Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-12-04/Recent research


 * So Wikipedia is run by an Oligarchy. Wonder who they are, List of cabals? -- Green Cardamom (talk) 08:49, 5 December 2013 (UTC)


 * My Wikipedia essay, You are not a reliable source, disagrees heavily with the second section, Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-12-04/Recent_research.-- Laun  chba  ller  10:57, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Seems to me that the whole concept of an "oral citation" runs afoul of WP:Verifiability which is a core policy.--ukexpat (talk) 15:35, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
 * As long as there's a reliable recording of the oral citation - say someone does an interview on a camcorder and posts the video to YouTube - I don't see a verifiability issue. Obviously the context of how it's used is important, but I see little difference between citing one person's observations that are written down (which we do all the time) and one person's observations that are spoken into a microphone.  S ven M anguard   Wha?  17:17, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes how would we deal with fringe ideas without any support? If is not clear how oral citations would work. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 17:38, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
 * By using cite interview.-- Laun  chba  ller  18:43, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
 * The problem with oral information (assuming it's recorded) isn't WP:V, it's WP:POV, or, particularly, WP:UNDUE, as well as WP:NOR. If someone says "We've been using X to cure Y for thousands of years", or "We've had elections for village chief for hundreds of years", and this is "published" on YouTube, how is this different from a home video recording where someone remembers that (famous) person X said Y to him/her, sixty years ago? (In short, the point our content policies isn't simply to require documentation; otherwise we'd accept writings by anyone about anything as being a valid source for what goes into Wikipedia.)
 * More generally, Wikipedia policies increase the average accuracy of articles by excluding information that has a more-than-average likelihood of being wrong. And without such exclusions, debates on talk pages would be far lengthier, and far more likely to drive away contributors who do think that Wikipedia should emulate the classic encyclopedias of the past, minus the more egregious faults such as imperialism and sexism. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:21, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
 * We accept opinions in articles all the time; that's what movie, book, and video game reviews are. No modern movie would make GA or FA status without a reception section that relied on the opinions of reviewers. We choose only those reviewers that are best credentialed, but they're we're still taking someone's POV and giving it a heavy amount of weight. In cultures that rely almost exclusively on oral history, that oral history is what's considered the accurate history of that culture. The person in charge of keeping that history is often trained extensively for that role, in other words, is best credentialed to present the cultural history of that culture as depicted by that culture. I'm not saying that we should just pick some dude off the street in downtown Atlanta and say "tell me about the cultural history of the Wolof people", but I am saying that if we have interviews of the cultural leaders of various groups, it would be entirely appropriate to include that information, couching it by making it clear that this is their own recounting of the information.  S ven M anguard   Wha?  23:40, 5 December 2013 (UTC)


 * No question that the definition for "reliable source" will be somewhat different in different domains of knowledge. WikiProject Med, as Doc James rightly points out, needs to consider a more restrictive definition, if it wants to provide statistically valid, evidence-based medical information to the thousands of people turning here for medical advice.
 * Eric Miller of Zepheira has a lot to say about how to cite for authenticity and trust in the new Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) Update - November 22, 2013 from the Library of Congress. I think that if we take Eric's insights as our point of departure, we could cite a much wider range of sources with good results. Djembayz (talk) 23:39, 10 December 2013 (UTC)


 * The person who wrote "The article presents several valuable and thought-provoking examples of how the rigid referencing rules of the English Wikipedia go to extremes and do not necessarily reach the goals of ensuring notability, verifiability and reliability." should be encouraged to submit an opinion piece to the Signpost or learn to write objectively. That kind of partisan commentary and others like it have no business appearing in this publication. DreamGuy (talk) 01:42, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
 * "What drives people to contribute to Wikipedia?" Well if they're like me they have a burning desire to waste a few hours for no greater purpose then trying to add or subtract some trivial thing in an article that they feel will help the project as a whole, only to be rebuffed by the greater whole of the registered user who feel your edit(s) were somehow "unconstructive". TomStar81 (Talk) 01:57, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
 * 60% of the respondents note that the articles about their clients or companies have factual errors they would like to correct; many observed that potentially reputation-harming errors last for many months, or even years. This statistic poses an interesting question about Wikipedia responsibility to the world: by denying PR people the ability to correct such errors, aren't we hurting our own mission?" - This assertion fails WP:SPS. Based on some of my encounters with PR professionals, for some of them the definition of "factual errors" includes anything they don't like seeing in print about their clients. We've got a guy in California, for example, who insists that telling the reader how his client is rated by organizations who disagree with his political party is "libellous and an attack". -- Orange Mike &#x007C;  Talk  02:00, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
 * How PR professionals see Wikipedia "40% of the 2013 survey respondents had engaged with Wikipedia through editing ..., compared to 35% of the 2012 survey respondents" So PR editing has gone up while the general editor decline is still going down. That doesn't seem good. When the PR editors outnumber the volunteer editors, I expect there'll be some interesting changes to our policies. Maybe we should try to get more volunteer editors? Just a thought. 64.40.54.20 (talk) 02:28, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
 * "Maybe we should try to get more volunteer editors? Just a thought." Good luck with that buddy, we've been barking up that tree for 5 years now. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:14, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Being "the subject of a book that was included in the Library of Congress" is almost meaningless in itself... AnonMoos (talk) 07:02, 7 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Re: so-called "Cultural imperialism." First, as all the news that the two auctions of Hopi Friends in France have raised, tribes don't necessarily want all their intellectual property and cultural patrimony shared with the general public. If information is published in a reliable, secondary source, I use that as a good barometer of whether the information is acceptable for public consumption (this doesn't always work, but it's a baseline). The self-published works are far more dicey. I can't find any mention on web of book, GI-Dee-Thlo-Ah-Ee Of The Blue People Clan, being published by the Cherokee Nation (who didn't ratify their constitution until 1975, so it'd be surprising if they were publishing books a year prior). Native peoples are purely capable of publishing books through proper channels, for instance Diné College Press or Chickasaw Nation Press affiliated with University of Oklahoma Press. It's not like requiring citations to be published leaves out the Native voice. That's why there's so many entries at List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas. BUT... unfortunately, people do attempt to use Wikipedia all the time to push their POV and legitimize dubious historical claims about their organizations. The craziest example I've dealt with was User:Aniyunwiya with Cherokee Nation of Mexico. Nothing in her/his sources backed up any of her/his claims. (And yes, 90% of non-Natives claiming to be Natives claim to be Cherokee, followed by Blackfeet, Delaware, Apache, followed by obscure historical tribes from the East Coast.) In the end, verifiable truth must win out. -Uyvsdi (talk) 23:16, 10 December 2013 (UTC)Uyvsdi