New blog post "Wikipedia: Sources & Methods"

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CrowsNest
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New blog post "Wikipedia: Sources & Methods"

Post by CrowsNest » Mon Aug 27, 2018 1:47 am

I tried my best, but Sashi could not be convinced that choosing Wikipediocracy as a publishing outlet would bring him no benefit.

I am disappointed he didn't take on board any of my feedback. There are some important points this post has to offer the wider public, but they are rather lost in this mix of information of wildly varying relevance, and massive over-detail. Casual readers certainly won't have a clue about what large parts of it even mean. The message is confused and thus easily lost. I've really struggled of late with Sashi's cryptic style of writing too, and he sadly includes a lot of that in this piece.

Still, credit where it's due, by all accounts this involved a hell of a lot of research. In making his choice though, Sashi seems to think Wikipediocracy were owed some kind of debt for some kind of help they offered in producing it, but I am dubious, based on who they are and what they do, as to whether this was useful help, or at least that he could not have got the same if not better assistance in other venues, places inhabited by serious critics with deep knowledge. Naturally this comment is directed only at those posters who choose not to visit this place, for reasons they seem to have trouble even articulating.

The blog post editorial staff of Wikipediocracy (all one of them, if not none now) certainly seem to have had a complete about turn of policy. Under the old guard they would have surely insisted on some changes before publication, given they do, or at least did, have the intention of making blog posts accessible for the general reader.

Anyway, that's my honest feedback, offered to someone I consider a comrade in arms, to whom I have nothing but good intentions. Would that those people he chose to give a lifeline to, by making their blog look a little less crusty and stale, could say the same.

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Re: New blog post "Wikipedia: Sources & Methods"

Post by Dysklyver » Mon Aug 27, 2018 11:57 am

I saw the initial draft and I reckon the end result is probably more accessible.

I have no real opinion on whether this research is very accessible, indeed it is probably more of a starting point since it is no way complete (yet).

For example:

It doesn't yet cover citations without URLs
It doesn't yet examine the reliability of book sources.
It doesn't cover the myriad of unreliable sources which are from small sites.
There is no way of knowing if citations have any relevance to the article they are in.

It doesn't measure how much article material is being cited to unreliable sources versus material cited to reliable sources.
This study doesn't measure the number of uncited articles or the amount of uncited material versus cited material.

But it does show that Wikipedia has a great deal of crap sourcing. Source quality is directly connected to the reliability of Wikipedia.

Ergo Wikipedia is somewhat more unreliable than people may think.

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Re: New blog post "Wikipedia: Sources & Methods"

Post by Graaf Statler » Mon Aug 27, 2018 12:15 pm

I am missing the most worst parts in the blogpost. Searching for citations what they now do. First the fundament, reliable sources, then the walls, and then the roof. And not the fundament as last part of the chain. And I don't know what to think of Sashi to be honest, but I never did. He is extreem intelligent, but for the rest I don't know. In a way I don't trust him from the first moment on.

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Re: New blog post "Wikipedia: Sources & Methods"

Post by sashi » Mon Aug 27, 2018 1:58 pm

I didn't really think it was all that complicated, though I guess the paragraph about [[internal link syntax]] isn't obvious.

I just wanted, really, to share the data, and to suggest it was worth looking at. Conclusions that can be drawn are that:

  • there is a Center Left US slant to topics covered / sourcing of coverage of topics.
  • some West Coast companies (especially media properties like Google, Disney, Amazon, Apple, etc. but also Wizards.com, ...) are linked to a whole lot, while others are rigorously kept out of the sum of human knowledge perhaps for fear of CoI, perhaps for lack of non-CoI expertise, perhaps due to a reflexively anti-corporate mentality (as long as it refers to other corporations and not the local guilds/cabals).
  • there are a lot of links to sources concerning music, film, celebrities, comics, anime, videogames, & sports (fancruft + insider baseball), not so many for less product/spectacle oriented subjects (literature, religion, etc.)
  • The major US universities contribute much less to "the wiki-sum of all human knowledge" than the major US press outlets do. (10.5 times as many NYT links as links to Harvard's various machines / corpora for example)
  • (micro-)blog posts / self-published pages are much more frequently linked to than the guidelines suggest should be the case.
  • technically it is not necessary to click through multiple pages to get the total number of occurrences (using the better-known and less flexible external link search)

But I thought it best not to force people to draw conclusions, so I just spun a yarn of little importance (since I'd always wanted to copy the style of Harper's famously pointed little Index) to clothe the spreadsheet. That's all really.

Graaf, I'm not sure why you're telling people you don't trust me. :? Were you thinking about having me watch your dog or something? Really, I won't eat the dog. Promise.

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Graaf Statler
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Re: New blog post "Wikipedia: Sources & Methods"

Post by Graaf Statler » Mon Aug 27, 2018 3:00 pm

Your smoke curtains Sashi. But never mind, me to don't eat dogs. Or cats. I love cats, they are my best companion, special because of the way they hunt.
Last edited by Graaf Statler on Mon Aug 27, 2018 3:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: New blog post "Wikipedia: Sources & Methods"

Post by Dysklyver » Mon Aug 27, 2018 3:11 pm

I feel something got lost in translation there...

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Re: New blog post "Wikipedia: Sources & Methods"

Post by Graaf Statler » Mon Aug 27, 2018 3:50 pm

Dysklyver wrote:I feel something got lost in translation there...

I don't think so. There are people who understand very, very wel what I am saying. And others not. But I think Sashi does....

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Re: New blog post "Wikipedia: Sources & Methods"

Post by Dysklyver » Mon Aug 27, 2018 4:57 pm

Graaf Statler wrote:
Dysklyver wrote:I feel something got lost in translation there...

I don't think so. There are people who understand very, very wel what I am saying. And others not. But I think Sashi does....


Yeah I am normally quite good at understanding what you mean, but these "smoke curtains" have me confused. :?

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Re: New blog post "Wikipedia: Sources & Methods"

Post by CrowsNest » Mon Aug 27, 2018 5:06 pm

Sashi, to do all that work and then not make a nice wrapper, it's crazy. Don't let what you have learned to go waste. I urge you to rewrite it, this time asking yourself, for every single word, line, paragraph and section, does the person in the street need to know this, and am I explaining it in a way they will understand.

This is why hanging out on Wikipediocracy, as if it were anything other than a useless fan board, is bad for critics. Everyone interested in writing for an external audience, left that site long ago, in recognition of what it is, and what it isn't.

If you write for them, your audience is Wikipedians, Wikipedians and Wikipedians. You write anywhere else, you will reach a broader audience. And you will still be read by Wikipedians, if that really is the goal. Any critic who is only interested in writing for Wikiledians, would surely cut out the middle man and simply write for the SignPost.

There's a time and a place for esoteric writing. I would suggest this was not it. And that Harper's piece works because it exists in isolation. Stick some text before and after it, and it just looks out of place.

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Re: New blog post "Wikipedia: Sources & Methods"

Post by Graaf Statler » Mon Aug 27, 2018 5:23 pm

The problem is that two chess boards. The Dutch, and the English with in between Meta. They are close, very close connected, but to understand the whole puzzle you have to know them both. And that is the problem. Something went treble, terrible wrong, and that Graaf has everything to do with it, together with his Digital friend Julien, aka Die Vandaal, Sergeant/Kapitien/Kolonel Zeiksnor, Die Vandaal, ect, etc, etc.

A hint:




Image

@Romaine, Public Domain. Source:Commons

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