<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />UC Berkeley students help improve [b]Wikipedia's credibility[/b]
UC Berkeley
BERKELEY — While searching for a quick fact one day on Wikipedia, Brian Carver, an assistant professor ...



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Another quote perfect for Wikipedia:



Refreshing what is?

A better place for a professor to direct students -- and to work, himself -- would be Wikiversity. Articles can be developed (or improved) there and then ported to Wikipedia. But a Wikiversity resource is far more than an article page. A subject can be developed in depth there, without the restrictions of working live on Wikipedia. When enough people think that a specific project page on Wikiversity is better than the Wikipedia article, then there is a basis for asserting these changes on Wikipedia.

And then the class also gets to encounter wiki politics, should this improved article offend any attached Wikipedians....

Abd, can you point to a single time when a Wikiversity page was used to develop an article intended to replace an existing Wikipedia article? I've never heard of this happening.

How refreshing it's is. Silly.

Well, I know a resource being developed at Wikiversity with the idea that individual pages might go to Wikipedia.

However, were I teaching a class, and I was interested in teaching the material itself rather than Wikipedia politics, I'd greatly prefer to use Wikiversity, and this is truly welcome there. So far, at least!

And one of the projects could, indeed, be to draft and find local consensus on an article improved over that on Wikipedia, by whatever standard. And then it could be proposed on Wikipedia, and anyone could read both versions and decide which was better. That's RfC-ready, if necessary. Simple question: this or that?

ScienceApologist, while blocked, worked on Optics on Wikisource, at this "workshop" page He then obtained the cooperation of Wikipedia editors (including myself, by the way, though I don't think that what I did was particularly important, I certainly supported it) to get the article imported to Wikipedia, to replace the existing article. There was some grumbling, to be sure, but ... anyone could have reverted back to the old article. ArbComm gave special permission for it.

My own view was that the special permission shouldn't have been necessary at all.... Anyone seeing his workshop version, seeing that it was properly licensed, should have been able to pop it down as a total revision of the existing version, believing it was better. If someone disagreed, they could have reverted, but the process could then have continued on-wiki.

The same could be done with a wikiversity page designed to be a Wikipedia page. There should be no problem with it, in theory. In practice, some editors would scream to high heaven. How can they be sure that no Bad People, perhaps affiliated with Bad Sites, did not work on it? What if it was done by a topic banned editor? Wouldn't that be Meat Puppetry?

(If the editor believes that the externally prepared article is better than the existing one, then the editor believes that the project is improved by making the change. And this, then, is required by IAR, which trumps trivial details about blocked editors and all that personality stuff.

Of course, the reality on Wikipedia is that the personality stuff trumps improving the project. Still, we can keep pointing this out! Maybe it will become true if it's mentioned often enough.

A Modest Proposal

Support links from Wikipedia articles to sister wikis. Not as sources!

There are templates for it. Supposedly these links are encouraged.

I added a link to Wikiversity's Cold fusion resource -- which was there before I started editing it -- from Cold fusion, one of my last edits before being topic banned again.

The pseudoskeptical editors really dislike the idea of people actually learning about Cold fusion by reading sources, discussing it, debating it, and all that. Wikiversity is a place where people can learn, not only by reading carefully polished articles -- which would be the best that Wikipedia could offer -- but also by delving into details, asking questions, even arguing. The pseudoskeptics consistently attempted to suppress discussion of the topic on Talk:Cold fusion, which does have some legitimacy, though they went way beyond the legitimate limitation. But there is really no excuse for disallowing a link to Wikiversity, which is an open WMF wiki, and I do not own the resources, there, I'm merely the most active. Many times I invited the pseudoskeptics to help out there, it was always refused, even refused rudely.

Anyway, Olorinish removed the link. I had naively thought this would not be controversial! (or I wouldn't have made the edit, due to my COI).

So I did start a discussion.

Thenub314 made an informative comment, but then we had the usual misleading BS from Enric Naval and JzG. Enric Naval made the point that "less than 500" articles have links to Wikiversity -- very misleading because most articles don't have material on Wikiversity -- and implied that readers would not find the Wikiversity resource useful. That is a serious error and misunderstanding. References to web sites, in general, where a topic may be discussed with people who know it well is always useful to a major and important subset of readers, those who actually want to learn in depth. But Enric Naval has never actually been interested in cold fusion, just in keeping out the "fringe" stuff, though he has never been as bad as ScienceApologist or JzG. Enric simply can't imagine that anyone would want to know what people who are informed about the field actually think, what is actually being published in mainstream journals, etc. He dismisses every publication in mainstream journals as some kind of fluke, and he actually deceived ArbComm on the balance of publication in the field, using a deceptive statistical technique, though he may not have realized the error. (If there are 1000 "mainstream" publications on cold fusion, and only 400 of them are "positive," to pick a rough figure from memory, then, by saying this, you can imply that the majority of publications are "negative." But, in fact, there are only, say, 300 "negative." Enric missed that the bibliography in question, that of Dieter Britz, classifies 300 papers as "neutral.")

And JzG, of course, put up his usual POV raving.
It's not an "article." It's an educational resource, and if the overall resource isn't neutral, JzG -- or anyone -- could fix it. Wikiversity takes a very different approach to neutrality, neutrality through inclusion. It's far more like a full university approach, and even "fringe" can be studied, in detail. Wikiversity allows subpages in mainspace, and if a top-level resource page is contested, it encourages forking. The neutrality policy there would require, my opinion, that the top level page, listing subpages, be rigorously neutral. But those subpages can express POV and Original Research is allowed.

