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We still seem not to have resolved the problem(s) we had when we discussed this a few weeks ago - we "know" that "the threshold" is supposed (in this case, at least) to mean a necessary rather than a sufficient condition; but (a) how do we expect readers to guess that this is how we mean it? and why force them to make such a guess when we could easily reword the sentence to resolve that ambiguity; and (b) by writing in big bold letters '''not truth''' we imply that truth is not a relevant consideration, thus leading to the absurdities of people wanting to knowingly repeat libel and so on, as in the case described above (and in other less dramatic situations, where the falsehood isn't a libel, but is still not wanted in our encyclopedia). Can we really not improve the wording of this sentence so as to make it clearer what we mean by it and what our motivation really is?--[[User:Kotniski|Kotniski]] ([[User talk:Kotniski|talk]]) 09:37, 18 April 2011 (UTC) |
We still seem not to have resolved the problem(s) we had when we discussed this a few weeks ago - we "know" that "the threshold" is supposed (in this case, at least) to mean a necessary rather than a sufficient condition; but (a) how do we expect readers to guess that this is how we mean it? and why force them to make such a guess when we could easily reword the sentence to resolve that ambiguity; and (b) by writing in big bold letters '''not truth''' we imply that truth is not a relevant consideration, thus leading to the absurdities of people wanting to knowingly repeat libel and so on, as in the case described above (and in other less dramatic situations, where the falsehood isn't a libel, but is still not wanted in our encyclopedia). Can we really not improve the wording of this sentence so as to make it clearer what we mean by it and what our motivation really is?--[[User:Kotniski|Kotniski]] ([[User talk:Kotniski|talk]]) 09:37, 18 April 2011 (UTC) |
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:(ec)A bit of history... When we added the Verifiability not Truth clause, we were trying to combat a persistent problem: POV pushing editors adding unverifiable material based on the argument that it was "true". The current language settled that persistent problem that very well. We determined that such material should not be included, and created a statement that says so clearly and bluntly. We want to keep that clear statement. |
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:What we are discussing now is a different issue... what to do about editors adding untrue (inaccurate) material based on the argument that it is verifiable. This is a much thornier issue. [[User:Blueboar|Blueboar]] ([[User talk:Blueboar|talk]]) 13:40, 18 April 2011 (UTC) |
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:Agree, ok, let's have a poll and get some numbers: [[User:Casliber|Casliber]] ([[User talk:Casliber|talk]] '''·''' [[Special:Contributions/Casliber|contribs]]) 12:52, 18 April 2011 (UTC) |
:Agree, ok, let's have a poll and get some numbers: [[User:Casliber|Casliber]] ([[User talk:Casliber|talk]] '''·''' [[Special:Contributions/Casliber|contribs]]) 12:52, 18 April 2011 (UTC) |
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Revision as of 13:40, 18 April 2011
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Paraphrase in challenged
- See previous Wikipedia_talk:Verifiability/Archive_44#paraphrase
With the edit made by Kotniski and given that the text was introduced into the section by SV and SV said on this talk page "I wasn't keen on its inclusion, but at least it's not in the lead, and it's not being added to a sentence in a way that would make the sentence false. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 19:53, 14 March 2011 (UTC)" and now that we have a mention of copyright in the lead, I am removing the phrase completely as is it an imprecise summation of the legal copyright requirements and the guidance given in guidelines such as WP:PLAGARISM. -- PBS (talk) 14:17, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
- SV I am confused. Above you said that you were not keen on the inclusion of the sentence that you have now reinstated in its own section. If you were not keen on it why have you reinstated it? Also did you read the comments in Archive 44#paraphrase? If for example I copy text from another Wikipedia page the wording that you have placed into this policy that states "do not copy text from copyrighted sources except when directly quoting the material" means that such a copy would need to be placed in quotes. I am sure this is not what is the intent of this sentence. I suggest that the section is removed as this is better covered in the copyright policy and related policies and guidelines. At the very least the section should be removed temporarily until we can agree on a form of words that do not contradict the copyright polices and guidelines. -- PBS (talk) 11:43, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
- Certainly seems that this section has a lot of problems and isn't really serving any purpose by being here. But can I at least ask people not to keep reinserting the ridiculous assertion that when you paraphrase, you have to use intext attribution - given that every statement in Wikipedia is supposed to be a paraphrase of a statement made by a source, this would imply that every sentence requires intext attribution (i.e. not just a cite, but a "John says..." in the text itself), which is clearly absurd.--Kotniski (talk) 12:06, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
- I think there is an element of a bigger problem with WP itself here, and concerning how to make its core aims fit with taking copyright and plagiarism seriously. But putting that aside:-
- WP policy does not demand every sentence to be footnoted. Sentences which state obvious things, or piece together things in an obvious way, are possible. Furthermore you can put a citation on a whole paragraph.
- Paraphrasing is following a text very closely, almost like quoting, except tweaking the words. According to all norms of plagiarism and copyright outside WP, which WP nevertheless tries to take seriously, just tweaking words and taking away the quotes does not mean you've avoided plagiarism and/or copyright infringement.
- (Here is the messy bit.) In practice, much material in WP is neither of the two above categories. For example material might be influenced by someone's reading over a lifetime, and it might be quite difficult to work out the best way of sourcing it because it does not come from one source. (Which does not mean it can not be verified.) WP could not exist without this type of material, but WP policy pages are written as if this were not true. Perhaps the only way to explain it is to say that such material is assumed to be either verifiable or else obvious/common knowledge, until challenged. The way WP traditionally handles this is to say that if someone questions something, then reality suddenly changes, and we need to find a way of sourcing it, even if we find a source completely different from what the original editor read. (That has of course developed into a situation where the easiest way to push a POV is now definitely to question sources selectively and strategically.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:34, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
- This goes off topic a bit; the original problem with your edit is that you're saying that whenever we paraphrase (not just paraphrase closely), we need to use intext attribution (not a footnote cite, but a "John says..." type phrase in the text). So if I have a source (say the NYT) that says "Smith's death occurred in 1981", I'm not allowed to paraphrase it and say "Smith died in 1981" (giving the cite in a footnote), but would have to say "According to the NYT, Smith died in 1981" (implying that we have some doubt about it), which is just not what we do.--Kotniski (talk) 12:46, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
- I think what I and others are thinking is that "parphrasing" is a word mostly used when the paraphrasing is close. Perhaps therefore others might accept the mere tweak of adding the word closely?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:49, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
- Yes, to bring it into line with the previous sentence... that would be OK. (Though I suspect what we really mean is quoting or closely paraphrasing passages of some significant length - with a short sentence like "Smith died in 1981" even copying it word for word is hardly going to constitute a breach of copyright or ethics.)--Kotniski (talk) 12:55, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
- Yes isolated words or small groups of words are not normally covered.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:10, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
- Yes, to bring it into line with the previous sentence... that would be OK. (Though I suspect what we really mean is quoting or closely paraphrasing passages of some significant length - with a short sentence like "Smith died in 1981" even copying it word for word is hardly going to constitute a breach of copyright or ethics.)--Kotniski (talk) 12:55, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
- I think what I and others are thinking is that "parphrasing" is a word mostly used when the paraphrasing is close. Perhaps therefore others might accept the mere tweak of adding the word closely?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:49, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
- I think there is an element of a bigger problem with WP itself here, and concerning how to make its core aims fit with taking copyright and plagiarism seriously. But putting that aside:-
- Certainly seems that this section has a lot of problems and isn't really serving any purpose by being here. But can I at least ask people not to keep reinserting the ridiculous assertion that when you paraphrase, you have to use intext attribution - given that every statement in Wikipedia is supposed to be a paraphrase of a statement made by a source, this would imply that every sentence requires intext attribution (i.e. not just a cite, but a "John says..." in the text itself), which is clearly absurd.--Kotniski (talk) 12:06, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
(And encouraging people to "internalize" the sources, whatever that means - incorporate them into your own belief system? presumably not, it just means understand, but we already say understand - also looks pretty silly.)--Kotniski (talk) 12:14, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
- I think "internalise" might need a footnote. It's shorthand for something quite convoluted to explain, and I'm worried that Kotniski might not be the only editor who fails to grok it.
Basically, "internalise" is what you do when you're genuinely acquiring knowledge. For example: Two different editors are writing articles on an obscure topic. Editor A has a degree in the subject. Her major reference work for learning was Book B. Editor A has learned what Book B says. Later she summarizes its contents for Wikipedia. Meanwhile, Editor R writes an article on a slightly different topic that's also covered by Book B, but Editor R has not actually learned it. He simply goes through Book B trimming it and paraphrasing in order to avoid any obvious copyright infringement.
Editor A is not infringing copyright. But Editor R is infringing copyright, even though he's using exactly the same source as Editor A. The difference is that Editor A has "internalised" the knowledge and then expressed it in her own words, whereas Editor R's edits went from the book to the article without passing through his brain in any meaningful sense.
If you can think of a better word than "internalise" for the process, then that would be great!—S Marshall T/C 01:03, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- It might not have been easy to spot, but I have included a proposal in a post within your active voice sub-section below. I believe, in other words, that the normal English term is to "familiarize oneself".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:42, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- I think "internalise" might need a footnote. It's shorthand for something quite convoluted to explain, and I'm worried that Kotniski might not be the only editor who fails to grok it.
If I understand correctly, there have been various requests to concentrate discussion on the copyright section to here? (If not then please move this post to the right place.) Anyway, in this spirit I place a copy here of my proposal for the wording which I have mentioned elsewhere:
- Current: Be mindful of copyright. Read the sources, understand them, internalize them, then summarize what they say in your own words. When paraphrasing closely or quoting, use in-text attribution.
- Proposed: Be mindful of copyright: do not copy text from copyrighted sources or paraphrase too closely unless you use in-text attribution. Please read the sources, understand them, familiarize yourself with them, and then give a balanced summary of what the sources say, in your own words.
I also believe that the recent situation where copyright was handled as one among several other policies which need to be kept in mind, was the logically most correct one.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:53, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
Can anyone cite a law or legal commentary where this concept of "internalizing" is shown to be relevant to avoiding breach of copyright? I rather suspect not, but I'm willing to be enlightened.--Kotniski (talk) 12:12, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- No, because no one is claiming such a link. I think the reason people like the word is because it helps give a mental image of what they consider a good safe method of editing in a balanced way. Perhaps more importantly, this then helps you imagine bad ways of editing. This is my interpretation of the intention. I do not think people see as part of any legal concept. I am not sure I agree that a policy page needs to try to define such a method, but it is there now, and I don't see an enormous problem with that. (OTOH, the draft proposal you are responding to does not include the word. Can you comment on it?)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:44, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- Seems to be going in the right direction, though "familiarize yourself with them" (while better than "internalize" in that people might actually understand it) still seems redundant. And I don't believe that using intext attribution is an automatic get-out clause (just like using "allegedly" won't get you off libel) - I'm sure it all depends on the quantity of text involved, and someone who actually knows the law ought to be informing this discussion.--Kotniski (talk) 12:54, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- You're right; attribution does not substitute for permission, whether you're using direct quotes or closely paraphrasing. Per US Gov circular on Fair Use: "Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission." All of the fair use factors are considered in determining if infringement has occurred, and amount & substantiality of the content is one of those. That said, attribution is an important factor in plagiarism. In terms of copyright, where people encourage quotations or close paraphrase, I think it always wise to note that we are limited to brief excerpts. Maybe "When paraphrasing closely or quoting, which must be kept brief, use in-text attribution"? --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:08, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- Thanks (you're just the sort of person I had in mind ;) ). It seems to be that copyright and plagiarism are often confused (WP:Plagiarism seems to confirm that they're not the same thing), and that we're actually confusing them here, the way we've been wording the sentences in this policy. Perhaps we should make it clear that there are two issues we need to be mindful of, and briefly summarize how to avoid both one and the other?--Kotniski (talk) 13:54, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- OK, but these remarks seem to be suggesting we add more to the policy as it currently exists while I was only aiming to work in practical steps, i.e. to make the current text say what it intends, but more clearly. Perhaps after such steps are taken more substantive questions can also be discussed more clearly? In any case, it seems to me that questions of detail about how to cite must be handled with wikilinks, for the simple reason that you can not put everything in one sentence. I think that is often the source of problems in this writing process. Anyway though, here is an attempt to tweak in order to cover these concerns:
Some may prefer the proposal above, because arguably this is starting to try to explain something from another policy. Comments please.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:01, 26 March 2011 (UTC)*Proposed (2): Be mindful of copyright and plagiarism. For example, use in-text attribution when quoting copyrighted sources or closely paraphrasing them. And do not paraphrase too closely or reproduce direct quotes which are too extensive. Please read the sources, familiarize yourself with them, and then give a balanced summary of what the sources say, in your own words, saying where you got it.
