Here PHG is instructed not to use academic sources which are not in English:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AN#...ify_his_sources.

Hello, Wikipedia? If the leadership can't read French and Japanese, and can't find anyone who can, the solution is for the leadership to step aside in favor of someone who can do one or the other. I'm no polyglot myself, but if this were real academia, there would be no debate that the problem is yours; not PHG's.

Given that their English comprehension is already sub-literate, I think I spy an automatic answer to all our problems.

Jon

This is an example of a time when I wonder whether it's worth responding to a thread. I'm going to respond here, because the above summary of the decision that was taken is terribly unfair, and then I would like some honest feedback as to whether it was worth my time to do so.

In [[Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Franco-Mongol alliance]], it was alleged that a long-time contributor was misusing sources in articles concerning medieval history by citing them out of context or for propositions other than the ones they supported. The contributions appeared to be in good faith, but the result was that the history articles were being filled with either incorrect information or with minority viewpoints presented as accepted ones. This was not an easy case for the arbitrators to decide, because the sources in dispute were obscure ones. After a detailed review of the evidence, which included one of us spending a day in the library chasing down the sources and comparing them against the Wikipedia articles they were used in, we were forced to conclude that the allegations were basically true.

It fell to me to write the ArbCom decision. There were calls that we should ban this contributor, but many of his other contributions were worthwhile, and we concluded that would be an overreaction. The decision that was adopted was that the user was banned for one year from editing articles on ancient and medieval history, although he was welcome to make suggestions on talkpages and to contribute to other types of articles.

Unfortunately, the problems did not abate when the decision was issued. Allegations persisted that (among other things) the same contributor was now misusing sources or giving them undue weight in articles on other historical periods. In at least one instance, this proved to be true. In other instances, we couldn't tell because the sources were obscure and in foreign languages.

Stop for a moment. Suppose you were an administrator or arbitrator responsble for handling this matter. There were renewed calls for banning the user, because other editors were having to spend many hours checking on and cleaning up after his work, and of course, the user himself claimed to have done nothing wrong. What would you have done?

The motion that we adopted requires that in order to enable other editors to check on this user's sourcing, EITHER he should use sources that are in English and widely available, AND/OR he should work with another editor to assist with his sourcing. The point is that someone will be readily able to check the validity of the references being used by this particular valued but flawed contributor.

If, as I hope, everyone is concerned with the accuracy of our historical articles, this seems to me a perfectly reasonable step to have taken under the circumstances, and arguably is the least restrictive sanction appropriate to the task.

Can we agree that it is horribly misleading to summarize all of this by suggesting that one contributor was arbitrarily told that he should not use sources that are not in English, because "the leadership" can't read foreign languages. Proabivouac has made some valid criticisms of Wikipedia, but I fear this isn't one of them.

Erratic sourcing, mischaracterization of sources, and misinterpretation or misrepresentation of the content of sources came up in the articles I deigned to edit when I butted heads against the participants in the Wikipedia Project on Intelligent Design.

My take, Brad, is that it's a systemic problem, of which the anecdotal case cited above is but one instance.

Brad, this was worth your time. I appreciate it.

I think the problem, though, stems back to something even more simple. You're talking about an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit". Why people would sign on, without pay, for this perpetual headache is a wonder to me.

I mean, why not just edit here, for about the same experience?

Greg

Thanks also for taking the trouble to reply, Brad. However, you say



But if the theory of Wikipedia is correct, some other editor will pop up out of the blue and correct the mistake, and Darwinian selection will ensure that verifiable information only is preserved in the encyclopedia. It works for Pokemon and Star Trek episodes. It clearly doesn’t work for medieval history. Aren’t you sort of admitting here that there are some fundamental problems with the model – it works well for the Pokemon stuff (also for pederasty and similar subjects), doesn’t work so well for, say Medieval philosophy and the like, for which a knowledge of Romance languages and Latin is prerequisite?

Those of us who have a heckuva lot more experience actually working in Wikipedia article space than you and your whole ArbClown Army know the vast practical difference between a Wikipediot Policy As Written (WP:PAW) and a Wikipediot Policy In Practice (WP:PIP). Unlike you, therefore, we can predict the actual consequences of Any Excuse To Delete Information That Makes Any Random Bafoon Feel Like A Bafoon (WP:ÆTDITMARBFLAB).

