That seems like a real shame, and an unnecessary repetition of work. Surely there's some way to verify expertise and provide expert commentary with supporting links to primary sources, even if it doesn't mean editing the entry directly? Perhaps a side-bar?
I'm sure this would lead to arguments about how to verify expertise, but even if it only started with unimpeachable credentials that would seem like a start. Tell me very clearly who is providing the commentary, and I can decide myself if it's credible.
I feel like I'm rambling a bit, but really this seems like a wasted opportunity. Why recreate Wikipedia from whole cloth when it already has so much? I suppose that given the way it's licensed, you could always fork it...
An encyclopedia is a survey of existing secondary sources. It's not a research venue.
The true waste would be taking valuable research and synthesize and hiding it in an encyclopedia. Pokemon aside, most new knowledge that merits inclusion in Wikipedia deserves its own independent source.
It goes research -> authorship of secondary source (journal article, book, magazine article, whatever) -> citation in encyclopedia.
And that's really all that happened here: someone tried to skip the middle step (notably: they tried to skip it while authoring the secondary source --- the author of this article published an authoritative text on the Haymarket Riot later on), and Wikipedia called that out.
> An encyclopedia is a survey of existing secondary sources. It's not a research venue.
Then I suppose I'm also frustrated at Wikipedia's lack of ambition. To strive toward that benchmark and not past it seems, as I said, wasteful.
One of the things that fuels this feeling for me is the work of people like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think there is a role for experts to address the public directly, rather than their peers. To be sure, it can get very messy, as some of the most vocal cranks think they are experts and seek every possible venue to espouse their nonsense, but they do that anyway. I'd love to see the bar lowered for scientists to contribute to works that are easy to access via the web and written for a lay audience, without having to start and maintain their own blog.
Experts should address the public directly. It has never been easier for them to do that. But they shouldn't address the public by writing encyclopedia articles. They should write books, write journal articles, give recorded talks, have IamA discussions on Reddit, debate things on message boards. Encyclopedia articles are the worst way for them to address the public.
Wikipedia is one of the most ambitious projects on the whole Internet. It is the world's most ambitious and most expansive encyclopedia. It was created entirely out of donated time using the Internet. It is hard to take seriously any argument that says Wikipedia is unambitious.
There's a whole rest of the Internet for you to build other ambitious knowledge projects on; the rest of the Internet also doesn't demand that you redefine the concept of an encyclopedia to do it.
"An encyclopedia is a survey of existing secondary sources"
This is incorrect. The definition of encyclopedia has nothing to do with 1) primary vs. secondary sources, nor 2) a survey of said sources. Consider "The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences", which contains links to primary sources. Consider the "Encyclopedia of Physics", which is certainly not a review of existing secondary sources. The "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" (from the 1970s) contains new research and essays about the people and themes in science fiction.
"Encyclopedia articles are the worst way for them to address the public."
When one of the first things that the public does is to consult Wikipedia, then a Wikipedia page is one of the best ways to reach people. If the information on the page conflicts with the primary sources, then the weight of the secondary sources should be diminished in favor of the secondary sources which are in agreement with the primary sources.
Your statement here is also wrong even on the surface. Stephen Barr (to pick one of many specific examples) is a researcher on grand unified theories, and he contributed the article on grand unified theories to the Encyclopedia of Physics. You saw elsewhere in this thread that Mandelbrot contributed the "fractal" article to Encarta. The Wikipedia page for "Encyclopædia Britannica" even says "Britannica's authors have included authorities such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Leon Trotsky".
Why would he or the other expert contributors have done that if doing so is the "worst" way to reach the public?
The obvious conclusion is that your views of how encyclopedias work is wrong, in that it does not agree with numerous real-world examples. Hence it is you who have redefined "the concept of an encyclopedia."
What are some examples of original research published in the Encyclopedia of Physics? What's an example of something documented in the Encyclopedia of Physics that isn't traceable to some earlier publication in something like Physical Review Letters?
