back

by jjmarr·2y ago·view on hn ↗
I've made a decent chunk of edits especially in the area of reliable sources, so I might as well extend on what the article is saying.

First off, Wikipedia is pseudonymous. You can't cite yourself because anyone could easily claim to be a domain expert and lie.[1] Rather than verify credentials, it's generally expected that content be cited to a reliable source other than the user.

And it's also not just about being a domain expert, because experts frequently disagree. The ideal source isn't "domain expert says x",[2] it's "academic article says major views in domain include x,y,z".[3] The goal of this isn't to entrench a cabal, it's to ensure that Wikipedia doesn't spotlight fringe perspectives only seen by a few experts in a field. So, re; "Wikipedia specifically rejects domain experts until someone who knows nothing cites them elsewhere", that's a feature and not a bug.

Anyways, to add some more context, Wikipedia has a big problem with people citing their own content to boost SEO.[4][5] Even academics publishing peer-reviewed content do this because Wikipedia cites are now a tracked metric. I can't verify whether that's what happened in the original blogpost. But the average editor seeing someone that isn't very active come on and repeatedly cite a single book is going to get alarm bells in their head.

About citing a company on itself, I wrote a lengthy comment on that below.[6]

Probably the single piece of advice I'd give to someone wanting to edit Wikipedia is to understand that someone reverting your edit is supposed to start a discussion, not end one. This is called the "bold, revert, discuss cycle".[7] You're entitled to ask for reasons why your edit is reverted, and if you can't reach an agreement, you can get input from other people in the community. The main place for discussing whether a source is reliable is the reliable sources noticeboard,[8] but you can also get help editing at the Teahouse.[9]

Also, if you're a grieving widow trying to get your husband's article updated, I would recommend contacting the volunteer response team at info-en-o@wikimedia.org. This is a private email (instead of the publicly visible Teahouse), one of the purposes of which is to help people who are the subjects of articles to get errors about themselves fixed.[10] You can also use photosubmission@wikimedia.org to submit photos of yourself for articles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?fulltext=Search...

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40698952#40701045

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Volunteer_Response_T...

1 comments
> So, re; "Wikipedia specifically rejects domain experts until someone who knows nothing cites them elsewhere", that's a feature and not a bug.

the problem is that anything the media reporting on it has a reason to be biased about, will be extremely biased on wikipedia as well.

The goal of using secondary sources that summarize what others say is to prevent bias introduced by individual editors. As you acknowledge, the media can pick and choose which domain experts to highlight to spin a narrative. If an editor writes an article cited entirely to domain experts, they can easily spin their own narrative.

By basing articles on secondary sources, we can outsource aggregation and replace the bias of Wikipedia editors with the bias of the media.

The question I'd like to ask is if you see a better tradeoff, because we can't.