- You're right; attribution does not substitute for permission, whether you're using direct quotes or closely paraphrasing. Per US Gov circular on Fair Use: "Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission." All of the fair use factors are considered in determining if infringement has occurred, and amount & substantiality of the content is one of those. That said, attribution is an important factor in plagiarism. In terms of copyright, where people encourage quotations or close paraphrase, I think it always wise to note that we are limited to brief excerpts. Maybe "When paraphrasing closely or quoting, which must be kept brief, use in-text attribution"? --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:08, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- Seems to be going in the right direction, though "familiarize yourself with them" (while better than "internalize" in that people might actually understand it) still seems redundant. And I don't believe that using intext attribution is an automatic get-out clause (just like using "allegedly" won't get you off libel) - I'm sure it all depends on the quantity of text involved, and someone who actually knows the law ought to be informing this discussion.--Kotniski (talk) 12:54, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- Proposal #425 - Just add: Be mindful of copyright and plagiarism
- Leave further explanations to the linked pages. Blueboar (talk) 14:22, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- That works for me, fwiw. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 16:22, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- Best suggestion we've had so far. (I still think it's possible to add a short explanatory sentence, but until someone successfully comes up with one, let's leave it to the dedicated policies to do the explaining.)--Kotniski (talk) 17:09, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- So what are we agreeing upon? One of the these I think:-
- Current plus additional of Blueboar. This policy requires that all quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged be attributed to a reliable published source using an inline citation. Cite the source clearly and precisely, with page numbers where appropriate. Be mindful of copyright and plagiarism. Read the sources, understand them, internalize them, then summarize what they say in your own words. When paraphrasing closely or quoting, use in-text attribution.
- Same as above with language tweaks. This policy requires that all quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged be attributed to a reliable published source using an inline citation. Cite the source clearly and precisely, with page numbers where appropriate. Be mindful of copyright and plagiarism. Please read the sources, understand them, familiarize yourself with them, and then give a balanced summary of what the sources say, in your own words.
- Minimalist. This policy requires that all quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged be attributed to a reliable published source using an inline citation. Cite the source clearly and precisely, with page numbers where appropriate. Be mindful of copyright and plagiarism.
- I am thinking Kotniski prefers the last?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:41, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- So what are we agreeing upon? One of the these I think:-
Much better to go with minimalist. I suggest moving it up into the lead -- as mention of copyright is already there -- and not placing it in the body of this policy.
Phrases such as "When paraphrasing closely or quoting, use in-text attribution." Is not correct because it does not have the necessary exceptions to cover things like internal copies from other Wikipedia pages, etc. -- PBS (talk) 18:23, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
- If Moonriddengirl is happy with a proposal concerning copyright, then you can take it as read that I'm also happy with it. Experience has taught me that she knows what she's talking about. :) For the avoidance of doubt this means that I don't object to her proposed trim.—S Marshall T/C 19:08, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
I'm not seeing objections to implementing this, yet it is being claimed in edit summaries that there are some. Can we have them please? Or if there aren't any, let's do this and move on.--Kotniski (talk) 07:52, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- This is becoming absurd, K. People object. You continue reverting as though they haven't. Then you return here to say there are no objections.
- Once again, we have to make clear to people that in-text attribution is needed for quotations and close-paraphrasing, in case they inadvertently plagiarize, as has happened. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 07:57, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- You seem to misread the situation - you reverted, not me; you claimed there were objections when there weren't (not me that there weren't when there were). But thanks for providing the objection at least now - however you didn't need to revert the whole thing - indeed, since your concern is plagiarism, it seems a bit strange that you remove the link to plagiarism, and restore the discredited wording that mixes up plagiarism with copyright.--Kotniski (talk) 08:11, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- SV text on Wikiedpia is copyrighted. If text is copied from one page on Wikipedia to another it has to be acknowledged by the mechanisms laid out in Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia in-text attribution is not required. The same applies if instead of copying the text of another Wikipedia page is closely paraphrased. There are other similar exceptions to the rule that you have reinstated, this is why a simple sentence proposed by Blueboar agreed by everyone else in this section was implemented by me today. You had been notified of this conversation see blow ("SV please see #Paraphrase in challenged and reply there"), but had not added an opinion to this section. (1) Why should we not implement the BB sentence until there is agreement on a more expansive version. (2) How do you propose that the sentences that you wish to keep can be altered to meet the objections that have been raised to them? -- PBS (talk) 08:41, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- You want to write this policy with reference to public-domain texts, which perhaps you use a lot, or copying from one WP article to another. But these are special cases. This policy is aimed at content contributors adding material based on external sources, which is most of what Wikipedians do. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 08:43, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- Still there are multiple specific problems with the sentences that you've restored (not just the nonsense about "internalizing", but also the misleading implication - though slighly improved when the link to WP:Plagiarism is included - that adding intext citations is a way of avoiding copyvios). Can you write this sentence in a way that says accurately what it's trying to say, and clearly enough that it becomes more useful than just the links to WP:Copyright and Plagiarism? Until someone can do that, I don't think we have a better alternative than the minimalist approach we all agreed on yesterday.--Kotniski (talk) 08:54, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- You want to write this policy with reference to public-domain texts, which perhaps you use a lot, or copying from one WP article to another. But these are special cases. This policy is aimed at content contributors adding material based on external sources, which is most of what Wikipedians do. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 08:43, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- I can't see what's wrong with what's there. When quoting and closely paraphrasing use in-text attribution. Be mindful of copyright and plagiarism. Where is the problem with it? Yes, I know that copyright and plagiarism are complicated, but people can look at those pages for more detailed information. This policy is for regular content contributors, who aren't copying large tracts of text, aren't adding PD material, aren't copying from other WP articles, but who nevertheless need advice about when in-text attribution is needed. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 09:07, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- I do not understand this approach of trying to define what the most common types of editing are, and then trying to write policy pages so that they are only clear for people making those types of edits (as also in the below discussion where you insist on treating Harvard references as irrelevant, because not the "majority"). Why not just make sure we choose words which cover as many cases as possible?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:46, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- This is not just an issue of internal copying but also with all sorts of copyleft and US federal sources as well as public domain. Further as you may remember from previous conversations on this issue there is also questions about whether in-line attribution is a style issue rather than a verification issue and whether very close paraphrasing of sources should be discouraged in favour of quotes. But lets not look at the style issue until after we have agreed on wording that covers all the classes of copyrighted types used as reliable sources in articles.
Policy contradiction?
- SV one can not write policy in such a way that one policy contradicts another. If we do that we cause no end of problems for editors on article talk pages. At the moment you are suggesting that this policy by omission contradicts copyright policy and the plagiarism guideline, while the minimalist approach suggested by Blueboar complements the copyright policy and the plagiarism guideline. -- PBS (talk) 09:13, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- Which policy is contradicted by "use in-text attribution when quoting and closely paraphrasing"? SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 05:47, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
- Whichever policy requires editors not to be so stupid as to mindlessly repeat "According to the text I copied and/or from {another Wikipedia article|a US federal website|one of thousands of public domain sources}..." into tens of thousands of articles, if not hundreds of thousands of articles.
- Editors do not, and do not need to, provide in-text attribution for absolutely every single quotation or paraphrase. It's more complicated than that. We should not provide an overly simplistic absolute rule for a complex issue. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:13, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
- And which policy is that? We can't write a core content policy for the small number of editors who still copy and paste public domain texts. But if you want, we can add "see X for exceptions" (whichever policy or guideline X is). SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 06:49, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
- To answer SV's question "And which policy is that?"
- It's policy zero, SlimVirgin. You'll find part of it at WP:IAR. You'll find another part at WP:NOTBURO. And you'll find more of it at WP:POLICY, which says that policies need to be supported by the community's consensus, as demonstrated by actual practice, not by the repeated assertions of a single editor.
- And it's the existence of support by (apparently) a single editor that I would like to focus this conversation on: Does anyone except SlimVirgin actually support the current wording about every single quotation and paraphrasing—including, in the current language, all public domain and re-used text from other Wikipedia pages—requiring in-text attribution?
- If not, I propose that we follow the directions in another major policy, WP:CONSENSUS, and fix the text to say what we agree on, rather than what a single editor says she wants. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:24, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
Public domain text is not the issue as it is not under copyright. As for the exceptions BB's text ("Cite the source clearly and precisely, with page numbers where appropriate. Be mindful of copyright and plagiarism.") does that. -- PBS (talk) 07:25, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
- No, Philip, it shouldn't, but as actually written, it does include public domain text. The current words are "When paraphrasing closely or quoting, use in-text attribution." It does not say "When paraphrasing closely or quoting copyrighted material, use in-text attribution." WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:24, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
- Philip, can you tell me, please, which policy is contradicted by "use in-text attribution when quoting and closely paraphrasing"? SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 07:32, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
- It contradicts actual accepted practice, which is far more serious than contradicting another policy - but if we want to get lawyerish, I think it contradicts NPOV, which says "Avoid presenting uncontested assertions as mere opinion. Uncontested and uncontroversial factual assertions made by reliable sources should normally be directly stated in Wikipedia's voice. Unless a topic specifically deals with a disagreement over otherwise uncontested information, there is no need for specific attribution for the assertion." So excessive in-text attribution is problematic from a policy point of view, as it can lead to false implications of doubt.--Kotniski (talk) 09:55, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
- SV it is not that it contradicts policy but that it is creating a policy to which there are known exceptions for which it tenders no exception. For example if an editor copies and then edits from one Wikipdia page to another, the text is closely paraphrasing the original, we do not "use in-text attribution" for such paraphrasing. But the wording you are suggesting would make such copies and edits a breach of this policy unless in-text attribution is included. If an editor copies text from a suitable licensed copyleft source such as Citizendium, then they do not need to quote it. This wording seems to imply that once copied, if it is edited in the normal Wikipedia way so that it is no longer a copy but a paraphrased version then it should suddenly obtain a Citizendium attribution in-line. Rather than go into these complications in this policy (which is about verification) a simple statement proposed by BB of "Be mindful of copyright and plagiarism" covers this area, and the copyright policy and its guidelines do not prohibit the use of in-line citations which is the primary remit for this policy. -- PBS (talk) 18:42, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
- Philip, you wrote above: "SV one can not write policy in such a way that one policy contradicts another." So my question is—which policy were you referring to. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 01:13, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
- As I understand it, the issue here is when random quotations show up in Wikipedia articles. I often find (and sadly sometimes even write) things like:
The Beatles were the "most popular rock band" of the 1960s and 1970s. The four members of the group were "known for their comedic personas", and later for their "attraction to Eastern religions".
