Mailing List Archive

Christoph Seydl wrote:

> Actually, the proposal is a little bit longer. Maybe, some non-German
> speakers are interested in the whole proposal:

I guess many who read these summaries in English will get the
impression that fascism is a part of German lifestyle that didn't
end in 1945, that every German wants to be as nasty as possible to
their neighbors, with or without a Fuhrer. Those who put forward
such proposals should perhaps bear that in mind. That this
proposal came from a German-speaking Swiss doesn't change the
impression of a Prussian attitude. The knee-jerk reaction to
propose new and harder rules is one that must actively be fought
against, and this didn't happen in this case. Identifying fake
(or harmful or pointless) rule proposals is just as important as
identifying fake articles.

Now, the German voting page actually begins with a problem
description. It describes a real problem and tries to find a
solution for it. However, the problem is never quantified and the
overly broad proposed solution is jumped to without considering
its possible harmful effects. Even I cannot completely escape the
suspicion that somebody is out to create (and enforce) rules,
rather than writing a useful encyclopedia.

The problem description goes like this (my translation):

: Wikipedia contains ever more narrowly specialized articles,
: whose correctness without source citations can be verified only
: with much difficulty. Over and over again, this leads to false
: informations and completely made-up articles remaining in the
: encyclopedia for months or years. As an illustration of the
: latter we have User:Gestumblindi/Fakemuseum . Falsified
: articles can, as seen from this, be dressed in full seriousness.
: And still such total falsifications without external citations
: are often speedily deleted, as soon as somebody sees them (which
: can take some time, if the nonsense is prepared in a
: Wikipedia-conformant manner). It is all the more difficult to
: detect partial fakes, that is when untruthful information is
: embedded in existing subjects. The usefulness of Wikipedia as a
: citable and reliable source suffers because of the often missing
: source citations. "Then everybody can just write what fits him"
: is an often heard prejudice. Articles that are created with
: source citations can help to counter this rumour of
: unseriousity.


The next section of the German page provides statistics about how
many new articles cite sources, but the page doesn't quantify the
*problem*. How many new articles were created and how many were
really of the fake kind? How "often" is this accusation heard,
from whom, and what kinds of articles are part of the problem?
Did the accusations come from commercial publishers, teachers and
librarians with a self-interest in the old authoritarian
encyclopedias, and is there any evidence that these accusations
would stop if Wikipedia adjusts its policies? The introduction of
the problem description mentions narrowly specializied topics, so
why not find a solution that is limited to that kind of articles?
If somebody wants to write a fake article, isn't it just as easy
to invent fake sources? Enforcing the proposed policy would
require citations to be in the article, but who is going to the
library to check that these sources exist and are in agreement
with what the article says?

I find no trace of empirical evidence that such a policy would
help the rumour of Wikipedia as a reliable source. What I do find
is a proposed rule of the fascist kind that makes it a lot harder
to contribute to Wikipedia. So the easy conclusion is that this
proposal is pushed by somebody with fascist tendencies. Now
*there* is a rumour that the German Wikipedia has to deal with.

Did I just accuse user:Gestumblindi of walking around in a brown
shirt with a swastika on his arm? No, of course not. Before
putting forward this proposal, he has been collecting a nice
"museum" of fake articles found in the German Wikipedia. He's
ambitious and takes fact control seriously, which is a general
trend on the German Wikipedia. It's just that the solution he
proposes is to introduce a draconian rule that (1) can't really
solve the problem anyway, because the serious vandals will conform
and invent sources, and (2) threatens to stop all serious
contributions to Wikipedia. And jumping to stricter rules is
indeed a trend on the German Wikipedia. Instead, I think he
should turn his promising "fake museum" into a WikiProject where
more volunteers are encouraged to help in tracing down fake
articles. That's the way to build something rather than
introducing harmful rules.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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