Talk:Wikimedia Fellowships/Project Ideas/InCite

Please clarify

Here is the Oral Citations project you referenced. What is the relationship between this project and your proposed project?

It is not clear to me what specific tool you want to develop besides a model policy set. Would this policy set give guidelines for permitting citation of an underutilized media type, i.e. oral histories? I think that is what you are saying but I want it spelled out more clearly. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:59, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Improving the proposal

Hi! I've been following and commenting on previous discussions about this issue and this looks like a fine project.

1. I recommend you explicitly commit yourselves to present working examples of the models proposed, like sample articles that would look like how each policy proposes. I assume providing examples is implicit in the idea of presenting policy recommendations, but it's good to be explicit about this for others who might read your proposal.
2. I also suggest you commit to develop all work and the report on public wikis, be it Meta (i.e. for the conversations) or Wikiversity (i.e. for the research), and avoid using private documents at all. Again, you might have been planning to do this, but it is not explicit beyond the conversations on Meta. Of course, by the end you can take the report from the wiki and format it as a stand alone document, but I think it would be nice to see this research develop as openly as possible.
3. Finally, it is very important, and might already be considered but again not explicitly, that the project also includes an in-depth investigation of the weaknesses in each proposed policy, for example by examining how easy it would be to forge citations.

Hugs, and congrats on your interest in developing this issue! --Solstag 00:14, 19 January 2012 (UTC)

Resistance

The direction English Wikipedia is headed in is not toward nontraditional citations, but toward excluding even relatively normal news and literature citations. Things like the elaborate cite templates and WYSIWYG editing seem of relevance, but it's not clear to me the person who would be recruited would have expertise to work with them. Wnt (talk) 17:44, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Primary sources or citation mechanics?

It is unclear at present whether this is to be a discussion of sourcing or of citation. There already exist a number of open archives for published and even pre-press primary sources (webcitation.org, archive.org, arxiv.org, etc.) We're best to leave that activity to them and work on improving our ability to work with such organizations and with cataloguing organizations such as openlibrary.org and worldcat.org, such as having tools for reporting and tracking metadata errors to them.

Improved mechanics of citation could certainly be worth persuing. It should be possible to have a single database record for each cited source document, which can be easily used on any WMF project. Efforts such as en:template:cite pmid and the related en:template:cite doi have value, but they really don't belong in template-space on a single language of Wikipedia. They should be language- and project-neutral central tools in order to facilitate translations and interwikis. A wp or wikt editor should be able to reference a source by a unique id (such as an ISBN) and pagenumber and have a link inserted to a fully-detailled metadata record. Templates such as those can present those records in visual forms which are accepted on those projects.

No

The epistemology of this project is fundamentally suspect, it attempts to construct a normatively acceptable subject that lies outside of a rigorous method of content verification—the "general public." There is no justification for the construction of this external subject other than "openness" which is a concealed democratic instinct. However, the democratic instinct that is concealed is fundamentally liberal in its methods. Unlike the 1970s attempts to reconstruct working class subjectivity as authority (cf: Wendy Lowenstein in the Australian context), the epistemology suggested here does nothing to reconstruct the external subject as an epistemic authority. See the failure of the oral citations project to conduct ethical interviews, acknowledge the traditional custodians of knowledge, or expose the methods that traditional custodians of knowledge have for determining their truth structures (see the rejection of oral citations at en.'s WP:RS/N).

Based on faulty epistemological premises the project attempts to conduct an attack on a body of work, scholarly knowledge, that does conduct itself ethically, acknowledge custodians of knowledge referred to through citation, and which is rigorous in its exposure of the epistemological construction of knowledge.

The hope to exceed the limits of "coloured"(!!!) knowledge indicate an implicit politicisation of knowledge on behalf of the project's authors, but unlike Lowenstein, there is no exposure of the political grounding of this. Instead, what we're left with is a mask that abuses all other epistemologies without indicating its own epistemology or its own political bias. Lowenstein has the good graces to indicate that here works are aimed to arm the working class for the overthrow of capitalism. InCite, apart from hectoring scholarly knowledge, and making some very bad puns about the racial construction of knowledge by the West does nothing.