- If nothing else, that's bad writing. Who is saying these things? If the source is notable, he/she should be attributed in-text - that's why we're quoting him/her in the first place. If not, then we should probably be paraphrasing him/her instead. Jayjg (talk) 00:07, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
- It's very poor writing suddenly "to add quotation marks" to a sentence, without "telling your reader" why you're "adding" them, or who the words are being "attributed to," if anyone. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 01:16, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
- SV, Jayjg, I agree these types of quotes would be a problem, but I would question Jayjg's understanding that this is what PBS is discussing. This appears to be talking past the real point. He gives quite a different type of example above, for example copying between Wikipedia articles. I find his question interesting and worth addressing. I think he is correct that no one cites Wikipedia when doing this, right?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:40, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
- But copying text from one WP article to another has nothing to do with sourcing. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 07:04, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
- Well obviously this is not clear to everyone, including fairly experienced editors. Personally I can not follow the logic of this remark. Can you explain how people, including newbies, can see this from the specific existing wording which was originally under discussion (or any other wording anywhere)? And if not, how can people understand wording which uses an unwritten definition of sourcing that excludes some types of sourcing as "not sourcing"? Thank you for coming back to the point which was raised. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:01, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
- Sorry, I don't follow what you're saying, or what this thread is about. The point is that in-text attribution is needed for quotations and close paraphrasing. It always has been, because we don't want editors writing sentences "like this" where they just "randomly add" quotation marks "without explaining" why, or who originally wrote those words. That's why it's in this policy and in the MoS. Best practice apart, editors have in the past been accused of plagiarism for closely paraphrasing without in-text attribution, so making clear that this is needed keeps people safe.
- Everywhere else in the publishing world if you quote or closely paraphase someone's words it's normal to attribute them in the text. It's only on WP that someone would argue against doing this, for reasons that remain unclear. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 08:14, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
- If you do not understand the point being made then why are you making such negative responses about it? Anyway, the question which has been raised is whether the words "use in-text attribution when quoting and closely paraphrasing" really apply to, for example, cases of copying from one Wikipedia article to another (i.e. where sourcing is done within wikipedia)? What do you think about that clear and specific question?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:51, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
- I'm "making such negative responses about it" because the page is full of posts that are hard to understand−even hard to parse−and that have nothing to do with reliable sourcing. I can only repeat: this page is about sourcing: when to cite and attribute, and what kinds of sources count as reliable. Copying words between Wikipedia articles has nothing to do with any of that, and I don't know why it's even being mentioned. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 09:07, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
- It is a very strange argument you are making. A group of people is having a discussion, and a person enters repeatedly and aggressively, and accusing them of all kinds of things. When asked how they justify this, this person says, over and over, that they do not actually understand the discussions. So the question of WHY you think you should make strong interventions, accusations of bad faith etc, is still open. Why not stay out of discussions you do not understand, or at least limit yourself to questions about what people mean rather than writing half the time as if you do know what is intended (and that it is something bad), and half the time as if you do not?
- Back to the subject: paraphrasing or copying "material" (i.e. words) from anywhere is sourcing by any normal sense of the verb "source", and it is a type of sourcing done frequently on Wikipedia. There is even a rule about the fact that we should link to the source article when we do this. To repeat a principle that needs to be repeated more often: simply declaring a new internal Wikipedia meaning to words which exist already simply can not be a good way to write policy pages. It is a foundation policy that anyone can edit, and esoteric rule-writing would obviously be against this principle.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:47, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
(outdent) It seems we're getting sidetracked here by an issue that isn't really part of the scope of this policy - it's just a caveat that needs to be mentioned in passing. "Copying pages between WP articles" and the other things are being mentioned not because they have anything to do with the topic of this policy, but because they have something to do with the topic of the caveat - they provide example situations which demonstrate that the caveat as currently worded is not right. If you say something in a policy, it isn't enough that it be applicable just in the cases you happen to have in mind, it must be applicable in (pretty much) all cases, unless you make the exceptions explicitly.--Kotniski (talk) 10:27, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
- Yes that was clearly the point being made, and it has been deflected into a sidetrack.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:04, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
- To reiterate WhatamIdoing's question "Does anyone except SlimVirgin actually support the current wording...?" -- PBS (talk) 10:11, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
- Thanks, Jayjg, for speaking up. Let me give you an example from the article Bride. There's a sentence that says, The cake-eating went out of fashion, but the wheat ears survived. I eventually discovered that it's from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (and as a result, it now sports an in-line citation, because I didn't want to have to re-re-re-discover that). This sentence is a direct quotation of public-domain material; actually, rather a lot of the article was either direct quotations from 1911EB or a (very) close paraphrase of it.
- The policy as currently written demands an WP:INTEXT attribution for this public-domain sentence, e.g., According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the cake-eating went out of fashion, but the wheat ears survived.
- Do you think the article would be improved by adding the phrase "According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica" throughout it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:50, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
- It should be attributed to the author of the article, the person who wrote the words.
- Please stop trying to make this policy reflect the lowest common denoninator to accommodate people who copy material word for word from PD texts. I hope it isn't still happening; if it is, this policy isn't written for them. This policy is for people writing articles in their own words using reliable sources, and if they don't add in-text attribution when quoting or closely paraphrasing they risk looking silly and getting into trouble. We're not going to expose people to that because of you and Philip Baird Shearer. There's no reason Wikipedians should adopt lower writing and research standards than exist anywhere else in the publishing world. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 11:30, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- But it keeps being explained that it's more complicated than that. We closely paraphrase all the time, but don't use intext attribution all the time - it depends on the amount of text involved and so on. The problems don't only concern people who copy material from PD texts (but the policy is of course written for them just as much as anyone else - if we don't make exceptions, the implication is that what we say applies to everyone).--Kotniski (talk) 11:43, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
Can anyone with any further objections to removing this wording, please speak up? We can't not do something just because there were objections - are there any objections now? If so, what? (Just saying "I support it" doesn't mean anything - we need answers to the multiple reasons that have been supplied for removing it.) --Kotniski (talk) 11:18, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- It has been explained multiple times, Kotniski. It isn't fair to make people keep repeating themselves, and when they don't want to, pretend there are no objections. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 11:21, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- What is decidedly unfair (and extremely disruptive) is to keep reverting consensus decisions without even being able to explain why your preferred wording is better. That "there were objections" is no argument at all, if any objections that there were have been answered, and everyone in the discussion except one person agrees on the right course of action. All this has also been explained multiple times by multiple people - to put in bold capitals in case it helps: YOU, SLIMVIRGIN, DO NOT OWN THIS PAGE. --Kotniski (talk) 11:29, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- And this is what I meant earlier by your pointless male aggression. No native English speaker would say that that sentence contradicts itself or any other policy. It's absurd that we have to explain the ordinary use of ordinary words to people wanting to edit a core content policy of an encyclopaedia. You couldn't make it up. :) SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 11:33, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- I've already shown you how it contradicts NPOV. Several people have shown you how it contradicts actual practice on Wikipedia and actual publishing standards, and complained about you trying unilaterally to block change. As far as I know, we are all native English speakers, and not all of us are male. And even if there was nothing wrong with the sentence (in fact two sentences), they still constitute an excessive off-topic digression for the section where they appear.--Kotniski (talk) 11:39, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- You haven't shown that it contradicts NPOV, or anything else. No one has shown that it contradicts actual practice on WP (it doesn't contradict best practice), or publishing standards.
- If you copy someone's words, or almost copy them, you give them credit in the sentence. Every professional writer does this. Please explain why WP has to be an exception. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 12:09, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- No, you don't, not if it's just one sentence. It's much more complicated than you seem to think. And please read the arguments above for how this advice contradicts various things. --Kotniski (talk) 12:33, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- Are you a professional writer, or do you have specific examples from professional writers in mind? If you're making an extraordinary claim like this -- that it's standard for professional writers to steal words without attribution, or to "place" certain words "within quotation marks" without explaining "why," or who the author "is" -- please give examples.
- No, you don't, not if it's just one sentence. It's much more complicated than you seem to think. And please read the arguments above for how this advice contradicts various things. --Kotniski (talk) 12:33, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- If you copy someone's words, or almost copy them, you give them credit in the sentence. Every professional writer does this. Please explain why WP has to be an exception. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 12:09, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- You've been asked this before, so please do offer examples this time, to show that it's not only three people on this talk page who believe it's okay to do this. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 12:38, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- This debate is not over giving adequate attrition. There is no question of not giving attribution for the text taken from PD or copyleft, how to do it is covered in WP:PLAGARISM -- and is handled using footnotes and explicit attribution (but not necessarily in line attribution) -- so no one is advocating "stealing". Your "professional" comments are in my opinion not relevant because you are not comparing like with like. The closet I can think of is when a professional copies something they have written before in which case they may not cite themselves. -- PBS (talk) 10:14, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
- Well, look at (totally random example) La Toya Jackson, the sentence supported by footnote 56. Bread-and-butter Wikipedia sentence, millions other such examples exist - a short sentence with words taken almost exactly from the source. In-text attribution? Of course not - that would look silly, and breach NPOV by implying we have some doubt about the fact being reported. Plagiarism? Copyright breach? Again, of course not - the copied text is far too short to constitute either of those things.--Kotniski (talk) 12:48, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- I'm requesting examples or sources from outside WP, showing that professional writers use other people's words (quotations or very close paraphrasing) without attribution, and that this is an accepted practice. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 14:58, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- Well, of course they do, in just the same way as WP does in the situations typified by the example I just gave. I don't have any specific non-WP examples to hand, but in any case, our job here is to document Wikipedia's practices (in fact this matter is outside the scope of this page anyway). --Kotniski (talk) 15:07, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- I've never seen it or heard of it, or seen any of WP's professional writers, editors, or researchers do it or recommend it. So you'll have to provide some examples or sources if you want to say it's accepted practice. You've been asked this several times.
- There's no reason to ask Wikipedians to do something not done anywhere else, unless there's a specific reason to; no reason to request bad writing and poor research standards, and pretend they're normal. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 15:14, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- I've just provided one example (short sentence); others have provided examples from the other extreme (articles based largely on a PD source, where we don't do in-text attribution in every sentence). Are you saying that omitting in-text attribution in these examples is not accepted Wikipedia practice? Surely you know as well as I do that we could find hundreds and thousands of such examples if we wanted to spend time looking; what are you trying to achieve by claiming practice is different from what we both know it to be?--Kotniski (talk) 15:33, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- As you know, I asked for an example of a professional writer doing it, or a professional source indicating that it was standard, or a style guide recommending it -- or any reliable source talking about it, apart from three people on this page saying it's okay. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 15:38, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- That's like requesting a source confirming that 2 and 2 doesn't equal 5. No professional writer does this; it's silly writing, bad writing, and there's never a need for it. The onus is on you to provide a source showing that someone other than three people on this page recommends it. And I mean someone who knows what they're talking about.
- K, you're displaying the worst case of IDHT ever seen on this page. I don't just mean with this issue, but going on now for months with every issue you raise. I can't keep responding to it, but don't assume that failure to respond in the same way 50 times equals silence, and that silence equals consent. I know, you'll call this another ridiculous personal attack. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 15:59, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- Well yes, particularly since this issue isn't even one that I originally raised, and that it seems to be you who refuse to listen to other people's arguments. You're the one saying that entirely standard Wikipedia practice is wrong; you want to include the instruction, you find a source for it. Everyone else wants to omit it; you don't need a source to say nothing (particularly when it's not within the scope of the page).--Kotniski (talk) 16:14, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- K, you're displaying the worst case of IDHT ever seen on this page. I don't just mean with this issue, but going on now for months with every issue you raise. I can't keep responding to it, but don't assume that failure to respond in the same way 50 times equals silence, and that silence equals consent. I know, you'll call this another ridiculous personal attack. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 15:59, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- Why the policy-mandated solution is unworkable
- About SlimVirgin's assertion at 11:30 4 April, "It should be attributed to the author of the article, the person who wrote the words."
- Nobody knows the name of the author. All we actually know is that it was published in the 1911 EB (see s:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bride). So we can't say "According to <name of author>". The only way to attribute this public-domain sentence is to say "According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica". I, and apparently everyone who has responded so far, except for SlimVirgin and probably Jayjg, think that would be unnecessary and undesirable—in short, that spamming the phrase "According to the 1911 EB" into half a dozen paragraphs would harm Wikipedia.
- How we know that this contradicts actual practice
- There are tens of thousands of instances of this in the English Wikipedia. There are at least fourteen thousand Wikipedia articles that are tagged as incorporating text just from the 1911EB. So far as I can tell, exactly three of them include the words "According to Encyclopedia Britannica" (leading into huge block quotations), but my search might be incomplete; perhaps the number rises to ten or twenty. That's about one out of all 250 Wikipedia articles is currently in violation of SV's policy requirement just over the one source, and only one out of every five thousand that drew from this source complies with it.