I think you've missed my point with regards to experts writing in encyclopedias. I didn't say they can't; I said they probably shouldn't, as it's a waste of their time. Of course, if Britannica is paying you to, different story.
There are three issues here: primary sources, secondary sources, and original research. You said "An encyclopedia is a survey of existing secondary sources". It is not. An encyclopedia also contains references to primary sources, and can also contain new research.
A reference to a primary source would be, for example, a reference to Newton's "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" or to Darwin's "On the Origin of Species". An article on the history of evolutionary thought would be remiss if it does not include Darwin's book and instead only referred to books discussing Darwin's work. Like the children's game "telephone", only relying on secondary (and then tertiary, then quaternary) sources can amplify noise.
You then asked about "examples of original research published in the Encyclopedia of Physics". There are two different types of research involved here. One is "original to the field of physics". Physics has a well-established mechanism for publishing and disseminating work, and that is not an encyclopedia.
The other is the research needed to reconcile and synthesize multiple viewpoints into a well-constructed whole. A non-fiction piece for the New Yorker likely entails new research (even an interview is new research), and that's the type of research which goes well with an encyclopedia. Take a look at Wikipedia's entry for "History of the Encyclopædia Britannica" with comments like "40,000-word hagiographic biography of George Washington" and "Dr. Thomas Thomson, who introduced the first usage of chemical symbols in the 1801 supplement". Thomas Young translated the Rosetta Stone and in his WP page is written "[s]ome of Young's conclusions appeared in the famous article "Egypt" he wrote for the 1818 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica."
Or take Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. The entire encyclopedia was written by Asimov, who commented "I alone have done every bit of the necessary research and writing; and without any assistance whatever, not even that of a typist." Right there in the text it says "research."
Do you think these examples of the research which goes into encyclopedia articles aren't actual research? If not, why not? Or are these simply not encyclopedias?
As to "if Britannica is paying"... do you think Harry Houdini, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud, Henry Ford, Leon Trotsky, Arthur Eddington, Lord Kelvin, Humphry Davy, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Malthus, and yes, even Isaac Newton, were contributors to EB mostly because they were being paid for their work? Most certainly not! (How much would Ford's time cost?) From what I've read, other factors were because they wanted to contribute to a collection of knowledge, and because of the prestige.
I think you're providing a lot of examples of things that Wikipedia is also largely fine with.
Meanwhile, the author of this article did original research, generating knowledge that was not only new to the field but that actually contradicted the field's best known sources.
Wikipedia (justifiably, but not particularly gracefully) told him "go write a journal article and then come back and cite it". Which is what he did.
This makes sense for a variety of reasons, some of them having to do with the charter of an encyclopedia, others simply as a matter of pragmatism: 9 times out of 10, when someone contributes original research to Wikipedia, their work is crazy.
Wikipedia must be fine with it because many of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica articles (which had entered the public domain) were imported into Wikipedia pages.
My point though was nothing to do with Wikipedia's policies. It was to your incorrect definition of what it means to be an encyclopedia. You've said:
- "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It's a terrible place for original research." I showed several examples of original research done for encyclopedias. One was the first use of the element symbols now used in every chemistry book.
- "everyone's understanding of what an encyclopedia (ANY encyclopedia) is" ... "is not a place of first publication for new research findings." In addition to the previous comment, this view falsely separates the scholarly research which goes into producing an encyclopedia from the scholarly research of any other field.
- "Wikipedia should do what encyclopedias do best: to wit, experts should conduct research to generate new primary sources or write books to generate new secondary sources." I gave a long list of encyclopedia articles across several encyclopedias written by acknowledged experts on the specific topic. Traditional encyclopedias often ask experts to do this. Wikipedia is in the small minority.
- "An encyclopedia is a survey of existing secondary sources". I gave many examples where encyclopedias references the primary sources, and pointed to encyclopedia articles which are not a survey of existing sources.