Jon

I think it was worth it. I noted PHG from ANI. After initially having some sympathy that he might be being harshly treated (I believe he was subject to some abuse) it occurred to me that I didn't have enough knowledge, but it seemed that he was indeed pushing a novel view of history, and that the abuse stemmed from the exasperation of dealing with an intransigent person.

What is interesting about this is the danger of extending to a general case what might be appropriate for a special case. A couple of thoughts: yes, in this individual battle, Wikipedians are unfairly disadvantaged in their lack of language: however, is it appropriate to contemplate having an article on a subject where the most appropriate sources are likely to be in French or Chinese (my naive view considers that Mongol history is more likely to be related to Chinese sources than Japanese, but then again I don't know). It seems eminently possible that English sources may be unaware of this specialised corner of history, and therefore a common man's view may believe that this is all horrendous original research, whereas we might find that in the world of French or Mongol history, this is not original thinking at all.

So it may well be that PHG is wrong and simply a tendentious editor, but this is based on having no knowledge - or rather that the Wikipedian view is based on an English-speaking view of the world.

So, although I tend to be persuaded that Wikipedia has got it right with PHG, it does beg the question that if the sources are genuine sources, that the issue is that Wikipedia is not qualified to have an article on a subject at all, rather than PHG is right or wrong - there are no many eyes of Wikipedians that the system relies on.

So in believing PHG to be in the wrong, have I fallen into the Wikipedian trap of arguing from no knowledge and relying on (I hate this) ad hominem views - almost certainly. The only way I can fix that is hearing from reputable people in this area of history - I'll take the word of a history expert - not rely on my judgment.

This is interesting. I checked on the RFA and see that Adam Bishop gave an opinion. I respect Adam's view, and indeed I have asked his help on a couple of occasions for this interesting period of history.

On the other hand there most certainly was an alliance of sorts. The difficult question is how important it was in the scheme of things. PHG references a couple of books that I have, I will check when I get home.

This sort of dispute is always settled in the real world by having a panel of experts or referees on hand who can be referred to if necessary. But as I have already commented, that goes against the theory of Wikipedia, that experts are in fact unnecessary.

That the arbitrators do not include active mainspace editors is a myth. Several of the arbitrators have made huge content contributions. (For what it's worth, I myself have created somewhere between 50 and 75 article pages, and have designs on many more, although I keep getting distracted ... can't think why.)



Although I am not an expert of the philosophy of the "Wiki Model," you are probably right that it works more weakly in more sparsely patrolled fields.

On the other hand, dispute resolution (culminating, where all else fails, in arbitration) is ALSO part of the system, precisely for the purpose of addressing otherwise intractible problems like this one.

But as I understand (not being a Wiki expert either) this sort of dispute resolution, as the name implies, is entirely aimed at behaviour, not content. Thus a highly qualified expert who tended to be rude and arrogant (as sadly many of them are) would lose out to an entirely unqualified but polite non-expert.

The solution would be a panel of referees, and also a reward system that rewarded the content contributors rather than the vandal-fighters.

There's some ongoing discussion on-site, which has been noted here on WR, about taking our dispute resolution processes to the next level of usefulness. I haven't yet formed a view on the proposals but am watching the discussion with interest. As for the issue of "polite POV pushing," this has been raised as a concern in the pending RfAr/Homeopathy case, so stand by.

I didn't bother to check until I became surprised by all the n00bish things you say about Wikipedia, but when I did I saw that you have only 2245 mainspace edits in just over 2 years. That is not what I call very much at all.

Jon

I have followed this with interest, I hope it proves fruitful. I apologise for the attitude of Awbrey.

One of the issues on the Lists of Jews controversy was that people refused to accept the (British) Jewish Year Book as a source because, being in America, they could not find a copy. And that's a book that's in English. It's all the "if I can't find something on Google it's not true" mentality.

My mainspace work so far is a heck of a lot less than some of the other arbitrators. I've fallen into the trap of too much administration/not enough content, and I regret that often enough. My FA candidate is at least a year overdue.

On the other hand, we all know that edit counts can be misleading. One can spend an hour or two creating a new page -- say, a biography of a largely forgotten judge as to whom my piece will become the major resource on the Internet -- one mainspace edit. Then one goes and does a bunch of administrative type stuff -- a dozen or more non-mainspace edits.