- We have literally thousands of articles with similar situations involving US federal sources and other non-copyrighted sources. I've seen whole pages that are almost nothing except US federal sources, and I've never seen even one that leads into each paragraph or section with "According the US federal government..."
- This is not an unusual situation that the policy should ignore on the grounds that it affects so few articles. We're talking about tens of thousands of articles here. The community practice has been firmly established as not supplying INTEXT attribution for non-copyrighted sources since the very earliest days. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:10, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- I agree intext attributions are for the most part up to the discretion of the author and nothing to be mandated by policy. If the author thinks it is of importance who stated it then he may use an intext attribution. However if he thinks just the (reliable) statement/content is important and it doesn't matter who said it then he may ommit an intext attribution. So in the Britannica example if the author thinks only the (reliable) information matters for readers and not that it stems from britannica, then there is no reason for him to use an intext attribution. We don't have to take our readers for idiots! They are capable of reading footnotes, i.e. if the attribution matters to a particular reader he can always get it from the footnotes anyway. Please note that this policy should stick to the bare minimum that's required for writing (decent) encyclopedic (and verifiable) articles. Personal preferences (in particular those not making much difference in practice) do not belong in (core) policies.--Kmhkmh (talk) 04:43, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
- Then open a neutrally worded RfC, and provide sources showing what you want to do is standard practice. And stop the personal attacks in edit summaries. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 16:11, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- I don't see any personal attack. The two points that I make are that we cannot do what you want done in this instance, and that we do not do what you want done in this situation. None of that is insulting, so far as I can tell. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:14, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- There's no need to refer to this as "what SV wants" in edit summaries, is there? Especially when it's not SV that's trying to change the policy. As for the claim that we cannot do what policy states we should do, your argument is essentially that because thousands of articles violate policy, therefore we cannot follow policy. Well, Wikipedia has 3.5 million articles, of which only a few thousand are FAs. I have no doubt that at least 3.4 million of those articles violate policy in some way. In fact, I have no doubt that at least 3 million of them violate WP:V in at least one instance. So, is the solution to weaken or remove WP:V because "the community practice has been firmly established as not attributing all quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged to a reliable, published source using an inline citation"? The solution to articles that violate policy is to fix the articles, not dumb down the policy. The goal is to have a high quality, well-written, trusted source of information, not "bunch of webpages no better or worse than any other random bunch of webpages". Jayjg (talk) 03:30, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
- You seem to miss the point - we are not talking here about the main idea of WP:V - that we aim to cite stuff - we are talking about a side issue that has worked its way into WP:V, but is really (or is claimed to be) one of the aspects of avoiding plagiarism, namely that of INTEXT (not inline) attribution. It is being claimed (I don't know on what basis, since SV seems to think in this case it's the side that wants to remove the information that has to supply a source that disproves it, which is fairly nonsensical) that whenever we quote or closely paraphrase a source, we have to give an INTEXT attribution for it - "the 1911 Britannica says..." etc. ACTUALLY IN THE TEXT (not in a footnote). Which might be quite good advice in a lot of situations, but as we've demonstrated ad nauseam, it isn't a universal rule. We could of course modify the wording to show that the advice is not without exception - but previous discussion led to the conclusion that it would be better just to leave the advice out - it isn't on topic for this policy, and even as it is (i.e. even without the extra words that would be necessary to make the wording satisfactory) takes up more than half of the text of the policy section into which it has been randomly and off-topicly inserted. If people think that it's important for this piece of advice to be here (assuming it can be worded in a satisfactory way), can we at least agree that it should be in a different section or separate section from the one it's currently in?--Kotniski (talk) 07:34, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
- Jayjg the sentences we are talking about were put into the policy late last year. The removal of the addition has been under discussion since it was added (see Wikipedia talk:Verifiability/Archive 44#Copyright). So to suggest that the pages of text that have been incorporated into Wikipedia are breach of policy is not credible as policy is meant to reflect consensus -- which it clearly does not, and in this case we have one editor revering to keep the lines in the text, and it is text that she herself has stated "I wasn't keen on its inclusion, but at least it's not in the lead, and it's not being added to a sentence in a way that would make the sentence false. (SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 19:53, 14 March 2011 (UTC))". It is not up to those who wish to remove it that need to show consensus but those who wish to keep the wording that need to do so. Although others have raised the issue of PD sources -- how to attribute them is covered in WP:Plagiarism, and does not include in-text attribution. I have raised the issue of copying within Wikiepdia (because it is a test example of how we handle compatible copyleft text). The wording under dispute demands that in-text attribution is given for text copied from one Wikipedia page to another with small changes to the text to fit the new page making it close paraphrasing. Do you think that in-text attribution should be done for text copied from one Wikipeida page to another? -- PBS (talk) 09:02, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
- Sorry, I really don't think the wording in question demands that material copied from one WP article to another be attributed in-text. I don't think many other people would interpret it that way either, even if a small group on this Talk: page have convinced themselves that it could possibly mandate that. Jayjg (talk) 03:17, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
- You seem to miss the point - we are not talking here about the main idea of WP:V - that we aim to cite stuff - we are talking about a side issue that has worked its way into WP:V, but is really (or is claimed to be) one of the aspects of avoiding plagiarism, namely that of INTEXT (not inline) attribution. It is being claimed (I don't know on what basis, since SV seems to think in this case it's the side that wants to remove the information that has to supply a source that disproves it, which is fairly nonsensical) that whenever we quote or closely paraphrase a source, we have to give an INTEXT attribution for it - "the 1911 Britannica says..." etc. ACTUALLY IN THE TEXT (not in a footnote). Which might be quite good advice in a lot of situations, but as we've demonstrated ad nauseam, it isn't a universal rule. We could of course modify the wording to show that the advice is not without exception - but previous discussion led to the conclusion that it would be better just to leave the advice out - it isn't on topic for this policy, and even as it is (i.e. even without the extra words that would be necessary to make the wording satisfactory) takes up more than half of the text of the policy section into which it has been randomly and off-topicly inserted. If people think that it's important for this piece of advice to be here (assuming it can be worded in a satisfactory way), can we at least agree that it should be in a different section or separate section from the one it's currently in?--Kotniski (talk) 07:34, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
- There's no need to refer to this as "what SV wants" in edit summaries, is there? Especially when it's not SV that's trying to change the policy. As for the claim that we cannot do what policy states we should do, your argument is essentially that because thousands of articles violate policy, therefore we cannot follow policy. Well, Wikipedia has 3.5 million articles, of which only a few thousand are FAs. I have no doubt that at least 3.4 million of those articles violate policy in some way. In fact, I have no doubt that at least 3 million of them violate WP:V in at least one instance. So, is the solution to weaken or remove WP:V because "the community practice has been firmly established as not attributing all quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged to a reliable, published source using an inline citation"? The solution to articles that violate policy is to fix the articles, not dumb down the policy. The goal is to have a high quality, well-written, trusted source of information, not "bunch of webpages no better or worse than any other random bunch of webpages". Jayjg (talk) 03:30, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
- I don't see any personal attack. The two points that I make are that we cannot do what you want done in this instance, and that we do not do what you want done in this situation. None of that is insulting, so far as I can tell. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:14, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
- Jayjg, do you agree that the sentence as currently written requires an in-text attribution along the lines of "According to the Encyclopedia Britannica" in the example I give from Bride? And (separately) do you think that adding that phrase half a dozen times to that article would improve the article?
- NB that we're talking about a real sentence in a real article. This is not hypothetical, and I'm not looking for hair-splitting. In your opinion, should this specific sentence (and others like it) contain both an in-text attribution and an inline citation to the source, or is an inline citation good enough? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:58, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
Separate section on copyright/plagiarism
I hope this will have been resolved by my making this into a separate section (so that it appears in an appropriate place in the policy, and can thus be addressed using more words to clarify what we mean and why we're saying it here).--Kotniski (talk) 11:25, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
- I have edited the section and removed what I think is an extension on the copyright policy and plagiarism guideline.
- While ensuring that what you write can be supported by reliable sources, be mindful of the dangers of following a source's wording too closely, and thus committing plagiarism or breach of copyright.
Usual best practice is to represent what the sources say using your own words.When quoting directly from or closely paraphrasing a source, ensure that the source is clearly cited(normally by using in-text attribution)and that copyright is not being breached.
- I would say that "usually use your own words" is good practical advice for a Wikipedian ("usually" implies not always). I'm not sure about this in-text thing - WP:Plagiarism also puts a lot of emphasis on it, though I'm not sure where it comes from, or if it's really of key importance for avoiding plagiarism.--Kotniski (talk) 12:31, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
- Predomantly like here from SV at about the same time as she introduced it here. The difference is that WP:Plagiarism covers more than just copyrighted text and is agreed that if a PD or compatible copyleft source can be adequately attributed in other ways which no longer makes it plagiarised text. (See WP:Plagiarism#Attributing text copied from other sources and also Category:Attribution templates) -- PBS (talk) 13:23, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
- In some cases, for example definitions of technical terms, all the major sources agree on the exact wording of the definition, or use definitions that are functionally identical. In these cases it would be appropriate to quote one of the sources and provide an inline citation, but it would be better to not use in-text attribution, because that would imply that the definition used by the cited source differed from the definition used by others in the field. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:58, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
- That's a good example. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:34, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
- In some cases, for example definitions of technical terms, all the major sources agree on the exact wording of the definition, or use definitions that are functionally identical. In these cases it would be appropriate to quote one of the sources and provide an inline citation, but it would be better to not use in-text attribution, because that would imply that the definition used by the cited source differed from the definition used by others in the field. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:58, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
- Predomantly like here from SV at about the same time as she introduced it here. The difference is that WP:Plagiarism covers more than just copyrighted text and is agreed that if a PD or compatible copyleft source can be adequately attributed in other ways which no longer makes it plagiarised text. (See WP:Plagiarism#Attributing text copied from other sources and also Category:Attribution templates) -- PBS (talk) 13:23, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
- The current version, which leaves the stylistic benefits of in-text attribution to some other advice page, works for me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:34, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
random break
For one thing, the side issue about copyright and plagiarism now takes up more than half the text in a subsection which is actually supposed to be about a different and very essential issue for this policy. Perhaps someone with the knowledge and skills can write a separate section on copyright/plagiarism, perhaps down towards the end of the page, then this section could link to that one. (It has to be admitted that WP:COPY and WP:Plagiarism are themselves far from clear expositions of their subject matter, so it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing to summarize them here; but we shouldn't do so in a way that gets in the way of communicating this policy's subject matter, or in a way that risks misleading editors, even if only a minority of them.)--Kotniski (talk) 09:22, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- Yes, it does now look odd. I think the logical place for such a separate section was the place where it was recently removed from? But I think there is a fair level of support for the idea that even then it mainly just needs to give clear links to other appropriate policy or guideline pages?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:46, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- Could we satisfy both sides by placing the "internalize" sentence that Kotniski hates so much in a footnote rather than in the main body of the policy? I'd also be happy with a clarification of "internalize" in the footnote.—S Marshall T/C 11:04, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- Well, I have no big problem with internalize, but if this word keeps getting in the way of discussion I have proposed several times that it can be swapped with "familiarize yourself with". Seems justifiable because indeed no one can argue that internalize is clear and standard English. On the other hand, it is true that logically this whole sentence is misplaced within a sub-section entitled "Anything challenged or likely to be challenged".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:16, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- (ec, replying to SM) That's not the only issue (and it's only the "and internalize them" bit that I hate; the rest of the sentence I just mildly dislike ;) ). As regards Andrew's comment, since the place it was recently removed from was the "reliable sources and other principles" part, and that part has now been moved to the end of the policy, putting it there would be quite compatible with my suggestion to put it near the end. But more to the point, someone has to write it - and since these are serious issues, that someone has to have that rare quality of actually knowing what they're talking about.--Kotniski (talk) 11:21, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- As long as there's a clear mention of copyright in the lead, personally I can stomach moving the section under discussion to the end.