- "[Experts] shouldn't address the public by writing encyclopedia articles". Excepting that experts do address the public by writing encyclopedia article, and have been for centuries.
- "Encyclopedia articles are the worst way for them to address the public." Excepting as Wikipedia shows, encyclopedias are often one of the first places people turn to for information, so it's a very good way to address the public.
- "Experts shouldn't want to write encyclopedias." Except that some encyclopedias are written by experts. Do you think the "Encyclopedia of Magnetic Resonance" was written by non-experts? (Hint: "The existence of this large number of articles, written by experts in various fields, is enabling the publication of a series of EMR Handbooks on specific areas of NMR and MRI.")
Your statements are definitely contra-factual to how other encyclopedias work, as you make statements for which counter-examples are easily found. Your understanding of the goals and purpose of an encyclopedia seem based solely on your understanding of the goals, purpose, and operation of Wikipedia.
Do you have any evidence to back your claims? Otherwise I must conclude that you don't know what you are talking about.
From what I can tell, the only encyclopedia you have that really refutes my argument is an encyclopedia of science fiction. When I asked you to pin down what original research the Encyclopedia of Physics hosts, you provided examples of things that are also fine on Wikipedia.
How bizarre. The one claim of your which I mostly agree with is that there are better ways to disseminate new scientific research than through an encyclopedia. Yet this is the one you insist on bringing up again.
What I say is that original scholarly work includes developing new synthesis of how to interpret existing information. This new work definitely has a place in (some) encyclopedias.
Ha! I just looked up the Wikipedia article on "Encyclopedia." It agrees with me, saying "The second half of the 20th century also saw the publication of several encyclopedias that were notable for synthesizing important topics in specific fields, often by means of new works authored by significant researchers."
That directly and explicitly counters your argument that encyclopedias categorically do not have original content.
To some degree it's irrelevant "what an encyclopedia is or is not" - what's important is what wikipedia is. Gutting wikipedia to slavishly adhere to a dictionary definition wouldn't help anyone.
There is no strict dictionary definition of an "encyclopedia." It's a broad category which includes works which have original research, which aren't organized alphabetically (or even with specific 'articles'), which are written by experts or by non-experts, and so on.
Nothing in what I said was meant to suggest changing much less gutting Wikipedia. It was to say that the concept of an encyclopedia is very broad, and includes both Wikipedia and encyclopedias with policies which are directly counter to some of Wikipedia's policies.
The true waste would be taking valuable research and synthesize and hiding it in an encyclopedia.
It's not like it wouldn't be available elsewhere, right?
It goes research -> authorship of secondary source (journal article, book, magazine article, whatever) -> citation in encyclopedia.
Conventionally, sure, but Wikipedia would seem to offer an opportunity to fix the shortcomings with that system.
Why do you care so much about secondary sources? Because they're vetted. Why is that important? Because primary sources can be taken out of context, because people can't parse them out correctly, etc.
I would submit that both of those things are no longer safe assumptions.
Secondary sources can be fabricated whole-cloth and appear legitimate (entire industries, such as some branches of SEO, do exactly this) when they are not, and can even cite Wikipedia themselves. So, secondary sources aren't these bastions of truth that they seem to be.
The idea that primary sources aren't usable to the populace is also old. It's trivial these days for a user (who cares even the tiniest amount) to run a search and contextualize a source. If Crazy Eddie's Account of the Haymarket Riot is, after a fast search, the only one that has Xenu interfering then maybe it's not a credible account, yeah?
Moreover, having so many eyes seeing the same citations and clicking through them increases the likelihood that somebody who actually does have expertise in the matter can comment usefully.
If you can't trust the great unwashed masses to search out the truth of things given primary sources, why do you think giving them prechewed knowledge is any better?
The one promise an encyclopedia makes is that it is an effective prose survey of the existing literature.
