Talk:Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Iteration 1/Diversity/13
This draft gearing toward English Wikipedia?
Has the draft considered the effects on all Wikimedia projects, like Wikipedia? Looks like the current draft is about mostly English Wikipedia, isn't it? If that's not it, how does this draft address issues at non-English projects, like Croatian Wikipedia and Azerbaijan Wikipedia, which were plagued with content and community issues addressed at Meta-wiki? Also, the draft is written in English (can't tell, though, whether it was well skilled or needs improvements) and not yet translated into other languages. George Ho (talk) 22:17, 16 August 2019 (UTC)
- I agree this needs to be articulated clearly. "Notability" in (English) Wikipedia terms is not even relevant for many if not most of the Wikimedia projects, for instance Wikisource. Nemo 10:18, 17 August 2019 (UTC)
Notability & reliable sources
First, I can't help but suspect that this recommendation is the work of specific individuals who have had problems with their articles concerning notability, & reliable/verifiable sources. If this issue & the recommendations weren't so general & vague, I could dismiss this as a case of baseless suspicion, but regardless to agree with this proposal would enable them to demand their unsatisfactory articles be accepted without review. I don't have any proof it is whom I suspect, & honestly it is not important that I name them, but fairness demands I admit my suspicions before stating my piece.
In some ways, the Notability/Reliable sources rules at en.wikpedia are broken, especially when it is applied to certain topics; I can attest this is the case with African history. It is difficult to obtain materials to research various events in African history, & such materials tend to be primary sources which are discouraged for use in writing articles. (The reason why primary sources tend to be more available than secondary is simple: working with limited funds, libraries will favor collecting primary sources over secondary ones, especially when these secondary sources are esoteric & too technical for the general user. The research libraries that do collect the secondary sources en.wikipedia policy favors are few & restrict access.) In short, the material is out there, & available, but not in a form that many Wikipedians would accept, out of fear this would lead to violation of the No original research rule.
One solution that occurs to me would be to modify the rules to accept the most reliable sources available. In some cases this would use secondary sources; in others it would be the present the unadorned facts of primary sources, properly attributed & the absolute minimum of interpretation. My proposal might not be the best solution, but it is a specific proposal based on well-defined problem one can understand & thus either agree or disagree with. A specific proposal is what is needed to improve diversity; vague suggestions based on vague complaints will not only fail to fix the problem, but weaken our methods to assure we are writing the best possible content. -- Llywrch (talk) 17:07, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
- It sounds to me like what we need to do is not to start using or accepting sources that don't meet the reliability criteria. Rather, since those sources exist but are hard to access, why doesn't WMF use its rather substantial clout to help us get access to them? For that matter, I see no reason WMF couldn't help found high-quality, peer-reviewed, open-access journals specifically for underrepresented subjects. If the problem is that reliable sources are lacking or hard to access in certain areas, why don't we fix that rather than using poor ones? Seraphimblade (talk) 18:27, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
- If we're talking about Africa, for instance, their success in establishing international journals which are fully open access is higher than in Europe or USA by several measures. It's extremely unlikely that any toll-access journal may be needed as a source. I agree it's possible that some help is needed to surface the sources available out there. Perhaps translation is a barrier and a cost which money can help with. Nemo 06:08, 22 August 2019 (UTC)
- The current Wikijournals proposal would be an excellent step forward in this direction. Also I think an encyclopaedia is a very specific thing, that depends on certain other specific things, namely published scholarship and accessible secondary sources. There are certainly many other valuable things to do to make the sum of all human knowledge accessible, but I think we have to recognise that all of these things are not necessarily encyclopaedic. The bits that can be an encyclopaedia should be one, and the bits that don’t fit the encyclopaedia model should adopt other models and get going. Everything can be part of a family of open knowledge projects but it is a mistake to think that everything can be part of an encyclopaedia. Diversity in sources and in methods of gathering and sharing is great. An encyclopaedia on its own cannot be diverse in this way because it must be what it is, or be nothing. Mccapra (talk) 21:51, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
Much of this can be accomplished without changing either reliable source or notability standards
