User:Alunsalt

Imagine, because that site is not and will never be Wikipedia. It could possibly be H2G2 or Google's Knol. The function of Wikipedia os not to give access to the sum of human knowledge, but to be Wikipedia. If expanding human knowledge conflicts with Wikipedia then knowledge loses. This is not due to a cabal or conspiracy but because of problems inherent in Wikipedia's set-up. It's just a shame that Wikipedia's social side helps exacerbate these problems. The social dysfunction is just the icing on the cake.

Wikipedia is not, by and large, a collaborative encylopaedia.

[edit] Problems with the software

The primary problem with the software is that it is fundamentally incompatible with presenting the sum of human knowledge. Take for example the entry on Elk. I picked this out of the aether and I couldn't have picked a better example. You may know about Elk. I may know about Elk. We can work together to create an entry on Elk. But that's on the assumption that there's just one NPOV article which could be written about Elk. If there two Neutral Points of View then one must eliminate the other. That's why Elk is a good example, because what I would call an Elk a North American would call a Moose.

Taking the position that Moose is the superior entry, because it is NPOV and Elk is not, is foolish, and Americocentric and not NPOV. Equally insisting it should be list under Elk and that the imposter in the Elk slot be moved to Wapiti is Eurocentric. We could make redirects and place the entry under the neutral Alces alces term, but that's just getting silly. Who is really that bothered whether it's listed under Moose or Elk if the information can be easily found? What the Elk situation does demonstrate that even adhering to NPOV is not always going to help, so rules and a little intelligence are needed if Wikipedia is to work.

Another solution is to accept there's more than one NPOV and realise that if it is aim at representing the sum of human knownledge that there'll be some staggeringly similar entries. You can't have entries with the same name because that's not possible with Mediawiki software. This wouldn't happen anyway because of the social dysfunction of Wikipedia. This too is an inherent problem and can't simply be solved by telling people to be nice, because of problems with the Verifiability policy.

[edit] Problems with Verifiability

Sadly Wikipedia's open nature means you can't know if someone does have a little intelligence or not. Closing editability to verifiable people would be foolish. Wikipedia would only be a tiny fraction of what it is if this had been done. Open editability is a good thing. Unfortunately it's the line the encyclopaedia that anyone can edit which gives me trouble.

It's accurate. I could edit the Quechua Wikipedia, and the fact that the only Quechua word I can recall is Qanchis (seven) is no bar.^[1] Admittedly it wouldn't be an entry in Quechua and it'd be edited out shortly after, but I could 'edit' it. Sensibly I consider by my ignorance a reason not to do this. Not everyone feels hindered by their ignorance, though occasionally you'll meet an editor who thinks your years of study is almost a match for his half-ounce of common-sense and 2 seconds of thought. Letting people like that edit is madness, so some more rules are needed. The idea of 'authority' is counter to the Wikipedia ethos - though that hasn't stopped it being a powerful force. The alternative, the Verifiability policy, sounds like a good idea. It stops people from making stuff up. In reality it's unworkable, but does encourage power-games.

[edit] Why Verifiability isn't about citation

Take a look at the Archaeoastronomy entry. It is, I think, well cited, but I know for a fact it's not verifiable because I know what those citations mean. Where I can I've added ISBNs to enable people to link through to WorldCat and find copies in their local libraries. I also know that many of the books cited are out of print, stocks of some were destroyed in floods, and some I read for the entry can only sensibly be obtained if you live in specific countries. How can you verify what I've written? I'm lucky. I'm at a university with the best collection of archaeoastronomy texts in the UK, but even that's not good enough. Some of the books are ones I bought myself. You can see the citations but you can realistically verify the entry. So when someone adds a ^{[citation needed]} tag to a sentence, I can add the citation for where I got the fact from, but it won't add any verifiability to the article. Making it even more futile is that the person adding the tags will not check the citation. So why ask?

You can see this taken to its logical conclusion in this debate about deleting an entry on a editor of Fornvännen. Fornvännen is a leading journal on archaeology in Sweden. This might sound obscure but it's actually been a hot area in the past. People like Prof Chris Tilley^[2] have written books about Neolithic Sweden despite being UK-based. What the deletion debate shows is a bunch of people with no interest in Scandinavian archaeology discussing how significant Fornvännen is. If you're interested in Britney Spears then I'll grant that it's not at all important. If, however you're based in Europe and have an interest in archaeology I'd argue it is.

The only commentator I'd consider remotely credible is DGG. Unfortunately I can only assume he doesn't spend much time chasing humanities citations because he's using Google Scholar as a measure of importance. That simply doesn't work for arts and humanities. Lest you think DDG is out of his depth I should point out he's a professional librarian and there's a lot more to that than picking a journal off a shelf so it's possible that he's right and I'm wrong. Nonetheless as a technophile archaeological researcher I wouldn't seriously use Google Scholar.