As for "knowing what they're talking about"--well, I'm not a copyright lawyer and I don't know anything about US law, which is about as relevant to me as the law of Timbuktoo, but equally, I'm semi-professionally interested in copyright and frankly, it isn't rocket science.
Copyright's in the expression of an idea. If you learn something, know it, and then explain it to someone else in your own words then you're not violating copyright. You're not even violating the copyright of the textbooks you learned it from, because the knowledge you're imparting is yours. It's the expression that counts.
If you don't know something, but you explain it anyway by copy/pasting it from a textbook, then you've violated copyright. This counts even if you change the order of the clauses, or use alternative phrasing, or other disguising methods, because in this event your expression of the idea is "derivative" (legal term) of someone else's.
This means that the optimal way to avoid breaching copyright is to learn your subject matter properly and thoroughly, and then explain it in your own words.
I find that Andrew Lancaster's suggestion of "Familiarise yourself with" doesn't quite encapsulate what I was trying to express with that sentence because it doesn't seem as strong to me as words like "learn" or "internalise". It seems like watering down what's actually a clear distinction: imparting your own knowledge in your own words -vs- imparting someone else's knowledge in phrasing that, if you don't personally have the knowledge you're sharing, must necessarily be derivative of theirs.
Make sense? And does anyone have a better wording suggestion?—S Marshall T/C 12:55, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- Better than what? Do you have a concrete proposal? But I'm sure it's not necessary to learn (or "internalize") something in order to be able to express it without breach of copyright. I don't even need to understand it, come to that. All that matters is that I change it "enough", or use "not too much" of it all at once. And that's how Wikipedia works, a lot of the time - in fact people are encouraged to add specific facts that they can back up with specific statements in a source, rather than read up on a subject and then reproduce the resulting knowledge from their heads (which is almost certain to involve a certain degree of original research, since the brain will have organized the knowledge in new ways). I'm not saying it's a bad thing for people to write from their own knowledge, but we shouldn't imply it's the only way of doing things (and avoidance of copyright is not the main benefit).--Kotniski (talk) 13:48, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- S Marshall I see two problems with your response which need to be separated:-
- word choice. I kind of like the word too, but let's admit that "internalize" is not a word most people have a clear definition of in their mind. It will conjure up different pictures for different people. That seems a bad thing for such a policy wording regarding a point touching on legal issues. It does not seem worth defending too hard?
- what is the aim? I think this is the bigger issue. What you describe is kind of how I also understood what the aim must be of these sentences: you are trying to define one possible "best practice". But (a) it is not a best practice which has been defined as far as I can see based on any detailed analyses of copyright law or plagiarism norms, (it just seems to be an idea about hot to try to avoid copyright problems most of the time, maybe) and (b) nor is it really the only way to work on Wikipedia, which is what it currently seems to be claiming to be.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:47, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- S Marshall I see two problems with your response which need to be separated:-
- Better than what? Do you have a concrete proposal? But I'm sure it's not necessary to learn (or "internalize") something in order to be able to express it without breach of copyright. I don't even need to understand it, come to that. All that matters is that I change it "enough", or use "not too much" of it all at once. And that's how Wikipedia works, a lot of the time - in fact people are encouraged to add specific facts that they can back up with specific statements in a source, rather than read up on a subject and then reproduce the resulting knowledge from their heads (which is almost certain to involve a certain degree of original research, since the brain will have organized the knowledge in new ways). I'm not saying it's a bad thing for people to write from their own knowledge, but we shouldn't imply it's the only way of doing things (and avoidance of copyright is not the main benefit).--Kotniski (talk) 13:48, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- As long as there's a clear mention of copyright in the lead, personally I can stomach moving the section under discussion to the end.
- Could we satisfy both sides by placing the "internalize" sentence that Kotniski hates so much in a footnote rather than in the main body of the policy? I'd also be happy with a clarification of "internalize" in the footnote.—S Marshall T/C 11:04, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- I am still having difficulty seeing how all these issues fit within the scope of WP:V. I agree that copyright and plagiarism are important issues... but discussing them on this page (ie in the WP:V policy) seems like instruction creep. Blueboar (talk) 14:23, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- I think it's because we're telling people on this page "follow the sources, follow the sources", so it's appropriate to add the caveat that they can sometimes get into trouble by "following the sources". (But I agree it's not essential to spell out any of the details here.) --Kotniski (talk) 14:31, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- um.... I don't think this policy keeps telling people to "follow the sources". WP:V tells people "If you want to say something, you must cite it". "Follow the sources" is more within the scope of WP:NOR. Blueboar (talk) 15:49, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- I think Kotniski is correct. OR and V overlap and taken together they tell us one big thing, which is, to put it another way, to avoid being original. (I think this is what Kotniski means by following the sources.) And my feeling is that there is a movement which is going to make sure they get more and more simple and extreme about this. To avoid being original is the first commandment, and if an editor can not understand anything else then at least an editor needs to understand that they are here to summarize stuff from published sources. Obviously this continuous push, does have to raise concerns about the fact that already WP does not really handle the subjects of copyright and plagiarism in any very clear and correct way. (Not making these things the highest priority is perhaps defensible in itself, but that is another question. WP says copyright is "serious" policy.) --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:40, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- um.... I don't think this policy keeps telling people to "follow the sources". WP:V tells people "If you want to say something, you must cite it". "Follow the sources" is more within the scope of WP:NOR. Blueboar (talk) 15:49, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- I think it's because we're telling people on this page "follow the sources, follow the sources", so it's appropriate to add the caveat that they can sometimes get into trouble by "following the sources". (But I agree it's not essential to spell out any of the details here.) --Kotniski (talk) 14:31, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- NOR contains this standalone paragraph in the lede:
Despite the need to attribute content to reliable sources, you must not plagiarize them. Articles should be written in your own words while substantially retaining the meaning of the source material.
How about if we use this wording for the time being? It has the advantages of brevity, simplicity and consistency with other policies.—S Marshall T/C 16:36, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- It would imply we can't make direct use of public domain or fair use material at all, even if we attribute it.--Kotniski (talk) 16:44, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- I think this is an example of the problem WP is riddled with, which is that it seems to have developed a traditional and internal definitions plagiarism and copyright which do not correspond with reality. Neither plagiarism nor copyright can always be avoided by "internalizing" and using "your own words". That would only be advice to someone trying not to get caught! What's more, using the exact words of a source is often perfectly OK in terms of copyright and plagiarism, as long as it is attributed and used in the correct way. Such things need to be explained better, and wrong information needs to start being removed from WP policy pages where it is leading to the development of wrong ideas.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:46, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- Actually, now I think some more, let's clarify and slightly modify that proposal.
Current lede | Proposed lede |
---|---|
This policy applies to all material in the mainspace—articles, lists, sections of articles, and captions—without exception, and in particular to material about living people. Anything that requires but lacks a source may be removed, and unsourced contentious material about living people must be removed immediately.
Verifiability is one of Wikipedia's core content policies, along with No original research and Neutral point of view. These policies jointly determine the type and quality of material that is acceptable in articles. They should not be interpreted in isolation from one another, and editors should familiarize themselves with the key points of all three. Articles must also comply with the copyright policy. |
This policy applies to all material in the mainspace—articles, lists, sections of articles, and captions—without exception, and in particular to material about living people. Anything that requires but lacks a source may be removed, and unsourced contentious material about living people must be removed immediately.
Despite the need to attribute content to reliable sources, you must not plagiarize them. Articles should be written in your own words while substantially retaining the meaning of the source material. Verifiability is one of Wikipedia's core content policies, along with No original research and Neutral point of view. These policies jointly determine the type and quality of material that is acceptable in articles. They should not be interpreted in isolation from one another, and editors should familiarize themselves with the key points of all three. |
Anything challenged or likely to be challenged - current | Anything challenged or likely to be challenged - proposed |
All quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable published source using an inline citation. Cite the source clearly and precisely, with page numbers where appropriate. (Be mindful of copyright and plagiarism. Read the sources, understand them, familiarize yourself with them, then summarize what they say in your own words. When paraphrasing closely or quoting, use in-text attribution.) | All quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable published source using an inline citation. Cite the source clearly and precisely, with page numbers where appropriate. Be mindful of copyright. When paraphrasing closely or quoting, use in-text attribution. |
Moved to footnote | |
Read the sources, understand them, then summarise what they say in your own words. |
Notice the omission of the contentious "internalise" phrase for the moment. ("Understand" and "familiarise yourself with" is redundant.)
How's this?—S Marshall T/C 16:54, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- I still don't think it addresses all the issues. Good to move the "read the sources..." sentence to a footnote, but it would now be redundant altogether (the only essential point of the sentence, "in your own words", is now covered elsewhere). But we are again mixing up plagiarism and copyright, making copyright an Easter-egg link in one place, failing to say that to some extent we can use the same words as sources do.--Kotniski (talk) 17:27, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- Plagiarism and copyright are actually two different things.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:36, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- While they're distinct, I think it makes sense to mention them together on this page.—S Marshall T/C 23:14, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- Plagiarism and copyright are actually two different things.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:36, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
Reflects the MoS, CITE, PLAGIARISM
SlimVirgin recently made an edit here (Revision as of 19:39, 10 April 2011) in which she wrote: "pls open RfC if you want to remove this; it reflects the MoS, CITE, PLAGIARISM, and best practice; we can't contradict those here".
SV to the best of my recollection you introduced the wording about inline text-attribution for Cite and Plagarism, and I assume to the MOS. Is my recollection incorrect? If so, did you open a RfC to introduce any of the wording?
I ask because you justification on the talk page of Plagiarism for addition of in-text attribution into Plagiarism for close attribution was given in the section Wikipedia talk:Plagiarism/Archive 6#In-text attribution. In that you started the section with the comment "Hi Moonriddengirl, what's your objection to this? It's standard practice per V to use in-text attribution without quotation marks. SlimVirgin 15:39, 8 October 2010 (UTC)"
- So it seem that thanks to its introduction into multiple pages all at about the same time with justification to use it based on its usage on other pages (It reminds me of the song old WWI song "We're here because we're here, because we're here, because we're here ...). The full implication of the wording not been fully considered in any one place and there is no broad consensus for in-text attribution being used to allow close paraphrasing, and if it is to be alloed whether it should be mandated for quotes, and for inclusion of exceptions to cover copyleft and PD texts. -- PBS (talk) 11:07, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
Yet at that time what V said was "Where there is disagreement between sources, their views should be clearly attributed in the text: 'John Smith argues that X, while Paul Jones maintains that Y,' followed by an inline citation." and "Where a news organization publishes an opinion piece, the writer should be attributed (e.g. 'Jane Smith has suggested...'). Posts left by readers may never be used as sources." This is very different from a general usage that you are currently proposing should be in the policy. As far as I can tell the wording you are currently supporting has its seed in this edit made on 20 December 2010. To the best of my knowledge (as the edit shows), before that date there was a prohibition in V to close paraphrasing (instead of quoting).
- BTW it is not at all clear that there is a consensus for the use of close paraphrasing in Wikipedia articles see this comment by "I don't believe quotes are the only way to distinguish copied material, but your comment 'how is a reader to know if what I have just written is a summary of what you said or a direct quote unless quotes are marked as such?' is, for me, the key point. EyeSerenetalk 11:41, 14 January 2011 (UTC)" (Wikipedia talk:Plagiarism#Query).
