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An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

newyorker.com

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Re: An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

#11

Post by OscarCunningham »

reaperducer wrote: post #10
magpi3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if a blog entry by Roth would have sufficed as a secondary source. It probably would have. They need something to point to after all. It can't just anecdotally be noted that a wikipedia editor received an email from the author. One solution could be to give people forums on Wikipedia to state their perspectives, which would then become source material for articles. Assuming there is some way to verify their…

>It can't just anecdotally be noted that a wikipedia editor received an email from the author. For a work of fiction, it absolutely should. Who knows more about a character in a fictional story than the person who made up the character? Should we purge everything from the record that Douglas Adams ever said about Arthur Dent? If Wikipedia was around in the 1500's, the entry on Shakespeare would be almost entirely bas…

Wikipedia doesn't object to using information from the subject of a page, the issue is to do with needing a permanent source to give as a reference.

I can't just edit someone's Wikipedia page and then claim my edits are correct because they told me in person.

Re: An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

#12

Post by sjburt »

JorgeGT wrote: post #7
OscarCunningham wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain >Roth described in a 2012 piece for The New Yorker how his novel was inspired by an event in the life of his friend Melvin Tumin, a "professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years". Tumin was subject to a "witch hunt" but was ultimately found blameless in a matter involving use of allegedly racial language concerning two African American students…

Which proves that despite the naysayers it's actually easy to fix mistakes in Wikipedia: you just need to become a quintessential American novelist and then have the New Yorker publish your letters to that effect.

Really, you just need to find a published source for your claim. He would have suffered the same challenge trying to have his Brittanica entry changed.

Re: An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

#13

Post by chris_wot »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #4
Swizec wrote: post #2

I’m dying to know, were they able to use this New Yorker article as a secondary source and fix the Wikipedia entry?

It appears so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain >Roth described in a 2012 piece for The New Yorker how his novel was inspired by an event in the life of his friend Melvin Tumin, a "professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years". Tumin was subject to a "witch hunt" but was ultimately found blameless in a matter involving use of allegedly racial language concerning two African American students…

That's kind of hilarious, given that it's not a secondary source but a primary source because it was written by Roth.

It really is absurd.

Re: An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

#14

Post by skookumchuck »

A large fraction of accepted knowledge about history and events is simply false. Just read a newspaper account about an event you have personal knowledge about. Sloppiness, inaccuracy, omission of crucial facts, bias, fabrications, etc., are commonplace.

It's why historians continuously churn out new books on the same topics. How many biographies of Abe Lincoln are there? I get 10,000+ hits on "Lincoln Biography" on Amazon :-)

Re: An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

#15

Post by maboo »

This is why Everipedia has "Verified Accounts" - so that Roth can have his say on the wiki page, and people know it's coming from him...

One of, like, 100 Wikipedia problems that Everipedia solves, simply by mimicking other, more modern websites like instagram/twitter.

Re: An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

#16

Post by smsm42 »

reaperducer wrote: post #9

Things like this are the reason I stopped contributing to Wikipedia. People with no knowledge or expertise are able to change facts at will, maliciously or otherwise. Someone once compared looking things up on Wikipedia to asking a question of ten random strangers at a bus stop. I think it's gotten much worse since then.

People with knowledge or expertise are able to change them too. It's a collaborative effort. It's not perfect. Rehashing this fact of imperfection again and again is mostly useless activity. But considering how much information there is in Wikipedia, and how good it is in general - and excepting publicized outliers and targeted sabotage efforts, it's pretty good - I think you could do much worse than asking these particular strangers.

Of course, I understand that each time you need to find out some piece of information, you conduct your own thorough and independent research. If you need to know about the life of Richard III of England, or when Joseph Tito was born, or how many noun cases there are in Finnish, or what was the Cranbrook Colony - you go to the nearest University library, find and read all the books on the subject that are there, then proceed to update with more up-to-date research papers on the subject and conclude it with personally verifying the facts with leading living authorities on the subject (which stand by being called on by you and supply with the data you need). Other people don't have time for this, so they use Wikipedia for the same, and are OK with a tiny risk of getting one of the facts wrong in tiny number of cases. I don't think it's so terrible.

Re: An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

#17

Post by neilk »

Wikipedia is not the sum of all knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. Many people seem confused about what that means.

Primary source: I say $foo! (blog, YouTube, opinion piece)

Secondary source: neilk said $foo. (The New Yorker)

Tertiary source: Reliable, fact-checked publications, such as The New Yorker, have said that neilk said $foo. (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia is a tertiary source. At best WP represents the range of viewpoints that learned people have. If many published articles in reputable outlets give credence to something false, and there's no good refutation in print, there's not much that Wikipedians can do.

Roth always had an option, one that he seems unaware of. There is an exception for primary sources for exactly this sort of thing.[1]. All he had to do was publish a blog post or a tweet or have his publishers do so for him.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...

Re: An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

#18

Post by scrollaway »

neilk wrote: post #17

Wikipedia is not the sum of all knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. Many people seem confused about what that means. Primary source: I say $foo! (blog, YouTube, opinion piece) Secondary source: neilk said $foo. (The New Yorker) Tertiary source: Reliable, fact-checked publications, such as The New Yorker, have said that neilk said $foo. (Wikipedia) Wikipedia is a tertiary source. At best WP represents the range of viewpo…

Wikipedia probably falls more in the secondary source category.

In fact, I'm quite certain it does. If you think about the numbers between the amount of information and citations on wikipedia, vs. the amount of information that is on "reliable, fact-checked publications", it becomes obvious that there is an immense amount of first-party information and citations.

Re: An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

#19

Post by sjwright »

scrollaway wrote: post #18
neilk wrote: post #17

Wikipedia is not the sum of all knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. Many people seem confused about what that means. Primary source: I say $foo! (blog, YouTube, opinion piece) Secondary source: neilk said $foo. (The New Yorker) Tertiary source: Reliable, fact-checked publications, such as The New Yorker, have said that neilk said $foo. (Wikipedia) Wikipedia is a tertiary source. At best WP represents the range of viewpo…

Wikipedia probably falls more in the secondary source category. In fact, I'm quite certain it does. If you think about the numbers between the amount of information and citations on wikipedia, vs. the amount of information that is on "reliable, fact-checked publications", it becomes obvious that there is an immense amount of first-party information and citations.

The vast majority of citations are secondary sources.

Re: An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

#20

Post by neilk »

scrollaway wrote: post #18
neilk wrote: post #17

Wikipedia is not the sum of all knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. Many people seem confused about what that means. Primary source: I say $foo! (blog, YouTube, opinion piece) Secondary source: neilk said $foo. (The New Yorker) Tertiary source: Reliable, fact-checked publications, such as The New Yorker, have said that neilk said $foo. (Wikipedia) Wikipedia is a tertiary source. At best WP represents the range of viewpo…

Wikipedia probably falls more in the secondary source category. In fact, I'm quite certain it does. If you think about the numbers between the amount of information and citations on wikipedia, vs. the amount of information that is on "reliable, fact-checked publications", it becomes obvious that there is an immense amount of first-party information and citations.

Citation needed.
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