You propose that an encyclopedia should, if it can, also set out to be a sprawling "book about everything"; a primary source when experts debate on its pages, a secondary source when an expert decides to write an encyclopedia article instead of a book, and a tertiary source the rest of the time.
The two goals conflict. You can't be an effective prose survey of the existing literature when any given sentence in any given article could be original research. The whole point of an encyclopedia --- a prose survey of literature --- is that you don't have to check every sentence to see if it comes from a reliable source.
So, I think I see the root of our disagreement here.
I'm not proposing that encyclopedias writ large could/should/would do this--I propose that Wikipedia specifically do this.
I claim that Wikipedia is considered an encyclopedia as that is the closest idea in mainstream use of what it is--and that now it's time to evolve further to better human understanding. There's no ambition--to use phrenology's phrasing--in doing anything less.
About 10 years ago, a couple of guys (the best known of whom was a bit of a fuckup) set up a web site with a trivial bit of software and in effect declared, "by soliciting anonymous unpaid contributions from the Internet at large to this crappy web page, we are going to build a resource that rivals the two-and-a-half-centuries-old Encyclopedia Britannica".
10 years later their site was not a footnote or a parable about Internet hubris. No, it was a resource that is in some ways better than the Encyclopedia Britannica in scope, in depth, and in some cases even in quality.
It is a breathtaking achievement. Our daily reaction to it (and pretty much everything else on the Internet) is a crystal clear metric of how jaded we are. How extraordinarily lucky we are to be living in a time where someone like Jimbo Wales can (by the standards of history) more or less pull something like Wikipedia out of his butt at random on a whim.
I think people need to get over what else Wikipedia could be.
If you're right, there's an easy (and productive) way to prove your point: take the Wikipedia database, which is provided to you and to the public under extremely permissive licensing, and build the site you want Wikipedia to be. Based on your comments on this thread, I suggest the name of your site not include the string "pedia". Maybe you want to build "Wikijournal of XXX", or "The Wiki Transactions On XXX".
Seriously. If that dude can make a Wikipedia simply because he got bored publishing web photos of boobs, anybody can do something similar. Get to work, and stop arguing with the encyclopedians.
No, it is now much harder to make a Wikipedia, for a number of reasons. To name just a few:
1. The Internet is bigger now. Being an average-sized fish in a small pond is not the same as being a small fish in an enormous ocean. Back then, being a professional blogger was actually doable and you could trivially game search engines and ad networks. The Web as a whole has a lot more resistance now.
2. There is already a Wikipedia now; there wasn't one when Wikipedia started.
3. Google wants to have Wikipedia's babies. Google does not want to have your babies.
4. An improvement that would be a great boon to an existing product is not necessarily a sufficient basis for a completely new project, particularly given the inertia outlined in the above points.
Overall, your contention here reminds me of suggestions like "If you don't like the law, go start your own country."
To clear up any confusion, I have nothing against encyclopedias. I have a fairly old copy of the Britannica on a bookshelf back home, and I used to love reading through them when I was younger.
Again, my issue isn't with encyclopedias--it is with the waste of potential for what Wikipedia has become.
So, yes, these are amazing times, Wikipedia is impressive, all glory to the hypnotoad, etc. Not arguing that.
There is no reason to go to all the effort of forking Wikipedia just to prove a point, and asking me to do so is absurd.
Let's ignore hosting. Let's ignore bandwidth. Let's ignore the amount of time it would take to duplicate that information. Let's ignore several "easy" (read: inconvenient to your argument that "you can just magically fork the datas!") issues I would encounter pursuing your suggested course of action.
From a practical standpoint, Wikipedia has become the place where normal people get information. It is the cache of human knowledge that is first hit when somebody wants to learn something new. I'm not talking about where you turn, or where I turn--I'm talking about Joe Blow. It seems to consistently be in the top few results for any search on a topic.
Ignore the encyclopedia bit. Ignore what it claims to be. Ignore even what it is. Pay attention to how it is used.
