Wikipedia Pain
tbray.org
tbray.org
Yes exactly, "it gets cited" is not "expertise". And "it has not been cited much" is not a lack of expertise. That is what people are complaining about. And no, vague hand-waving about "Reliable Sources" doesn't help.
You can't just redefine "expert" to an very specific non-standard meaning and then use that for your argument. This is playing word-games and doesn't engage with the substance of the criticism.
And look, I'm not even saying Wikipedia is wrong to have the policies that it has. But any policy on this matter will have real limitations and trade-offs, and the current one is no exception. Being dismissive of that and playing word-games around it is not going to change that.
The article then continues to defend Wikipedia against some of the allegations entirely without any knowledge of the conflicts or facts involved. It's just speculating in thin air.
This recent xAI chat on SpaceX is way better and more revealing than anything I've read on Wikipedia: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1dgyujd/comment/l8...
The fact that AI is allowed to connect the dots (banned as WP:OR in wiki) can be an advantage over Wikipedia...
Some autistic german guy (self described in his profile) rolled back an edit I'd made related to a local band known for its satirically serious take on things, quoting 'lack of citation'.
I had zero clue as to how some guy in Germany knew, let alone understood the band given their lack of context. It was then I noticed that wikipedia had gamified moderation because part of his profile showed off his 'moderation badges' or whatever they were.
Despite all that I still use it often enough that I overall like it, it just has its flaws like most things do.
I also found it funny that my attempt to be funny/clever on the internet was thwarted by someone who clearly had no idea what they were doing (other than gaming the system as part of their own self-identity), which kind of fits with the bands whole schtick.
First off, Wikipedia is pseudonymous. You can't cite yourself because anyone could easily claim to be a domain expert and lie.[1] Rather than verify credentials, it's generally expected that content be cited to a reliable source other than the user.
And it's also not just about being a domain expert, because experts frequently disagree. The ideal source isn't "domain expert says x",[2] it's "academic article says major views in domain include x,y,z".[3] The goal of this isn't to entrench a cabal, it's to ensure that Wikipedia doesn't spotlight fringe perspectives only seen by a few experts in a field. So, re; "Wikipedia specifically rejects domain experts until someone who knows nothing cites them elsewhere", that's a feature and not a bug.
Anyways, to add some more context, Wikipedia has a big problem with people citing their own content to boost SEO.[4][5] Even academics publishing peer-reviewed content do this because Wikipedia cites are now a tracked metric. I can't verify whether that's what happened in the original blogpost. But the average editor seeing someone that isn't very active come on and repeatedly cite a single book is going to get alarm bells in their head.
About citing a company on itself, I wrote a lengthy comment on that below.[6]
Probably the single piece of advice I'd give to someone wanting to edit Wikipedia is to understand that someone reverting your edit is supposed to start a discussion, not end one. This is called the "bold, revert, discuss cycle".[7] You're entitled to ask for reasons why your edit is reverted, and if you can't reach an agreement, you can get input from other people in the community. The main place for discussing whether a source is reliable is the reliable sources noticeboard,[8] but you can also get help editing at the Teahouse.[9]
Also, if you're a grieving widow trying to get your husband's article updated, I would recommend contacting the volunteer response team at info-en-o@wikimedia.org. This is a private email (instead of the publicly visible Teahouse), one of the purposes of which is to help people who are the subjects of articles to get errors about themselves fixed.[10] You can also use photosubmission@wikimedia.org to submit photos of yourself for articles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?fulltext=Search...
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40698952#40701045
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Volunteer_Response_T...
the problem is that anything the media reporting on it has a reason to be biased about, will be extremely biased on wikipedia as well.
By basing articles on secondary sources, we can outsource aggregation and replace the bias of Wikipedia editors with the bias of the media.
The question I'd like to ask is if you see a better tradeoff, because we can't.
> maybe Wikipedia should change its tag-line from “anyone can edit” to “anyone who’s willing to provide citations can edit.”