JzG generally sat on the Cold fusion article by removing material, and especially by removing links to lenr-canr.org. ArbComm reprimanded him for using his tools to blacklist lenr-canr.org, but it never addressed his long-term deletion of the references. ScienceApologist last month did the same, and this debate has come up over and over, and the result, when there was broad consideration, always supported the inclusion. But at the actual article, there are enough of the pseudoskeptical editors sitting on it that almost nothing can be done. ScienceApologist simply raised the arguments that were given, and rejected, in the past. But nobody is watching any more, except for a few editors who either don't know how to deal with the intransigence or don't care enough to bother. The discussion is here.

If you do read that discussion, you might miss that, in fact, lenr-canr.org is no longer blacklisted in the global blacklist. My request for removal at meta was successful, and it was Beetstra who granted it. Beetstra, in the discussion, appears to be arguing against my position, but, at meta, I think he realized that his was a lost cause, and he didn't want the precedent established through an RfC, at least that's my interpretation. The RfC would have, he'd think, hampered the freedom of the blacklist administrators, who like being kings of the mountain. Rules? We don't need no stinkin' rules!

The claims of copyvio had been -- as they were everywhere they were carefully examined -- debunked. "Copyvio" was merely a smokescreen raised originally by JzG as one of the excuses for banning links to the most complete library of sources on cold fusion, on the internet, and it is a neutral library, i.e., it hosts everything where it can get permission, positive, negative, or neutral. It is not, in itself, an "independent publisher," it is only useful for convenience links to what are generally preprints of papers published elsewhere, as allowed by many publishers if the author permits. For a long time, lenr-canr.org was listed in the article as an external link, as it should be.

It is purely a question of convenience, since one can find lenr-canr.org by googling the title and author(s) of the paper. The pseudoskeptical editors demonstrated, in the discussion linked above, that they don't give a fig about the readers. So new?

This is Wikipedia.

As I thought, this isn't really done in practice.

It would be difficult to know, unless it somehow comes to wide attention.

My point is that if one cares about creating a quality article, satisfying the Wikipedia guidelines, and you have a class available, it would be better to do it on Wikiversity, where there will be no flak or a minimum of it (some of the class pages from the resource I pointed to were deleted, but that was undone when noticed, with only a little flap), than on Wikipedia. From that experience, I'd recommend that any professor doing this require that students register an account, if they don't already have one. It is far easier to keep track of (and to protect) the work.

Then, if one has a better article (by whatever standard), this can be asserted on Wikipedia. That part might be anything from easy to impossible, depending on political factors. And that, alone, would be an "educational experience" for the students.

The Wikiversity article would have it all. It would be reviewed by the professor, as well as by actual students of the subject, and, in addition, it could easily have review by experienced Wikipedia editors.

Wikiversity generally deals -- in theory -- with resource controversy by forking. In this case, if controversy erupted, i.e., I'd suggest that groups spontaneously formed work on their own versions. Wikiversity can, by policy, host such forks. And then, in the process to attempting to take this to Wikipedia, alternative versions could be suggested. If a true POV fork appears, I'd think there might be three versions, though, more likely, only two. One consensus or maximized consensus, and one "I ain't gonna give an inch to these idiots" version. As to that version, well, may the best version win!

There is no guarantee that Wikipedia will allow the best version, i.e, the version that actually satisfies the guidelines best in combination with being the best quality writing and explanation of the subject.

But that problem exists if the class works directly on Wikipedia, and it could prevent the writing from being done. Often, when there was a problem with an article, I'd work on it in user space and only move it to mainspace when it seemed adequate, with sourcing, etc., to survive AfD and other nuisances. It's pretty silly to work on an article facing AfD; I did it a few times, finding sources to answer the objections in the AfD, and it was deleted anyway.

It's a brilliant facet of AfD process: if a lot of delete votes pile in, based on, say, sourcing deficiencies, and then the article gets sourced, those early !votes frequently stand. A careful admin will look at the substance, at what were the original objections and what changed, etc. But how many admins are that careful? Some see the pile of Delete votes and simply close with "Consensus is delete." No explanation, no addressing of the basic issues, no confirmation of the arguments, i.e., a complete misunderstanding of what the process was intended to be.

There was reason for Not a Vote. I've proposed, in the past, three or more ways to deal with the problem. One of the simplest is a process where voting ("labeled comment") doesn't start until all the arguments are presented. That is, in fact, standard deliberative process. Voting before the debate is closed is a basic violation of democratic decision-making process, but the early Wikipedians had almost no experience, in general, with that. And there are lots of other tweaks that would make it work better.... but almost no chance of seeing them implemented.

Because deliberative process is not followed, the basis for decisions remains unclear and there is no body of built, considered precedent. It seemed easier to Just Decide. In the long run, it was far worse than taking a little extra care in how decisions are made.

(Thekohser's experience at Wikiversity was warped by serious "cross-wiki issues." Wikipedians sometimes show up at Wikiversity and try to impose Wikipedia standards on Wikiversity. Thekohser's experience -- and it's the same with Moulton -- isn't the norm at Wikiversity, even though there are still some personality problems. The real Wikiversity is more like the one that unblocked Thekohser, and would probably unblock Moulton if he were willing to stop poking admins in the eye.)