So, as we say often enough on the RfA type pages, one can't always judge by the numbers.

I am curious to learn why dispute resolution failed to appear in my case, Brad. Twice I called for MedCab, and once for an Ombudsman. Neither appeared. A 3rd Opinion person appeared briefly to say that 3rd Opinion doesn't take cases where there are more than two editors involved. (The 3rd Opinion person appeared right after the first editor with whom I disagreed summoned an ally to join him.)

That you say a lot of n00bish things about Wikipedia is a Fact. I was merely being charitable by seeking extenuating circumstances in your edit count. If you wish to plead less innocent on that score, then I will seek another explanation.

Jon

Totally agree.

I'm not familiar with your case, other than the tail end of your successful review by ArbCom (which was before I joined the committee). If you e-mail me some links, I will take a look when I have some time.

I'll send you the same material that Kim Bruning just requested. The only E-Mail address I know of for you, Brad, is the one that I can find via Google from the information that Daniel disclosed. Is that the E-Mail I should use? If not, please PM me with an alternate E-Mail not associated with your law firm.

I don't understand your remark about a "successful review by ArbCom."

I asked ArbCom to review whether or not I was afforded due process.

ArbCom declined to examine or opine on the question.

That was a typo. I meant "unsuccessful review."

My Wikipedia e-mail address is listed at [[Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee]].

Bugger Off —

And another one bites the Ignore List.

Jon

Thank you. E-Mail is on the way.

Well, it only took JzG about 28 minutes to create the [[Arch Coal]] article, ab initio, while participating in the AfD. Of course, he was plagiarizing.

Not that other mods and staff agree, but I feel it is inappropriate for WP "officials" to offer intervention or review of grievances directly on this site. It undermines both the ability of this site to develop an effective critique and would seem to me to undermine WP's own processes. I don't believe any part of the documentation of WP's dispute resolution process says "post on WR and ask for help."

No.

It's an opinion, not a fact. And it's not an opinion that is necessarily universally shared. Let's not generally misstate your pronouncements, witticisms and bon mots, amusing as they may be, as being Revealed Truth, hmmm? Sometimes you're right in your evaluations, sometimes you're not.

I agree, which is why I suggested that Moulton take it to e-mail. Thanks.

Let's not forget, too, that there is a subset of editors who specifically game that system by making each and every edit an atomic operation, so they can then point to their "look, this editor has 180,000 edits to wikipedia in a year!", etc, etc.

Edit count is a travesty of a measure. If we really want to look at contributions, there should be a word count of the delta text in a diff. Still possible to game, but a lot more obvious when done so (removing large tracts, re-adding large tracts).

Of course many of those high edit count editors will resist that vehemently, as their edit 'rank' will drop significantly when it's shown that they might edit an article 35 times to correct a dozen spelling and grammar errors.

Newyorkbrad, you seem genuinely upset. I don't think you should be; this is a more systemic criticism than you might have appreciated.

Supposing the dispute hinged on upon something I wasn't competent to evaluate, I would conclude that I'm the wrong person to arrive to this determination, or at least need serious assistance to do so. As an arbitrator, I suppose I wouldn't have that option. Your qualifications are political, not subject-matter expertise, while someone who would be competent in the relevant field would lack the legitimacy of being appointed to the committee.

I don't blame you or anyone in particular for making this decision, given the limited resources at hand, and I appreciate that this must have been a difficult case to deal with. Still, this element of the decision is (or should be) an embarrassment to Wikipedia.

That the ideal course of action - to refer the dispute to experts in this field including at least some who have access to and no trouble reading the relevant material - would be unthinkable in the context of current Wikipedia practices only shows how far Wikipedia is from where it should be, and the fact remains - I don't imagine that you'd deny this - that it's completely unheard of to criticize another scholar for using foreign language sources. Only a tiny minority of scholarly works are or will ever be translated, and sources are not substitutes for one another; very often a particular object of study is discussed only in one place. Blaming the material for being difficult to you, while personally understandable, is also an inadvertant admission of profound systemic failure.

That said, if someone misrepresents sources, that's a huge problem which needs to be addressed, but to say he might be, and how would you know? Well you wouldn't know, and, quite probably, neither would I. Shouldn't the answer be to find someone who would? Barring that, you're in a no-win situation, which I don't envy.

