); providing reputable references may add strength to what we write when none of us can claim to be an expert.

Perhaps the term "intellectual honesty" doesn't need to be there, and maybe I should integrate some of what I've said here. I'll get back to it soon. -- Janet Davis

Ok. That phrase just raises hackles, sorry. :-)

I'm not being intentionally dense (though I suspect I am being dense about it somehow, since other people seem to understand it)... but: what is the difference between looking it up in a book where someone else has already looked it up and verified it, and verifying it ourselves? At what point do we quit citing other people? (at what point is something considered well-enough known that it doesn't need to be cited?) Also, suppose I take information from the Unnameable Source, which is now in the public domain, and update it and put it here. That source lists references; am I obligated to list them as well? What about if we read something several years past but remembered it; suppose the original source of knowledge was not deduction of the facts but some long-forgotten source: are we "intellectually dishonest" if we do not cite that source? (This is not a rhetorical question, as I did read voraciously about Dave Brubeck 5 or 6 years ago, and did the same thing about Stephen King over 10 years ago: biographies, interviews, essays, prefaces, etc.)

I'm coming to believe increasingly that Thomas Jefferson should have won out in the copyright debate, as he is quite correct that once you have been given a notion, you can not rid yourself of it.... But that is not the point, as my rantings will have no effect on copyright law or the codified behavior of Intellectually Honest people. Please don't think I'm being glib; I honestly do not understand, and I don't intend the questions rhetorically. --KQ

KQ: Some of us forget stuff. Lots of stuff. All the time. For this reason, I write everything I consider professionally important into a notebook (math gets a LaTeX summary), complete with references to external material and cross-referenced internally. I try to find several different references for anything I don't understand well, because in my experience, any individual reference may be incorrect in some key point.

For wikipedia, references probably aren't very important, because encyclopedias are not viable references for scholarly work, outside of work explicitly concerning encyclopedias. (I have read at minimum several hundred papers in fields spanning geology to mathemetical mechanics and never once seen an encyclopedia reference.)

Janet: Use without attribution is definitely icky. I think its ok if one limits oneself to facts in the public domain. Example: this months Natl Geographic has an article on some island off the coast of Chile with big caves. The "public domain" part of the article could be the name of the island, the location of the island, and 1 or 2 sentences on physiography: "Has limestone, lots of rains, big caves." Anything more than that, in my opinion, better have a link back to Natl Geog.

Larry: Maybe a disclaimer on the front page, and a tiny disclaimer link on each topic page served up. At some point, some knucklehead is going to serve wikipedia with a copyright violation notice. A disclaimer might make it easier to remove offending pages without any further consequences. (Let's not talk about possible patent violations... )

One further note about encouraging outside links: it will probably encourage spam. I would just love to write up a bunch of the stuff I do professionally, then link it back to my web site!

Hope this helps. DMD

First, plagarism and copyright violation are covered elsewhere, so for the sake of discussion, let's assume those issues aren't involved.

I don't think Wikipedia articles need a lot of formal citation. An encyclopedia article, in general, presents common knowledge within a field that could lead to dozens of citations. I don't particularly feel the need to mention that I perused several books or web sites to verify that sort of thing. Perhaps the urge for formal citation comes from the academic backgrounds of many of the contributors, where the meritocracy of intellectual credit is more strongly felt than in most other areas, and is highly formalized?

If a topic within an article is obscure, controversial, or just wants emphasizing, the wiki format encourages an informal citation style ("Professor Smith, in his definitive Opus 497, indicated that blah blah ...").

An encyclopedia article usually cannot have the breadth or depth of a book or focused research effort, (although Wikipedia and similar projects may change that view), so a "Suggested Reading" or "For Additional Information" reference section may be very appropriate.

To summarize, my feeling is that citations are only appropriate where the sense of the content can be clearly attributed to a particular work, but otherwise should not be a big deal -- with many editors reviewing articles, needed citations will likely appear later if not in the original article.

