This is spot on. At times I wonder if some Wikipedians have ever heard of epistemology. I also have taken note that there is a tendency among some editors to truncate probability calculations to the nearest whole number.
Ray On 07/29/11 2:50 AM, David Gerard wrote: > The great thing about an oral history citations project is that it is > a first and active method to remedy one of the big problems with > English Wikipedia: the epistemology - how we decide we know what we > know - really is completely and utterly broken at the edges. > > (I realise this is foundation-l, but en:wp is a third of Wikimedia by > most measures, and this discussion shows its ways of doing things > getting into everywhere else.) > > The trouble is that all through history, turning information into > knowledge has required human judgement and nuance. People do four-year > humanities degrees to *start* getting *any good at all* at this stuff. > But Wikipedia being Wikipedia, the whole thing has to be (a) reduced > to a three paragraph guideline (b) which calcifies into policy (c) > misinterpreted by socially-inept teenagers (d) with the > misinterpretations being perpetuated well past the point of actual > failure. > > Thus we end up with blithering insanity like the phrase "reliable > sources" being used unironically, as if being listed on WP:RS > *actually makes a source humanly reliable*. This is particularly > hilarious when applied to newspapers - no-one who has *ever* been > quoted by the media would think this way. > > (For those of you aware of the hip Bayesian way to calculate > uncertainty, this is what happens when your network has allowed > probabilities of 1 or 0.) > > Now, the sourcing method we have almost works. Its successes are > important and useful. But there's a lot of denial that it breaks > really badly when misapplied, and that the misapplications are even a > problem. WJohnson's earnestly put forward this viewpoint in this > thread; his argument appears to be that we don't have a perfect > solution so therefore this must not be a problem and doing something > that doesn't work *harder* must be the right answer. > > Somehow we have to get the nuance back. All this stuff is produced by > humans, and working assumptions that it isn't are *broken*. > > The oral citations project appears to be a first step to even > acknowledging that the present methods actually break at the edges. > This alone makes it a good and useful thing. And, y'know, we might > actually learn something. > > > - d. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l