We don't need to drag this out, but the point I would like to emphasize is that there had already been a prior decision in which we checked the sources and found errors and citations out-of-context, and then after the decision urging the user to be more careful, another instance of the same. At that point, we had to take further action. And, as I noted, we gave the user the option of "finding someone who would" be able to verify the sourcing, which effectively gets to the same place you are suggesting.

I hear the cries that this is Not Of Any General Interest, so I will desist here.

I suppose it's as close as you can get, given that you're hobbled from the get-go by a lack of subject-competent reviewers to whom you can turn, you're reduced to asking PHG to produce them. It well may be that this was your best option within the context of this inadequate system. Thank you for taking the time to respond to this, Newyorkbrad.

I also found this post by Peter Damian…
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...indpost&p=96819

…and this post by dogbiscuit
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...indpost&p=96825
…to be particularly insightful, highlighting aspects of this topic that I hadn't considered.

Hard to argue with any of this. That being the case, remember that all the edit counters available come with this same caveat, and there is more than one droll essay warning about "edit-count-itis", a dred disease.

The recent decision seems reasonable, but I think it was a mistake to ban PHG from the historical articles. It would have been better to create a mentorship arrangement in the first place (although calling it something else so that it wouldn't seem so demeaning to PHG), have a few other editors with similar access to sources and language proficiency who could review his work and help him ensure that his high level of enthusiasm and knowledge would be used to produce definitively accurate content.

Perhaps I'm missing something. I looked at the proposed decision and didn't see where it required PHG to only use English sources.

It was added on later in a motion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req...Mongol_alliance

I discovered that the way to foster collaboration in that is to write swear words. Maybe that might work for wikipedia?

I looked in ‘God’s War’ this morning – I will have another look again this evening. It says that the alliance proposed by Innocent IV is probably a myth. So it seems like a case of one of those ‘fringe’ historical theories which may be true or not. I will do some further research this evening.

Another point that occurred to me while reading this stuff about ‘experts’. I am not an expert in 13th century history. I have an academic training to higher degree level, which helps with understanding the distinction between primary secondary tertiary sources &c, but that is not difficult to pick up, and is reasonably well explained WP:OR. And most ‘experts’ are expert in a narrow field, thus not expert in other areas.

The way I picked up on this one was just to go to a good bookshop such as Waterstone’s, look for a good book on the subject (you can tell good books by the absence of garish covers, and by their bibliography), and see what the book says.

You would be surprised at the number of Wikipedians who find the idea of a printed book astonishing, or old-fashioned or strange. True, there is a lot of material available on the Internet. But most good resources are copyrighted, and are therefore not available, and therefore have to be obtained using the old-fashioned medium of print.

I don't think that NewYorkBrad is picking up the irony that in order to produce an encyclopedia of any quality, one must do the things that real encyclopedias do - check sources, ask informed experts.

So Wikipedia is forced out of its Google shell and its slapdash approach to history and forced to do some real research and come to a real, informed conclusion. THAT must have been a shock to the system.

Having chased off the experts, having denuded Wikipedia of informed commentary, what you've got left are axe-grinders and vandals - some of whom are admins, put there by the popular acclaim of ignoramuses.

Now NewYorkBrad knows the difference between Wikipedia and an encyclopedic reference. All he has to do (for no money down) is do the same to the other 2 million articles and he's got himself an encyclopedia.

Simple.

Reasonably well explained, perhaps, but the intent of that section was not to use it to guide editorial judgment, but to define a rule based system that allowed the exclusion of quality sources and allowed journalism to be preferable.

SlimVirgin massaged policy at one time so that primary sources were banned (that is now modified), and mainstream newspapers are a high quality reliable source (ho, hum), and the dubious use of perspective to modify some secondary sources into primary sources (so a public inquiry report would be a primary source when discussing the outcome of the inquiry, and therefore could not be used to rebut inappropriate press comments and misquotes - think Verifiability not Truth when verifiability excludes primary sources) the combination of which meant that she could cherry pick quotes from newspaper articles under policy and people could not therefore use editorial judgement to refute her writing.

But I understand your point. I'd guess that some people would think that the heretical approach of going to a library to check facts smacks of research and we know research is banned in the quest for knowledge. The fact that you can find no evidence that supports an assertion means that you are going to synthesise a position of rejecting that assertion and fall foul of policy. You have performed the criminal activity of using editorial judgement.