InCite amounts to bully boy tactics about the construction of knowledge, in particular suggesting that open season ("unusable in their existing form as they constitute primary sources which Wikipedia's policy at present discourages. A method of putting this extensive wealth of information to use remains to be evolved.") to force the creation rather than the reporting of knowledge. This project suggests no method of epistemological verification of conclusions drawn—it suggests open season politically in terms of allowing users to construct politicised knowledge. Again, to refer to communist ethnography and oral history of the 1970s, the end point of this epistemology was the tripled restrictions of scholarly conventions in relation to ethnography and oral history, publication in a system of review, and veracity to the reports by proletarian and petits bourgeois respondents. There is no suggestion of a method of verifying knowledge here, and as such this would be inferior to both the system of scholarly knowledge, and to the various systems of traditional custodians of knowledge.

The issue of abuse of traditional custodians of knowledge lies centrally as the largest risk this project is taking on board. If Oral Citations acts as a pilot project, then I expect that this project will be both unethical and a direct attempt to valorise traditional knowledge without appropriate economic return to custodians of the community whose knowledge they have responsibility for. The method and metrics do not support such a high level of risk; and, there is little of the generosity of activist historians or anthropologists that is seen in similarly politicised work around the reconstruction of traditional knowledge.

I am reminded of Lukacs on the difference between Grand Realism and Socialist Realism, in particular the poor quality of Socialist Realism in the 1940s. Lukacs response in terms of the quality difference between a new form of publication of culture, and an older form, was that bourgeois culture had had hundreds of years to perfect its outputs, whereas socialist culture was relatively new. InCite is, in these terms, far too ambitious and offers very little to language communities that have access to wide ranging knowledge systems that contain epistemological standards—there is already a body of people who deal with large archival datasets, their name is "historian" and they have a system of verifying knowledge that exceeds anything you can put together; if wikipedia wishes to produce a new venue for the publication of this system of knowledge, or to improve the quality of amateur historians through the replication of the existing epistemic system, then good. But this isn't what InCite suggests.

In relation to language communities that do not have access to this, it offers (due to Oral Citations) a direct threat to their control over their knowledge, and in the case of the ethics of recorders of such knowledge if Oral Citations is the pilot study, it threatens the ethical coherence of such recorders due to the failure to adhere to standards of conduct that have been repeatedly discovered by—guess whom?—the scholarly community. There are best practice standards for conducting anthropology, sociology and oral history that prescribe ethical standards discovered the hard way. This suggested project has failed to expose any concern displayed in this field, and the only visible pilot study was vastly deficient in terms of ethics, production of knowledge, and respect for the reporting of knowledge held. Fifelfoo (talk) 00:56, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi Filefoo! I completely agree with the arguments you bring into this discussion. However, I think they're a bit misdirected. The people responsible for both the Oral Citations project and this one are not, as you so clearly observe, expert epistemologists or historians. They're just some folks who sense there is a significant gap between currently acceptable sources and the breadth of subjects that lack any reference in that pool.

They tried to experiment with some very simple ideas with the Oral Citations project, which, as conducted by non experts, is naturally methodologically unsound. But they also did not play the role of experts or tried to force their way into a reputable journal, which would be unethical. They just convinced some people at the WMF that this was a significant issue, and that no one else had shown up with a better or professional proposal up to that point, so they might as well do it as a non-scientific experiment. As far as I see this was much closer to taking pictures and filming their vacations through those places than to conduct ethnographical work, and therefore the standards of ethics are quite different.