The de facto use of Wikipedia goes something like:
1. Person wants to know about concept X.
2. Person searches for X, probably gets a Wikipedia article.
3. Person reads article on X on Wikipedia.
So, it would seem that currently Wikipedia's use is to provide knowledge about X. The end user doesn't give two shits about the process that put that information there; or how reliable it is; or whether it is sourced primarily, secondarily, or made up entirely.
The end user just wants knowledge.
So, either one believes that Wikipedia has perfected the accomplishment of that mission (in which case I think you are obviously wrong), or one believes that Wikipedia has the capacity to be improved to meet that goal.
Are you going to take a hard line that Wikipedia is perfect in its accomplishment of its de facto use case? Are you going to argue that good is good enough?
EDIT: I'm not going to launch into how wasteful it would be to split up mindspace/SEOspace by creating another wiki. Suffice it to say that a mree policy change on Wikipedia could accomplish all this, while in the forking case you'd have all those "easy" problems to solve, plus promotion to get people (and lots of them!) involved, plus making sure people don't just default to Wikipedia anyways, etc.
The SEO implications of relaxing Wikipedia policies is a can of worms that I have mercifully kept sealed on this thread; take my word for it that Google's deference to Wikipedia is a far bigger burden to the project than a boon.
Late: I modded you up from grey; couldn't disagree with you more, but that doesn't make you crazy.
Would be interesting to see know if there is special-case code in the Googles for that reason--I'm as sure we'll never know as I am that it is the case.
Anyways, would you mind elaborating on your disagreement? I'm pretty sure it's a fundamental difference in views that we'll have to agree to disagree on, but I'd like to know if you find my reasoning suspect. Thanks!
(as for the crazy: I don't mind being unpopular, provided I can justify my position--that's why good discussion [as we've had here] is so helpful.)
That's truly begging the question. Wikipedia is a survey of secondary sources, but it's much too much to claim that all encyclopedias need to be. As others have pointed out, many encyclopedias include references to primary research and primary research itself. Indeed, the first encyclopedia included new material never before published.
I'm not sure where you're getting your definition. It's not how Wikipedia itself describes encyclopedias. In fact the term "secondary sources" does not appear in that article at all.
In contrast, this sentence does appear: "The second half of the 20th century also saw the publication of several encyclopedias that were notable for synthesizing important topics in specific fields, often by means of new works authored by significant researchers."
The reason for doing it that way is that the bar to "facts" entering the mainstream is significantly higher (i.e. peer review, editorial review, etc.) as opposed to "what some WP editor let through".
This is important because people do cite Wikipedia and there is more than one instance of a "fact" appearing in an article and later being cited to a secondary source that cites... you guessed it Wikipedia. :)
The important step that publishing material adds is peer review. An editor might have excellent credentials but other editors are not equipped to peer review their material.
FWIW I don't agree it is an unnecessary repetition of work; the published material is likely to be much more than a summary, with reasoning, and so is adding significantly to the body of work on the topic - which WP can then summarise :)
> This is important because people do cite Wikipedia
Well, yes, but even Wikipedia tells people not to use it as a source, but to follow the links in the article to the sources. That's one of the reasons why sources are supposed to be important.
Without being sarcastic, there is, and its the view history & talk pages. Although the other of the original article got in to a disagreement, his revisions and the arguments he had are now recorded for the duration of history. Personally, I find these pages full of useful information for more obscure topics.
I should also add, Wikipedia is the only place I've had a discussions with response times measured in years. That is certainly something unique.
I'm sure this would lead to arguments about how to verify expertise, but even if it only started with unimpeachable credentials that would seem like a start. Tell me very clearly who is providing the commentary, and I can decide myself if it's credible.
I feel like I'm rambling a bit, but really this seems like a wasted opportunity. Why recreate Wikipedia from whole cloth when it already has so much? I suppose that given the way it's licensed, you could always fork it...