Just my rambling opinion.... --loh (2001-07-05)

Sources are good for traking serious scholarship, research, history, etc. But a large number of articles here aren't that; they are simple explanations of things the reader might be unfamiliar with, but about which we know something. I think "usefulness" is the most important criterion here, rather than rigorous scholarship. What is a useful "source" to cite for a article containing one paragraph explaining that Robert A. Heinlein is a science fiction author and listing his stories? An article about any subject should certainly point out important works on that subject, whether or not those were the sources of the information in the article. Typically any expert's knowledge of a subject will come from dozens of sources, many of which are very good in general and many of which are too specific to be of any use to newcomers, and much of it even the expert may not remember where it came from. If I'm writing about poker strategy, it would be unthinkable not to include some mention of David Sklanky's Theory of Poker and Mike Caro's Book of Tells; but if I happen to use an example from a game I played last week, will I even remember that something obscure like that Ray Zee's Seven Card Stud High-Low for Advanced Players had a chapter on the theory behind that particular play with a similar example? If I did remember, is it useful for ordinary readers to know that if that book is otherwise not that useful to them? --LDC

Just a question about formatting. What is the proper (in Wikipedia) way to acknowledge a source in the body of the article? Do we have a way to make footnotes? Should we use the HTML href and name tags to refer to items in the bibliography at the end of the article? An example of something I've done that I'm not happy with is at the beginning of fractal. More simply: does Wikipedia need a standard for quotations and references?

Some of the more serious articles have had numbered references in footnotes, and I don't see a problem with that. Unfortunately, the software does not yet allow page-internal links, so we can't link to them, but numbers should be fine. I don't tink we should rigidly follow CMS, though. This is a new medium, and we should explore new methods. For example, standard bibliographies don't include ISBNs. In paper books, that makes sense, because library catalogs are organized by author, topic, etc. On the web, that's monumentally stupid, because ISBNs are the key to every online database like Amazon. Let me clean up the fractal article and see if you like the style. --Lee Daniel Crocker

- Yes, ISBNs must be included, they are far more important than the standard bibliographic entries which are obsolete - easily looked up given the ISBN. Same for ISSN. There are reference standards used for other online systems, check out bookfinder if you really want to find everything there is. We should be assuming that such obscure sources would need to be found somewhere like that, and it deals nicely with both current and out of print books - you could do worse than add bookfinder and google searches to every page. -24

- Write your draft, find your controversy, pick the extremes as sources, and find the foundation. -24

There are a few people here who think they are entitled to source on demand, or that their suspicion makes them experts on a topic, e.g. they can't tell that "fiat" and "military fiat" are the same thing, they can't tell that "bioregional" and "ecoregional" are the same thing, and various other failures of cognition may apply. Dictionaries may be interested in these distinctions, but if we are, it's a sign that incompetents are getting into editing. It's fair to fix and add synonyms, but there are people out there deleting whole articles because it doesn't fit their pet terminology.


 * 24, never assume what people do or do not think or understand. Thank you.  Koyaanis Qatsi
 * I will do so every minute of every day for the rest of my life, because it's unavoidable. We can't live examining each others' motives in infinite depth.  I can cite specific examples of the behavior noted, but let's not get into it, as I didn't name names - for a reason.   I think this behavior has settled down somewhat.  24

As to frequency of source quoting, there are lots of people who simply don't understand what they read and object to a line here and a fact there. Fine. Forget them. Over time, factual errors will be corrected by pedants and unless they're absolutely central to the argument (as they shouldn't be, an encyclopedia article should never be describing anything so narrowly causal as to hinge on a single fact or example) they don't affect the rest of the article.


 * You are assuming two things here: 1: that you do understand, and 2: that since someone disagrees with you, they must not understand. See the above.  Koyaanis Qatsi
 * I don't see how anyone could 1. get by every day without believing that they understood the things that their lives depended on or where they had very outstanding success in the past, nor 2. mistake, as you have, a problem with a narrow range of "lots of people" (a clique), for a problem with all humanity.

Various extremely controversial topics, notably politics and religion, but in matters of the state and its use of power also economics and psychiatry, are going to necessarily require an extremely careful choice of terms. Even just to choose the terms from one side of a debate, e.g. using a word like say "sociopath" which hsa many meanings, is taking a side. Same issue as "vandal" or "miscreant" or whatever. A good example is the way a Marxist says "means of production" and a classical economics says "factors of production" - to the classical, labor is just another factor, a commodity. to most people in the world, they don't want to be treated as such with no regard to their creativity, family, social ties, etc.. That's a simple example. A more complex one arises every time you get into debates about God, e.g. many atheists will vehemently deny it's a faith even though it clearly is, the neutral position is called "agnostic" (not caring and considering both theist and atheist positions to be based on a foundation axiom that they made up).