If Wikipedia cites a newspaper article which brought to light that the company has been poisoning the local water supply, should that section be removed just because the company's founder says differently?
Personally, I want a resource that values primary sources, not one that censors them. The world isn't short on hard drive space (and deletionism didn't make sense back when it was, either.)
I would prefer that an article about XYZ Co. is edited by the former CEO of XYZ Co., rather than by someone who knows nothing about XYZ Co., but whose opinion regarding "reliable sources" is informed by their biases regarding the "social structure of capitalism."
Even a former CEO would keep secrets. The next corporation's board is not going to hire a CEO that will knowingly be frank on Wikipedia about a former company.
We simply don't know. There's a lot we don't know because somebody like this didn't approve of where the information came from. Somewhere a homeowner's association is missing a lawn committee chair.
Obviously people involved in a topic have a conflict of interest and their edits should be viewed with the appropriate amount of trepidation (if they should even be editing at all). This, however, has nothing to do with capitalism. It's a very odd swipe to include.
And it really does depend on the specifics of what they wanted to change. People with a conflict of interest try to make poor edits all the time, but there's also tons of uncited or poorly cited stuff on Wikipedia that can be hard to change if one particularly difficult editor stands in the way for whatever reason (possibly due to their own opposing conflict of interest).
A whole-sale dismissal of their complaint without any information about the specifics at all is just flat-out wrong. This is exactly the sort of behaviour are complain about.
Virtually every company has a direct financial incentive to prevent negative information about them from spreading widely and to add positive information of dubious relevance.
The way Wikipedia deals with this is the policy commonly abbreviated as WP:ABOUTSELF [1], which allows to cite companies for information about themselves in the following situations.
> Self-published and questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, usually in articles about themselves or their activities, without the self-published source requirement that they are established experts in the field, so long as:
>> The material is neither unduly self-serving nor an exceptional claim; >> It does not involve claims about third parties; >> It does not involve claims about events not directly related to the source; >> There is no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity; and >> The article is not based primarily on such sources.
If you want to "begin to argue with someone who holds an opinion like this", the first step is probably to clarify what the policy really is. Personally, I think this is a fair compromise between a maximalist approach (anything influenced by capitalism = bad) and the idea that companies are 100% authoritative on their own history.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...
In the case of minerals and energy listing specifically there are steep penalties for releasing information known to be false and for not correcting information by a following release at the earliest oppotunity.
Annual reports, quarterlies, board positions, major share holdings, assets, new grounds, technical report summaries, reserve|resource estimates etc are all "self published" but can be assumed to be accurate and backed by third party accountants, third party assessors, etc if pressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
to Standard&Poor used multiple sources: state government land titles from around the world, public information released to stock exchanges, and others.
The billions of dollars in market cap is what tends to make reputable stock market release information in minerals and energy especially reliable - where there's suspicion of fraud money flows to investigation, then litigation, etc.
Very little that cannot be backed by third party independant experts is posted, very few actual errors are posted, of those errors the majority are corrected in a timely manner.
Factually (in those capital intensive domains, by my experience) the information is easily more reliable than that published in general run of the mill newspapers.
Consolidating all that raw information into GIS database's that link layered companies, board members, physical plots of land etc. makes for a service that investors and industry members were and still are willing to pay well for.
Putting spin on facts and attempts at misdirection of course happens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_One_controversy is an interesting example of where political and media spin in the US news cycle got entirely out of hand and at no point ever particularly addressed the essentially dull reasons for a POTUS to speak and endorse the transfer of Kazakhstan shares.
All of that dust in the air was far removed from facts about companies, shares, resources, etc released by the exchanges.
Wikipedia deals with a firehose of this nonsense. I can assure you that prima facie rejecting edits from company sources with a glaring conflict of interest is the obviously correct move, both with a moment's thought and in practice.
If you bounce this hard off the mere words "social structure of capitalism", then you come across as trying way too hard not to understand fairly straightforward and obvious things.