I am assuming this is primarily written to cover larger Wikipedias, since these two concepts are primarily related to Wikipedias rather than any of the other existing projects. I do agree that there is limited knowledge of what would constitute a reliable source in some regions or contexts; for example, few Wikipedians will have enough context to know whether a Ghanaian news publication is locally equivalent to the Washington Post or to the National Enquirer. The same is true when determining notability, often because there aren't a lot of sources that help give context to whether (as an example) a musician is popular throughout a country or has never performed outside of their region. This seems to be more an issue of better educating both the existing editing community (particularly with regard to sourcing) and new editors (particularly in what to include in articles to demonstrate notability). Notability and reliable source standards vary from project to project and are applied by those local editing communities; there aren't global standards for these concepts, and I don't think you've made the case for them. Risker (talk) 03:31, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
- @Risker, if the recommendation were, "We need to have community conversations regarding the on-going standards and goals for our encyclopedia projects including improving quality assurance measures to meet those standards and goals." I would agree. But here the working group is making an absolute recommendation that notability and sourcing standards are wrong and must change. The Working Group has not engaged here with further dialog on this recommendation, which is very troubling. I agree with your observation that "I don't think you've made a case for [global standards]". Hlevy2 (talk) 13:50, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
- I agree with Risker, and I think that point is made in several places in this recommendation, e.g., "Too much bias in implementing the notability criteria. Ie. topics that pass these criteria through non-western reliable sources still get flagged a lot of times". The main problem isn't necessarily "the criteria" so much as (some) people (sometimes) implementing the criteria unfairly. I have seen, for example, editors at the English Wikipedia insisting that all articles about schools for teenagers are automatically notable, and then voting to delete an article about exactly that kind of school in Asia.
- Purely encyclopedic activities, such as like writing good articles about periodicals, could be really helpful in this regard. Imagine a world in which editors don't have to guess whether a news website in an unfamiliar language is reputable based on its aesthetic model, because the sum of all human knowledge about newspapers, magazines, and academic journals was already in Wikipedia. We have some (including articles in the English Wikipedia about the biggest privately owned daily and the biggest government-owned newspaper in Ghana), but we need more. Maybe we could somehow support a Wikimedian in residence or a partnership with a group such as the w:en:International Coalition on Newspapers to improve those articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:40, 3 September 2019 (UTC)
- Your issue of schools is a demonstration of textbook America-centric bias and how adorning the robes of an overzealous benefactor can be counterproductive.
- In India, the number of local newspapers is vastly less than in USA/UK. We don't have a newspaper for every district (constituent units of a state)/major town; vernacular publications cover an entire state, almost always and that too, are few enough in number. The consequences are probably rationally expected and everybody from the Indian Wikiproject indeed knows that it's outright insane to expect coverage of every random higher-secondary school and above in our reliable newspapers. For an anecdotal experience, I have not seen any of the 5 higher secondary schools in our area to be covered in any newspaper in a substantial fashion -- one made it to a city-page news after a student committed suicide whilst another was name-dropped in a list courtesy its students performing well in an exam.
- Now, an AfD about an Indian school will attract more heads from India than some other nation, generally. That's because AfDs are sorted in country-specific lists which are often keenly watched by country-project-regulars. Same for a school in USA, which draws it's own country/state-project-regulars in more numbers. There also exists a common ___domain of users who patrol education-AfDs-list and make a common appearance in both.
- So, in a general afore-described AfD, most of the folks from Indian Wikiproject says that the article ought be deleted because there's no source and there's no rational expectation of finding any source whilst some overzealous western guys !votes to keep them, because we are perpetuating systemic bias otherwise. Some of the latter allege that there must exist some source (which the delete !voters can't find for the time being), because the same type of schools in USA do have them! The last time I checked Indian-school-AfDs scenario, a few those AfDs were successful because the sheer volume of INB editors usually out-voiced or convinced the SYSBIAS folks.
- In totality, we have, in the name of fighting systemic bias, an effective imposition of an America-centric version of notability which compels us to often keep articles of schools, about which precious nothing is known save that they exist and are accredited.
- P.S.:- You can replace India with any country from S. Asia., as to the broader view-port of newspaper availability and their coverage.Winged Blades of Godric (talk) 15:48, 7 September 2019 (UTC)