As a number of exceptions have been demonstrated here to using in-text attribution for all material used in Wikipedia artices, it would seem to me to be time to qualify the wording in the guidelines to incorporate those exceptions (although the wording in MOS#Attribution seems to be less detailed than in the other two and in its current form I don't think it needs qualifying). I would suggest the place to start in in the Plagiarism guideline, as the exceptions are already in that guideline and fixing it mainly involved moving the text currently in the lead into a section to do with standard copyright. In that -- PBS (talk) 10:49, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
- It certainly seems to me these matters need to be cleared up, and that this page is not the place for the detailed discussion. If there is to be some kind of ban on close paraphrasing, it would need to be very carefully worded, since the practice of paraphrasing (with varying degrees of closeness) is pretty much Wikipedia's bread-and-butter. --Kotniski (talk) 12:49, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
- I don't think this is the place to discuss. it either I think that the place to discuss it is in Wikipedia talk:Plagiarism as clearly close paraphrasing from copyleft sources and PD sources have to be handled differently from copyright sources. The sentence that as it was [changed back on 20 December 2010: "when quoting someone else's words or closely paraphrasing them, be sure that copyright is not violated, and that the source is clearly cited." which seems to me to cover the issue adequately for this policy. Whether that involves using in-text attribution or some other method or combination of methods, can be delegated to guidelines. -- PBS (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 14:21, 11 April 2011 (UTC).
Verifiability, NOT truth????
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth: whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true.
After all the debate, the first phrase in the sentence is still very bad and very misleading and almost universally misunderstood to mean something else. "Verifiability" still refers to "likely truthful sources" and the phrase "NOT truth" still refers to the editors' personal idea of truth, not what's in the likely truthful sources (which, after all, is indeed likely to be true). But the phrase is still widely understood to mean that WP has no care about truth. Want to see an example from just today? See the last two comments here: [1].
Could we fix this, please? SBHarris 20:20, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
- Actually, the comments you point us to seem to understand the policy quite well. Sources frequently disagree as to what the "Truth" is... and we have to take a neutral stance in such situations. Blueboar (talk) 20:46, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
- If you think you're taking a neutral stance when you decide which sources are reliable (thus likely to contain truth), you're fooling yourself. Policy will never be so complicated as to determine this FOR you, and if it ever is, somebody on WP will still need to write the policy. There's no escaping this problem. So long as care about source quality, you care about truth, and thus cannot be neutral in that way. SBHarris 20:52, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
- Actually, the comments you point us to seem to understand the policy quite well. Sources frequently disagree as to what the "Truth" is... and we have to take a neutral stance in such situations. Blueboar (talk) 20:46, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
- {Ec}I'm not sure I understand the problem. The excerpt which Sbharris quotes is about the ability to check whether the source says something or not. The reason why we don't care about the Truth is because people can argue endlessly over what's true. But checking to see if a source says something is a much easier debate to settle. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 20:58, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
- It is indeed, and that is why I've suggested in the past, that the WP:V policy ONLY address the sourcibility of material, not the source-reliability itself (which problem is properly the domain of WP:IRS). However, I have not been successful at this, and the opening statement of THIS policy gets into RS questions immediately (you are wrong, as the quote DOES say "reliable"). Worse still, WP:V (including the source-reliability part of it, which starts with the first words of it) is policy, whereas WP:IRS is merely a guideline. That's a problem. SBHarris 21:11, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
- {Ec}I'm not sure I understand the problem. The excerpt which Sbharris quotes is about the ability to check whether the source says something or not. The reason why we don't care about the Truth is because people can argue endlessly over what's true. But checking to see if a source says something is a much easier debate to settle. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 20:58, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
- Well, we could remove the stuff about reliability from this policy and promote WP:IRS from a guideline to a policy, but why? I'm not sure what problem you're trying to address. Not to mention the huge amount of effort that will be required to gain concensus for such a change. A Quest For Knowledge (talk)
- I'm trying to address the problem that this policy is misunderstood, and poorly stated, as above. I've been as succinct as I can be, and I'm getting nowhere. You say above that the policy doesn't mention reliability, when it plainly does. Clearly, then, its dismissal of "truth" doesn't mean dismissal of reliability, which has to do with truth. You yourself read the policy, and read it wrong, leaving out a word. Well, that happens to a lot of people. Do you not see this as a problem? I want a policy written so that people who read it can understand it. Is that not a clear statement of purpose?
If it is impossible to gain consensus to write an unclear policy so that it IS clear, then Wikipedia is broken. I have surmised this, but am not going to come to a firm conclusion until I've tried to fix it, using very small words.SBHarris 00:21, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- I'm trying to address the problem that this policy is misunderstood, and poorly stated, as above. I've been as succinct as I can be, and I'm getting nowhere. You say above that the policy doesn't mention reliability, when it plainly does. Clearly, then, its dismissal of "truth" doesn't mean dismissal of reliability, which has to do with truth. You yourself read the policy, and read it wrong, leaving out a word. Well, that happens to a lot of people. Do you not see this as a problem? I want a policy written so that people who read it can understand it. Is that not a clear statement of purpose?
- Sb, I don't mean this as a personal attack, but as an honest question... given that multiple editors are telling you essentially the same thing ... have you considered the possibility that perhaps you are the one who is misunderstanding the policy? The rest of us seem to have no problem with it. Blueboar (talk) 00:54, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- Um, you seem to be speaking on hehalf of a very large group of editors who have nowhere deputized you as their spokesman. Please note that since then (see below), a number of these people have managed to speak for themselves, and don't agree with you any more than I do.SBHarris 20:44, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- We're in an alternate universe here. Where "reliable" doesn't mean reliable. Let's see, does all of the wp:ver/wp:nor stuff have a purpose? Could that be to try to make Wikipedia content accurate? But then the policy opens by disparaging accuracy. First by using the word "truth" instead of accuracy (because, "truth" has other meanings, making it an easier to disparage word than accuracy) and then the lead disparages the concept of accuracy. North8000 (talk) 00:52, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- Um, you seem to be speaking on hehalf of a very large group of editors who have nowhere deputized you as their spokesman. Please note that since then (see below), a number of these people have managed to speak for themselves, and don't agree with you any more than I do.SBHarris 20:44, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- You know, I really understand the confusion here; it's a sad state of affairs. We have some editors with the (perfectly valid) concern that things which are not 'true' are being promoted as true. We have other editors with the (perfectly valid) concern that articles about unverified things are being misrepresented because the first groups is using inappropriate standards of truth for representing them. So for example: UFOs are not 'true' in the objective sense (at least, there's absolutely no evidence to indicate the presence of alien spaceships on this planet), but there is a lot of noteworthy babble about alien spaceships that ought to be documented properly in an encyclopedia (UFOs are a big interesting topic, despite the fact that they are not 'true'). So sourcing has become the battleground - people in the first group bang on the 'reliability' drum in order to exclude noteworthy babble and pad articles with 'objective' (i.e. reasonably skeptical) truth; people in the second group rely on 'verifiability is not truth' to add the noteworthy babble back in (because in all fairness the noteworthy babble is a lot more informative on topics like this than reasonable sources). The whole thing becomes dreadfully polarized.
- In a perfect world, of course, the two groups would work together to produce a balanced, informative article. Now, everyone who thinks wikipedia is a perfect world, please add your signature below, so that you may be thoroughly stigmatized and ridiculed.
- The upshot of this (at least within my wandering mind) is that we do not actually write articles based on sources. we write articles, and sources are a reality-check on us, so that our ignorance and opinionatedness doesn't get out of hand and skew the topic. Verifiability just means that we can demonstrate that what we are writing is a prevalent opinion in the real world and not our own imagining. Reliability just distinguishes between sources we can trust to be reasonable on a given topic and source that we have to take with a grain of salt. None of this should be approached in a legalistic, literalistic fashion, but should be used to encourage a generous application of common sense, and anyone who puts in too much time arguing about this from a legalistic, literalistic standpoint simply needs to be thoroughly wp:trouted, or possibly bludgeoned with cooked ramen noodles, until they cry 'uncle'.
- The rant is ended; go in peace. --Ludwigs2 05:21, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
The problem stems from the fact that there are two valid things that people want to make the sentence "verifiability, not truth" to express, and the second has led to a simplistic reading of policy that is sometimes not appropriate:
- A
- It is not enough for something to be true to be included in the encyclopedia. It must also be "verifiable" in the technical sense of having been reported in a "reliable" source.
- B
- In the vast majority of cases, when something is "verifiable" in the technical sense of having been reported in a "reliable" source, it is true. Editors who claim, without evidence in "reliable" sources that it is not true anyway are often fringers and arguing with them about the truth is discouraged as a waste of time.
- C
- We automatically report everything that has been reported in a "reliable" source as true. The only way to prevent this is by finding an equally or more "reliable" source contradicting it, so that we have a formal reason to suppress or balance the claim.
The first is the original meaning of the phrase. The second is a historically grown secondary meaning. The third is a simplistic version of C which a substantial minority of editors subscribe to. Since B is a consensus interpretation and B and C agree in their results in the vast majority of contentious cases, it is natural for the fundamentalists who subscribe to C to believe that C is also a consensus interpretation of policy. But C is not a consensus interpretation as it can lead to problematic results. Some examples:
- Sometimes only fringers write about a topic, and some of those writings are uncritically reported by "reliable" sources. A says nothing about this case. B says nothing about the case. C says that the fringers win automatically once the New York Times has uncritically picked up a fringe claim and no other RS has contradicted it. This case is never a problem in practice, presumably because the editors who subscribe to C do so as a way of strengthening the B aspect and are not interested in promoting fringe.
- Sometimes a true fact has been reported but is simply not worth mentioning in an encyclopedia. My standard (possibly hypothetical, though probably real) example is Obama's shoe size. B does not speak about this case, but C does, and does so incorrectly. This becomes a problem in practice when editors are divided on whether it makes sense to include information and the editors supporting inclusion try to win on technical grounds by appealing to C.
- Very occasionally there is an overwhelming consensus among editors that something is certainly and unambiguously wrong, even though it was claimed in RS and not contradicted in other RS. An important example was when The Register reported about Wikipedia-internal affairs and got everything totally wrong, as our server logs proved beyond any doubt. See WP:Articles for deletion/Sam Blacketer controversy.
A and B do not tell us anything about this situation. There are three main approaches in this case. The first two are reasonable. The third is not and can cause legal trouble. Unfortunately it has been supported in practice by very experienced editors who believe in C:
This problem keeps coming up. I brought it up recently with respect to a specific subscriber to C, but the discussion was closed for unrelated reasons before there was a clear consensus. Hans Adler 07:40, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- Hans, the problem with what you wrote is the reliance it has on 'truth'. It seems to me your point A is flawed. Whether or not something is actually true is irrelevant to it's inclusion in the encyclopedia; we should consider the extent to which something is accepted as true as a weighting factor, but we as editors are not qualified or entitled to judge its truthiness. This of course impacts on your point B: verifiability does not confirm 'truth', it confirms 'acceptance as truth', and there is a world or difference between those two phrases.
- You're right about the problem with point C - people who look at this in a fundamentalist way conflate verifiability with truth and end up misusing policy in some silly, silly ways. But the confusion is deeper and more convoluted than you make it, I think. For an example, let me pick a book off my bookshelf (I've grabbed "Freud and Beyond", by Mitchell and Black, 1995 - an academic book from a minor publishing house), and choose a quote at random (e.g. first two lines of chapter 5):"Human beings, in Freud's account, are born at odds with their environment. They are wired the way Freud and his contemporaries understood animals to be, oriented towards pursuing simple pleasures with ruthless abandon." Now, here's what we can say about this quote, without stretching:
- it is clearly verifiable in the simplistic sense (someone said it, and that can be easily checked by looking at the book).
- It is clearly a reliable source in some sense of that term (Mitchell is faculty at NYU, and the publisher - basic books - is fairly well established, at least for textbooks)
- However, this only scratches the surface of the source, and leaves a number of important questions at loose ends:
- What were the authors writing about, and is this quote an important or incidental part of their argument?
- Should this quote be considered true of psychoanalysis in general, or just an opinion of a small cohort of psychoanalysts?
- Should this quote be considered true in the real world, or just true of psychoanalysis as a limited perspective?