One defence of the verifiability rules is that it means you don't have to be an expert to help with quality control. Sadly that doesn't seem to be how the policy is used. Another example from the Archaeoastronomy article is that when GA status was discussed there were concerns that the section on Declination was uncited. That's worth examining.

Declination is an astronomical concept which is a bit like celestial latitude, where Polaris is around +90° and if the was a south pole star it would be at -90°. It means you can work out what things a building might be facing in the sky. Archaeoastronomy is about how people related to the sky. Declination is a useful tool, but it's not the same as archaeoastronomy. For most people reading the article it's enough to know it exists, they don't need a citation. Some people will take a deeper interest and they will need citations. What they'll find is the section on Declination in the archaeoastronomy entry is wholly inadequate for that because the archaeoastronomy article is about archaeoastronomy not declination. If you want to learn about declination, you'd be better off reading the Declination article, which is why I linked through to the Declination article so that people could find out more. The citation is a distraction for people who don't want to know. The only serious effect is that it's a waste of my time looking for a book with a simple explanation for declination because the people who will want to look it up will have the sense to read the declination article and look up the references from there.

I don't think that people are intentionally being timewasters when they add ^{[citation needed]} tags. I think that they're doing their best to apply Wikipedia policies because they think Wikipedia policies are about creating a better encyclopaedia, rather than making Wikipedia socially viable. I can see that citations would be essential where there is a dispute but if you're a Wikipedian who hasn't read an encyclopaedia I suggest you go down the library and have a quick browse. There'll be further reading listed in the entries, but nothing like this level of citation. Adding ^{[citation needed]} tags doesn't add to the quality of an entry, it just shows you know Wikipedia policies.

Part of me thinks that the citations are a good thing. It's something that Wikipedia does better than its competitors, so maybe they aren't a waste of time. On the other hand I think that the lack of true verifiability and the citation lists give Wikipedia a spurious air of authority. Most editors will cheerfully admit Wikipedia isn't the last word on a subject or a vault of the Truth. Yet Wikipedia does have unwarranted influence on the web. This gives the entries an economic value not justified by their content, and I can show that with another ludicrous example.

[edit] Wikipedia entries are economically valuable and this leads to social dysfunction

A couple of days ago I wanted to look up a paper: The response of benthic foraminifera to the K–Pg boundary biotic crisis at Elles (northwestern Tunisia). I put that into Google and the top result was a Wikipedia entry I'd written about Eles, Tunisia, which only mentions the paper very briefly. The page actually linking to the paper I was looking for came second. I cannot believe that Eles is so popular that a newly written entry is that important. Instead it's the sheer prestige of all the links to Wikipedia.

It's not news to SEOs that Wikipedia is so important. It makes the Wikipedia entry on any topic economically important, with that comes power and with that comes people who want power. If I create a page on Imaginary Ducks I will be creating a major entry for the web. Anyone searching for imaginary ducks will see my work on the first page of results. The ability to add pages to Wikipedia is therefore power. But it's also work. You need to create something and plenty of people are too busy being powerful to waste time with the creative side. Of course the flip-side is that if people can delete pages then they too have power. It's a lot easier and only requires some familiarity with Wikipedia policies rather than any expertise in the subject you're judging. This undermines the core of Wikipedia.

If I write a page and have to justify that page's existence - and everything on it - to you we are not collaborating.

If you help create something with me, we are collaborating, but merely sitting in judgement is not collaboration. It's control.

That's not always a bad thing, someone with a detached view can help by saying where and article can be improved. Sadly that rarely happens beyond vague statements. I've not seen a reviewer who will drop in ^{[citation needed]} tags where he thinks they're justified rather than simply say more citations are needed. It creates a social structure with creators at the bottom of the pile. That's not inherently a problem either because we can pick up and drop roles so one day we create and another we police. But when we reinforce that division by not editing when we police then something is wrong.

It goes even further wrong when we create spurious grounds for policing.

[edit] Notability is not about improving Wikipedia - it's about reinforcing social status

I could make an entry about Spider Bridge. It's a roundabout and a local landmark. There's no point though. Sooner or later I'll make an edit that someone doesn't like and they'll decide to get revenge by deleting the Spider Bridge entry as it's not notable. Now I could fight that, but time I waste talking about Spider Island to some whinger could be spent creating the entry on Blue Peter Island (another roundabout further up the road). The example is deliberately trivial because I want an answer to the question:

In what way would Wikipedia be damaged by an article about a roundabout?

...and conversely how would deleting such an article make Wikipedia a better place? I can see that it's trivial. It's certainly less notable than say, the early life of Monet. On the other hand I know nothing about Monet and quite a bit about Spider Island. Wikipedia could provide information about things that other encyclopaedias won't - so why doesn't it? Is the space which would be used for Spider Island needed for another entry?

I can give two reasons why such entries damage Wikipedia.