So when making that kind of claim, on that kind of topic, attribute where you can - the debates are controversial enough you should be able to do that. But don't become afraid to write the text itself, to lay out relations between the positions of various experts, etc., there is always glue, and always trust in writing and reading. Anyone who claims otherwise and thinks they deserve to have a citation on demand is just incapable of trust and ought to be ignored.


 * yes, attribution is important. This, 24, is where your own writing on controversial subjects is at its weakest.  And your opinion on whom I ought to trust is completely irrelevant.  Koyaanis Qatsi
 * if you insist on citation on demand, well, there are many many long and weird articles without citations, including most of Larry's. There are some profound issues with his POV on some questions, but I don't believe that I can just bug him to tell me why he believes what he believes about the topic, whenever I want.  Attribution only becomes "important" when you don't trust.  Thus, people may expect more of it from me than Larry.  Fine.  That helps to improve the articles.  They may resent this requirement of improving articles.  Fine.  They can do something else with their time, and others will step in.  You don't seem to realize that my "own writing on controversial subjects" is *deliberately* weak on attribution.  It's a *policy*.  Note that there are many articles I've written that are quite over-attributed.  But if the topic is controversial, why sully MY credibility with that of the sources?  Fewer the better, until I know *why* the topic is controversial.  Then the article can improve drastically as I focus on neutralizing places where a POV was unintentionally taken.

On controversial topics, once you know what the controversy actually is at the moment, you should be able to join forces with someone with an opposing point of view and nail down two or three sharply opposed references, and a foundation you all believe in. That obviously won't happen on the first pass, but you will identify who is actually concerned to represent the topic fairly, and who is simply insisting on their own view or whta they learned in high school as "neutral", and who is hopelessly stuck in some systemic bias. You will also find out that certain people hate you, your politics, your attitude, or your viewpoint based on things written in talk files. Fine. Let them howl.

This project cannot solve its social problems without a means of governance and there is seemingly zero interest in avoiding a devolution to anarchy or expanding discussion of governance beyond a clique, so forget those concerns. Push to the limit of neutrality as you understand the field in the real world, and ignore the people here who think they know what neutral means.

The correct way to find what is neutral is not by prescription but by successive refinement. In that view, sources go on at the end, not at the beginning, although if you don't have two or three trusted names in an article, you don't give your opponent anything to hinge on. So try to do that.

24


 * Your comment encouraging people not to give sources so that opponents have nothing to hinge on indicates that you are not interested in dialogue, or compromise;
 * ROTFL - the comment says the opposite, but in a way designed to trap people like you into revealing your biased way of reading. Obviously anyone who reads that sentence with all those negatives can interpret it as "give those trusted names" or "do not give those trusted names".  you chose the latter, but I read it the former way. 24

and so indicates to me that you are here not to reach consensus, as you pretend interest in (after all, what is anarchy based on) but to push your own agenda. Mull on that if you need to. Koyaanis Qatsi
 * I don't, although I appreciate your answer which illustrates your assumptions. I am extremely interested in consensus process but note that it is poorly understood here.  I am interested also in governance but I am told that Systemic Bias in Wikipedia does not exist or is irrelevant, and comes with a monarchy appointed long before I got here.  This is all very funny, but it has nothing to do with consensus or preventing anarchy.  What I need to mull on, is whether I am wasting my time educating people in consensus, why it is not unanimity, and why it is not monarchy either.  I have yet to see anyone here outline what theGoverning Ontological distinction actually is, that makes them believe that a source needs to be cited, versus not. 24

24 - not on the first pass - too often, impressive-looking citations and references make people accept nonsense or heavily discredited views that were popular 200 years ago. So, find out what the controversial statements are, and only then attribute where required, simultaneously indicating who said what on the controversial matters - KQ's concern can be best dealt with by realizing we are not a community but a market... and have no "opinion"...