- The first point gets at whether we are simply verifying the quote or whether we are verifying the source (i.e. what was literally said vs. what the authors were trying to convey in the bigger picture). The second and third points get at the scope of verification (whether we are verifying this as a truth about the world, or a truth about psychoanalysis, or a truth about a small subgroup of psychoanalysts). Which level and scope we are trying to verify will be contingent on the article in question: i.e. we will come to different conclusions on an article about the human mind vs. an article about psychoanalysis vs. an article about the theories of Stephen A. Mitchell. It's all very contingent and contextual, and requires thought and common sense to apply; there is no way to construct a fast and ready rule to cover all situations. The fact of the matter is, we don't know what the 'truth-value' of psychoanalysis is in the greater world, and we don't know what the 'truth-value' of this source in the world of psychoanalysis is; how can we make broad, reified assessments of how 'reliable' this source is in such a condition? That's why I keep saying we should stop trying to evaluate the truth-value of topics at all and restrict ourselves to describing the topics as best we can in our best understanding of a reasonable context. It's the only way we're going to not make ourselves crazy. --Ludwigs2 09:35, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- I'm very impressed by this analysis; but I'm not sure how it translates into a position on what the first sentence of the policy should say. Are you defending the current wording, or would you suggest an improvement? (Same question to Hans and others.)--Kotniski (talk) 10:13, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- Ludwigs2, I am really not interested here in any deep matters where we have to get philosophical about the meaning of "truth". In the Sam Blacketer case it was all very simple. The Register claimed that ex-Arbitrator Sam Blacketer (they called him by his real name) had vandalised an article on a political opponent in the heat of an election campaign. Our server logs proved that he had actually removed vandalism. (Replacing a photo in which David Cameron looked as if he had a halo by an approved one.) The topic wasn't interesting enough for the quality press to investigate on their own, but interesting enough for part of the international press to pick up without investigating. The general public has the right to expect that Wikipedia does not write things about Wikipedia that Wikipedia knows to be false. Yet a number of editors argued seriously that we have to do precisely that, because what counts is verifiability NOT truth. Just read the deletion discussion.
- The press was just guilty of carelessness. But we, since we knew it was false yet repeated the claims without relativisation (it took many days of heated discussion to get this stuff deleted) were guilty of libel in the legal sense of the word. (Presumably. Not sure who was actually guilty of it. I certainly wasn't because I was fighting to prevent it. I have asked Newyorkbrad to comment here; he may or may not have an opinion on this specific detail.) Hans Adler 13:20, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- I think I've touched upon this before somewhere else but this should have easily been dealt with if it was possible to refer to WP:IAR without the baggage currently associated with it. Lambanog (talk) 13:24, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- Who are you telling this? After this comment of mine it took 6 more days for the article to get deleted, and during that time the same editors who were arguing against deletion were also arguing against putting anything in the article that would have mitigated the effect, based on the argument that it was improper to use our knowledge of our own internal processes, and links to our servers, as sources for a BLP article. This should have been a no-brainer, but it wasn't. I want to make sure that next time this happens it is a no-brainer. Hans Adler 13:58, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- I think I've touched upon this before somewhere else but this should have easily been dealt with if it was possible to refer to WP:IAR without the baggage currently associated with it. Lambanog (talk) 13:24, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- The "Verifiability not Truth" statement does not say (or mean) that if something is Verifiable, Wikipedia must include it (even if it is not True).
- The statement does say (and means) the opposite... if something is not verifiable, Wikipedia should not include it (even if it is True).
- Does this distinction clarify things? Blueboar (talk) 13:41, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
I've been asked to comment here. My views approximate those of Hans Adler. We appropriately require that information be verified by one or more reliable sources before it is included (and that a citation to the source be included, at least when a fact is questioned or disputed). This is a necessary condition for including a statement in a Wikipedia article.
But the fact that a piece of information is included in a source, even one that is normally considered highly reliable, is not a sufficient condition for including the information. An additional condition is that the editor inserting the information, or a consensus of editors if a dispute arises, believes that the information is actually accurate.
Much of the time, this additional condition can be disregarded, because by definition, reliable sources are accurate much more often than they are inaccurate. (If they were not, they would not be reliable sources!) But even the most reliable source will contain errors—whether the error rate for many would be higher or lower than the error rate on Wikipedia itself is an interesting question—and "reliable sources" must not be mistaken for "infallible sources." Sometimes there will be an error. When it is an obvious or a known error, we would be irresponsible in propagating it. (I am not dealing here with the exceptional case of reporting on the error itself, described as such.)
Perhaps one way of putting it is that verifiability of a plausible fact in a reliable source creates a presumption of truthfulness that allows the fact to be included in Wikipedia. But the presumption can be rebutted by other evidence that the fact is really false. This will most usually be a showing that other reliable sources are reporting contradictory information, but it can't be limited to that.
A statement such as "whether or not something is actually true is irrelevant to its inclusion on Wikipedia" does not, in my view, capture either what our editing policies are or what they should be. I can understand why such a comment would be made—we have too many people who believe that content should include what they think is true, no matter how many sources or how strong a consensus points in a different direction. That is not acceptable and it is not something I am endorsing here, at all. But the other extreme of simply abjuring any interest in getting the facts accurate is also unacceptable, and if taken literally (I don't think it was likely meant as such, at least in its extreme form), would be an exceptionally irresponsible attitude for one of the world's most visited websites. Newyorkbrad (talk) 19:37, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- I think (or hope) that everyone here agrees with what you say Brad. What I think we disagree on is whether the statement "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth: whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true." accurately (and/or adequately) sums up this concept.
- My personal take is that it does sum the concept up accurately (so I oppose removal or changing it)... but it may not be adequate (ie, it may need expansion to clarify.) Blueboar (talk) 20:14, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- The phrase "threshold for inclusion" means that verifiability is a necessary condition. It's sometimes a sufficient condition too. That depends on context, editorial judgment, common sense, how NPOV is being interpreted, and how many sources are competing for inclusion. What this policy describes is the necessary condition, no more. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 00:26, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- How often does this problem actually occur? I'm hard-pressed to remember an occasion where an editor knowingly insisted on inserting factually inaccurate information on the grounds that it was verifiable. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 20:20, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- The ethnic composition of Latin America is the case that comes to mind. Various Latin American countries use definitions of "white" and "black" that defy common usage, and various editors have fought to their indefinite blocks "correcting" the census reports. There's no doubt that the censuses are false, but they wind up in every country's articles anyway. No one seems happy saying "we know this country cooks the books, therefore we won't report any census information for it".—Kww(talk) 20:36, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- Jimbo Wales allowed his own incorrect birth date to remain in his article for a while, just as hair-shirt, since reliable sources had printed it wrong. Then, I think he changed his mind and took off the shirt. Does that count?
I think it rarely happens that editors insert (without qualifiers of any kind) information that they personally think is unfactual. Usually you find them saying something like "A believes B (cite), but others do not.(cite)" That's fair. Often you can tell in an article which belief the article-writers are skeptical of. That doesn't bother me on WP (any more than in an academic course) so long as the cards are on the table.
I think what the opening statement of WP:V means to say, is that the threshhold of inclusion in WP is either the writer's belief that the statement is correct (when it is not controversial) OR that belief PLUS a citation to a reliable source, when it IS controversial or non-obvious. A lot of WP consists of non-controversial statements of fact that aren't cited because they don't need to be, so there are obviously different threshholds of includablity. A rewrite of this is needed. SBHarris 20:44, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- Jimbo Wales allowed his own incorrect birth date to remain in his article for a while, just as hair-shirt, since reliable sources had printed it wrong. Then, I think he changed his mind and took off the shirt. Does that count?
- The ethnic composition of Latin America is the case that comes to mind. Various Latin American countries use definitions of "white" and "black" that defy common usage, and various editors have fought to their indefinite blocks "correcting" the census reports. There's no doubt that the censuses are false, but they wind up in every country's articles anyway. No one seems happy saying "we know this country cooks the books, therefore we won't report any census information for it".—Kww(talk) 20:36, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- How often does this problem actually occur? I'm hard-pressed to remember an occasion where an editor knowingly insisted on inserting factually inaccurate information on the grounds that it was verifiable. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 20:20, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- lol - well, while I largely agree with everyone here, I still believe there are some broad confusions because of the range of things thisx text is supposed to cover. just to list things out the kinds of issues where I've seen it used, we have:
- Editors inserting material they know is counter-factual (rare, and usually handled by vandalism and BLP policies)
- Editors inserting material from sources which have obviously made an error (as in Hans' 'Sam Blacketer' example).
- Editors inserting material from sources which have likely lied (as in Kww's 'Ethnic Composition' example).
- Editors inserting material from sources which have made valid statements about something that is itself likely untrue (a frequent occurrence on fringe articles).
- Editors inserting material where the editors misunderstand or misuse the source (e.g. quote-mining, which happens to some extent or another on any contentious page).
- Have I missed any? Writing a single opening line that covers all of these adequately without stepping on the toes of any of them is and artistic challenge... --Ludwigs2 21:19, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- (ec) Sb, when a non-controversial fact is added without citation, that simply means the fact is not verified (in the article)... it does not mean the fact is not verifiable. The initial threshold for inclusion is that the fact be verifiable. As a second step, we then go on to say that it must actually be verified (in the article, by adding a citation) if challenged or likely to be challenged. Blueboar (talk) 21:21, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- Ludwigs, yes you missed one... Editor inserting controversial material from sources that disagree with the sources some other editors have read. All too often, both sides will argue that their sources are reliable and stating the Truth, while the other side's sources are unreliable, incorrect, misrepresenting the facts, lying etc. Blueboar (talk) 21:28, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- lol - well, while I largely agree with everyone here, I still believe there are some broad confusions because of the range of things thisx text is supposed to cover. just to list things out the kinds of issues where I've seen it used, we have:
The fact that this policy is written in a way to downplay arriving at accuracy, and the related things that in dominoes such into (basically source criteria that somethings has little relation to reliability on the task at hand) comes up extensively. It becomes fodder for wiki-lawyering warfare (and avoiding accurate coverage) wherever there is a an article where there is a RW clash. The current rules and policies are a failure on all of those. North8000 (talk) 21:30, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- Given that there will be strong opposition to any major change to the language of the policy (some of it valid and some of it of the knee-jerk variety), can you suggest a way forward? Blueboar (talk) 21:41, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- I'm trying to work on more organized supporting analysis and ideas, (I could give you a link but it's still to ragged / unfinished to get spotlit)....but in vague terms:
- The opening statement should be changed to keep everything about verifiability without throwing in the swipe which disses accuracy. Such was discussed/consensused a few months ago but reverted by one of the owners of wp:ver when put in, saying it was not discussed enough. So then when it was floated for a longer time on the talk page (as I recall) that owner split it in half via manual archiving and then manually archived the remainder of the discussion (both before the bot did them), so now it is gone.
- Add two source strength metrics (objectivity and knowledge regarding the fact the cited it) to the two existing ones (the editing layer ["RS"] and primary/secondary/tertiary aspect), define the "strength of the source for the cite" as the combination of these. And say that the strength of the source/cite must be commensurate with the situation. Challenged/questioned statements need stronger sourcing, and vica versa.