The first is that liberalisation of entries could damage the prestige of other entries. Take Stonehenge. People writing a website might link the the Stonehenge entry. If there are dozens of similar pages like History of Stonehenge, Ways to get to Stonehenge, The Summer Solstice at Stonehenge and so on people might link to these entries instead. My response is so what? People would be linking to more relevant entries. And if they don't link to them there's no harm done. I know some people would argue that such entries could be trimmed and put in the main article, but that's hardly increasing access to the sum of human knowledge is it? If the entries are initially small, who cares? So long as they're complete by the deadline that's what matters.

The second and more serious reason is that it limits opportunity for social displays of power.

There's a few ways to show you're someone to be respected. One would be to write entries. This is difficult as it probably requires some expertise in what you're writing about. Another is sit in judgement of entries and how they comply with Wikipedia rules. All you have to do is know the policies and guidelines and you can pontificate on any Wikipedia entry. If we take away notability and rigid verifiability then a lot of posing opportunities are lost.

Another reason against liberalisation is that if any article can be created then there won't be time and resources to police them all. Again who cares? Look around: you cannot police the whole Wikipedia anyway. So long as the articles have reasonable relationship with reality, does the fact of their existence require policing? It could lead to spam problems, but again that already exists. If an entry is a problem it can be fixed, and if an entry is so obscure it cannot be noticed can it really be a problem?

I can appreciate why people behave the way they do, but I'm not sure Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, and its own policies preclude it from being an encyclopaedia of everything. Its success is in part despite its policies, not because of it. It will only last while people are willing to work round them. That time will be over soon.

[edit] Knol will do to Wikipedia what Google did to Altavista

From the limited information available it looks like the combination of Knol and Wikipedia's policies will be a Wikipedia-killer.

First off Knol will attract experts because of its emphasis on authorship. Additional features like collaborative authoring will attract people who can work together. You can also bet that Google will be marketing Knol as a tool to experts. Even without migration from Wikipedia that will be a blow. The material will be protected from plagiarism. If there's one company that can find copies on the web, it's Google.

Additionally, Knol will have entries on anything, which means it will cover material excluded from Wikipedia. Knol will start grabbing number slots from Wikipedia, which will make Wikipedia an even less attractive site for experts. But Wikipedia will have many legacy links from un-updated websites for decades, so it will slowly fade rather than disappear. It'll be common to see Knol as result one for a search as it is for Wikipedia today, and Wikipedia will own the number two slot. It'll also gain a reputation, because who will be left?

The people who don't create content will stick around Wikipedia where they can police each other. So will cranks, who'll have free rein on many articles when subject experts leave for Knol. Wikipedia will be known for giving an alternative opinion, in the same way that saying Elvis is alive in Des Moines is an alternative opinion.

The biggest question is how long will it take for Knol to overtake Wikipedia. My guess is that for 12 months after Knol's launch, Wikipedia will still be number one, and the users remaining here will congratulate each other for seeing off the threat. The occasional search results where Knol beats Wikipedia will be seen as an aberration. Between 12 and 18 months people will notice that Knol beats Wikipedia for most major subjects, there'll be attempts by Wikipedians to organise other Wikipedians in writing entries, but as the months go on it'll be noticed that the creative people have disappeared somewhere. 24 months after Knol's launch you'll be able to tell if an entry really is notable is by whether or not Knol or Wikipedia is the number one search result.

[edit] My own involvement with Wikipedia

As may be obvious I've decided Wikipedia will die shortly, and I'm not interested in clearing up the mess. When subject experts introduce themselves on their user pages saying how they tackle arguments by winning over their opponents audience, I don't applaud their sagacity. I feel pity that the system they're working in has dragged them down to that level. I can sympathise with feeling that you don't want lunatics to win, but if you find yourself regularly arguing with them then maybe it's time to get out.

It's a shame because I genuinely believe most Wikipedians do want to create. It's wonderful when someone collaborates with you on a project and makes it better. If you're a Wikipedian who hasn't done this I urge you to try it. Sadly there smaller group of poseurs, axe-grinders and nutters have a disproportionate influence on Wikipedia. I came out of a long edit war with someone who wanted to push his own POV last month. It would be nice to say that I'd be returning to normal Wikipedia, but the disproportionate influence of bad editors means that edit warring seems to be normality for Wikipedia.

I won't contribute to that. I still like the idea of Wikipedia, but frankly there are better options coming. Even if Knol is a dog, the BBC may revamp H2G2. I don't want to waste effort on a site that will be a joke in two year's time. What I will do, if I have time, is haunt the GA nominations board and applaud the people who are doing something positive, and use my own creativity in a more productive manner. And when in the future my students laugh at the entries on Wikipedia the way people laugh about Conservapedia today, I'll sadly say that it wasn't always that way and tell them that at one time it seemed a really good idea.