- There's two of them....got a couple more....thanks for asking. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 22:11, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- I edit a lot of articles on or related to fringe theories and I'm skeptical. The last thing I want is to give ammo to those promoting fringe theories to claim that reliable sources are wrong and we should follow The Truth. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 22:29, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- I'm with you 100%. I think that it may not be clear that my ideas are also with you 100%. Step one is to get rid of the word "truth" because 1/2 of the time "truth" means somebody's belief rather than objective accuracy (for those cases where such exists). North8000 (talk) 22:47, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- We're all a bunch of anonymous editors, right? This means that we can't use authority to determine what is true or not. That's why we have to go by verifiability as the inclusion standard. I've participated in some controversial topic areas in Wikipedia, apart from it often being a miserable experience, one thing I've noticed is that editors will argue over the credibility of the sources. In one case, I experienced several editors arguing, much to the annoyance of the regulars at the reliable sources noticeboard, that the New York Times couldn't be used as a source in a "science" article. In my opinion, therefore, I think the statement at the top of this thread could be made even stronger by adding something like, "Wikipedia editors, because of anonymity, cannot decide matters of truth by authority, and therefore must use verifiability as the baseline standard for inclusion" or something like that. Cla68 (talk) 22:55, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- If the NYT is at odds with peer-reviewed secondary sources specialising in a given area, then it should either not be included or included in a subjective way "NYT reports that...." so it is not as simple as that, which is why we are humans judging and not computers systematically entering all referenced data. Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:03, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- We're all a bunch of anonymous editors, right? This means that we can't use authority to determine what is true or not. That's why we have to go by verifiability as the inclusion standard. I've participated in some controversial topic areas in Wikipedia, apart from it often being a miserable experience, one thing I've noticed is that editors will argue over the credibility of the sources. In one case, I experienced several editors arguing, much to the annoyance of the regulars at the reliable sources noticeboard, that the New York Times couldn't be used as a source in a "science" article. In my opinion, therefore, I think the statement at the top of this thread could be made even stronger by adding something like, "Wikipedia editors, because of anonymity, cannot decide matters of truth by authority, and therefore must use verifiability as the baseline standard for inclusion" or something like that. Cla68 (talk) 22:55, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- I'm with you 100%. I think that it may not be clear that my ideas are also with you 100%. Step one is to get rid of the word "truth" because 1/2 of the time "truth" means somebody's belief rather than objective accuracy (for those cases where such exists). North8000 (talk) 22:47, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- I edit a lot of articles on or related to fringe theories and I'm skeptical. The last thing I want is to give ammo to those promoting fringe theories to claim that reliable sources are wrong and we should follow The Truth. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 22:29, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
- I'm trying to work on more organized supporting analysis and ideas, (I could give you a link but it's still to ragged / unfinished to get spotlit)....but in vague terms:
PS: I guess I should add my voice to those who are unhappy with the wording of the first sentence - the implied general meaning for me seems to be that there are two divergent endpoints "verified/verifiable material" and some core "truth" (a la Kuhn maybe?). Whereas I imagine this much more as verifiability as a means to an end to get to some consensually-understood truth. It's the "not truth" which is the problem in implied meaning.
I guess I'd much rather something like "Verifiability is the route taken to transform unverified (mainspace) content into reliably-referenced and checked (encyclopedic) content" With a caveat "One may be surprised that one's understanding may diverge from a presupposed understanding as one uncovers and reviews source material"
(We can then get all gushy and 70s-like and delight in the embracing of knowledge at this point...hehehe) Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:14, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- I like your second sentence. I'm not embarrassed to admit that in editing I've sometimes found that what I thought to be true was not exactly the same as what was in the sources. Cla68 (talk) 00:52, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- I also like that second sentence....actually beyond like. It is a statement of how the 90% of Wikipedia works works. Although I would tweak it slightly, During the 90%, the editors, in consensus, decide on it based on the integration of 500 sources that their understanding came from. And then they take what they decided and source it and put it in. During the other 10% (basically the contentious failure articles) the wiki-lawyering blocks this process when it does not have their preferred result, noting that the process that makes 90% of Wikipedia work is a violaiton of the rules, if taken literally and in a vacuum. North8000 (talk) 01:06, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- That the threshold for inclusion is verifiability, not truth, is a very simple idea. It means verifiability is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for inclusion. An invitation to the party is a necessary condition for inclusion, but if you turn up drunk and threaten to strangle the hostess, the invitation alone will not ensure your admittance, i.e. an invitation is not a sufficient condition. I think it's important not to make this idea more complicated that it has to be.
- In many of our articles, verifiability is a sufficient condition too, just as an invitation to the party is going to get you inside 99 percent of the time. This policy can't substitute for the editorial judgment required on the page to decide whether a source is also authoritative enough, appropriate enough, and so on. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 01:04, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- I am sorry, I just had to read your post a couple of times and I still am unclear about the point yuo're making, and hence I think the way it is laid out is obfuscating rather than clarifying the issue. Slimvirgin do you agree or disagree that the way it is presented now tends to artificially diverge truth and verifiability and imply that verifiability is an end rather than a means to an end? Casliber (talk · contribs) 01:37, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- I'm not completely sure what you mean, Cas, about a means to an end. When I cite John Rawls as a source for the concept of justice-as-fairness, there is no issue of "truth". The question is only whether Rawls is an appropriate source. When I cite U.S. government sources on Bradley Manning, the question is whether the U.S. govt is an appropriate source, because who on earth knows what "the truth" is.
- When you write an undergraduate essay or MA thesis, the aim is not to reveal "the truth," but to offer an overview of the appropriate literature, and that's what WP articles seek to do. We cite sources who are notable, or authoritative, or honest, or well-known, or widely read, or carefully checked, or important, or appropriate, or respected—and we use the word "reliable" as a shortcut for that amalgam of attributes. Being able to "verify" our material against one of those sources (i.e. check that one of those sources published what we want to publish) is the threshold for inclusion, the necessary condition for inclusion—the invitation to the party. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 02:22, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- Cas, another way of looking at this: to mix up truth and verifiability is to make a category mistake. Looking at an issue in your area, imagine someone asked you to write an essay on the difference between the concepts of mental illness, personality disorder, and neurological damage. You'd explain the differences between the categories, you'd explain the history of how they developed, you'd explain the legal and philosophical differences, the different approaches between disciplines, according to sources who work in appropriate fields. Then imagine you had someone shouting as you were writing, "Yes, but what is the truth? Which of these ideas is true? Which of them is correct?" It would be meaningless.
- None of us can know whether 5.9 or 6.1 million Jews died in the Holocaust, or whether it was four or 10 million. We can't know, we can never know, we have no realistic way of finding out. So we have a bunch of names of scholars we trust—people in mainstream institutions, where it's hard to get a job—who say they've read the original documents, and we repeat what they say. That's for the most part what scholarship is; it's knowing who the trusted sources are. Yes, at some point, an approximation to "truth" is the aim—a convergence of trusted narratives—but that's a complex philosophical idea within historiography, and there's no way we can get involved in discussing it in a Wikipedia policy. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 02:40, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- @SV - I'll try not to intersperse but answer bits and pieces. When I write I am mindful of the subject as a whole, so that impacts on how I look at further bits of information and how they integrate with the whole. Luckily for the most part, the quality of the sources speak for themselves, so integrating as a whole is not a problem. But (for instance) where a source contrasts with other material will heighten the need for qualifying that source. For instance, in medicine, we'd often state a Review Article as fact "treatment X is effective for disease Y" BUT we might have to qualify that in a number of circumstances - e.g. a large high quality and highly publicised meta-analysis (technically a primary source, but maybe picked up by newspapers, gov'ts etc - hence we might review article to say "Medical consensus has been that treatment X is effective for disease Y (ref here), however a new meta-analysis....." - so to answer, no, I could see a case where the presence or absence of other high quality material may impact on how we ref US gov't sources on Manning. Regarding "the truth", ultimately, yeah there is an unknowable truth we can never know (e.g. a ruler cannot measure exactly 30.000000000000000 cm), but it doesn't mean we don't try to give an accurate picture of the subject as possible. Note that this needn't be a preconceived idea on the part of the editor but develops as one reads and processes sources. (i.e. inaccurate =/= wrong, which seems to be a distinction that needs making here. For instance, re difference between the concepts of mental illness, personality disorder, and neurological damage - yes all are different paradigms and none repreresents "The Truth", but it is up to me to be able to explain the strengths and weaknesses of each paradigm (complex but not insurmountable). Casliber (talk · contribs) 04:58, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- None of us can know whether 5.9 or 6.1 million Jews died in the Holocaust, or whether it was four or 10 million. We can't know, we can never know, we have no realistic way of finding out. So we have a bunch of names of scholars we trust—people in mainstream institutions, where it's hard to get a job—who say they've read the original documents, and we repeat what they say. That's for the most part what scholarship is; it's knowing who the trusted sources are. Yes, at some point, an approximation to "truth" is the aim—a convergence of trusted narratives—but that's a complex philosophical idea within historiography, and there's no way we can get involved in discussing it in a Wikipedia policy. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 02:40, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- Did you notice that the word threshold does not occur in the title of this section? That's not because it misrepresents the problem, but because most of the time when someone mentions "verifiability, not truth" the word is not used at all. And quite a few editors will deny that the "threshold" language means anything like you and I think it means. To me that's an indication that the snappy language stands in the way of understanding. I don't care how we fix this, so long as we fix it.
- Editorial judgement is another problem, and a related one. A lot of editors have no judgement at all and try to substitute wikilawyering for it. WP:Editorial judgement is a redlink. I am afraid it wouldn't even help as a guideline. It would have to be a policy so that wikilawyers cannot continue to claim that exercising editorial judgement is against policy without risking a block. There is this absurd idea that Wikipedia is not written by (more or less) intelligent people who read and understand the sources, but that some kind of automatic writing is going on that turns policy pages + reliable sources into an encyclopedia, with humans playing a role analogous to that of electrons in a computer. Hans Adler 01:49, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- Agree. I don't think that anybody is challenging the verifiability content of the beginning of the policy. The question is, why the heck does the lead of a core policy have to add wording that insults the idea of striving for accuracy? First by substituting the ambiguous, straw-man-ishly multi-meaning word "truth" for accuracy, and then, in a phrase that we know always gets quoted out of context as the (mistakenly) mission statement of Wikipedia: "not truth" = "not accuracy" North8000 (talk) 02:00, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
We still seem not to have resolved the problem(s) we had when we discussed this a few weeks ago - we "know" that "the threshold" is supposed (in this case, at least) to mean a necessary rather than a sufficient condition; but (a) how do we expect readers to guess that this is how we mean it? and why force them to make such a guess when we could easily reword the sentence to resolve that ambiguity; and (b) by writing in big bold letters not truth we imply that truth is not a relevant consideration, thus leading to the absurdities of people wanting to knowingly repeat libel and so on, as in the case described above (and in other less dramatic situations, where the falsehood isn't a libel, but is still not wanted in our encyclopedia). Can we really not improve the wording of this sentence so as to make it clearer what we mean by it and what our motivation really is?--Kotniski (talk) 09:37, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- (ec)A bit of history... When we added the Verifiability not Truth clause, we were trying to combat a persistent problem: POV pushing editors adding unverifiable material based on the argument that it was "true". The current language settled that persistent problem that very well. We determined that such material should not be included, and created a statement that says so clearly and bluntly. We want to keep that clear statement.
- What we are discussing now is a different issue... what to do about editors adding untrue (inaccurate) material based on the argument that it is verifiable. This is a much thornier issue. Blueboar (talk) 13:40, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
- Agree, ok, let's have a poll and get some numbers: Casliber (talk · contribs) 12:52, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
Poll: Misleading opening statement
- For whatever reason, this statement, "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth: whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true." is problematic and needs to be rewritten:
Support
Oppose
- . It's neccesary to mention that debates for inclusion don't depend on whether something is true or not. Truth is highly subjective, and endlessly arguable. Verifiabilty can be easily checked. If we imply that truth is a matter of consideration in our decision making process, we will encourage original research, endless arguments, and walls of text. We'll never reach consensus on anything. LK (talk) 13:09, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
Discussion
- As above, my beef is that it creates an artificial dichotomy of truth and verifiability as distinct endpoints (which they are), but what needs to be emphasised is verifiability is a means to an end. Casliber (talk · contribs) 12:52, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
Social media
The wording of the social media doesn't make much sense in that it begins by saying, "In addition to the limitations listed above" as if a new limitation is about to be introduced. But it's not adding a new limitation, it's just restating limitation #4 that there should be no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity. I'm not sure how to reword it. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 21:44, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
- I decided to be bold and fix the problem.[2] Ultimately, what we're trying to say in this section is that social networking sites are subject to the limitations of SPS. So I greatly simplified the text to say that. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 21:54, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
- Personally I'd prefer not to have this section, which was recently added, because it does suggest we're saying something new or different, but we're not. "[T]here should be no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity" says it all already. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 22:06, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
- Sorry, I see now you've done that already. Thanks. :) SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 22:08, 15 April 2011 (UTC)