Finally, InCite, although again with unsound vocabulary and methodologically flawed constructs, is proposing precisely to start a wider dialogue about this question, to which I expect proper specialists would be invited and consulted, besides the intellectual wealth of the community itself, which seems to include a few of those. The problems you point out are not the fruit of a bully boy, but of a naive one. And you pointing out those problems are exactly the kind of contribution that I think InCite was aiming for, and Oral Citations was attempting to provoke. Just to conclude, I am very thankful that you raised these issues here, and I do hope the proponents of InCite take them as well meaning and improve the project to address your concerns. But I am just as thankful to them, for their interest in taking the initiative to start this conversation.

Hugs, --Solstag (talk) 05:23, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

No worries, I had assumed that with the strongly constructed advocacy that this was the result of informed (but perverse) people who had previously conducted similar works on a professional basis. I very much would like to see a method of incorporating non-Western bourgeois knowledge into free information projects. I'm uncertain as to the encyclopaedic advantages of such knowledges (see en.'s WP:RS/N where I raised Lowenstein, one of the better verbatim oral historians; and where I feel Lowenstein was rejected for notability, weight, and structure, and for almost all "facts." It is probably worth searching out attempts to find "hidden knowledge." As I noted, I'm aware of sociological, anthropological, ethnographic, folklore, folk song and oral history attempts. Some were explicitly political. Some were massive ethics failures. Some were basically cultural ramraids where westerners looted somebody else's culture. There's a great deal more work needed here. And I am very very solid on the need for any oral or traditional knowledge structures to expose their system of verification if they're going to be used in free global projects as knowledges. Unless someone says, "You can tell she's an expert because X," or "We can tell she's speaking rightly because Y," how can we possibly believe her statements are anything other than the equivalent of my unedited blog, or the letters column of a newspaper, or this anonymous photocopy pamphlet I once got. Fifelfoo (talk) 10:10, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Though the proposal as written purports to give the expert, unpublished individual a voice, I expect that the door opened for this individual will instead be used by political activists who will bend it to their purposes. An activist group can point to their shared experiences to support a notional "fact", confounding traditional published sources and accepted authority. I could never support InCite in a form that would give activists free rein. Binksternet (talk) 16:49, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Well, not supporting methods for incorporating self-verifying oral knowledge systems is also politicised. As I've previously said in relation to Oral Citations, for language communities without a scholarly written tradition or with an incredibly weak one (the word "comprador" comes to mind here) the wikimedia movement would be better off providing such a community with a way to migrate their verified knowledge system into an online written form that serves that language community. And that means, basically, creating a system of publishing original knowledge where communities do not have the inherent publishing resources to do so themselves. In the English language there are enough open journal systems to not require this, outside of "sub-altern" experiences, and the sub-altern question is inherently political. Are we really in the business of providing blogs or uncovering the system of knowledge verification of homeless NEETs? Fifelfoo (talk) 21:03, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Archiving

This project idea has been reviewed, and declined for fellowship at this time. I'm glad to see the idea generated so much discussion, and from the conversation it is clear that the area of sources and oral citations could be very fruitful and interesting for further exploration. In the fellowship program's review of this submission, however, there were a few key issues that made us hesitant to take it on for fellowship at this time:

• Fit between the candidates and the needs of this project - policy discussions are not something to be waded into lightly, and are generally not an area where WMF gets involved, so we would want to be very careful about the design of a fellowship project with policy-related implications. Although the candidates have great Wikimedia experience in some areas and are clearly awesome individuals, we weren't convinced that their experience and background matched up with the needs of this particular project. And although edit count is only a crude metric for assessing editing experience, having a member of the project team with more Wikipedia edits is likely to be useful for a project like this, if Wikipedia is to be the key project where impact is expected.
• Scope and impact - this project is by definition not a neat or easy one, the territory is uncharted, and its difficult to measure impact or know what success would really look like from the outset. That doesn't mean its not worth doing, but this year the fellowship program, in line with WMF goals, had a selection bias for projects that are most likely to impact editor engagement and retention, and a project involving such deep issues as alternative sources would likely take time to bear fruit. It is quite possible that the end of the year there still might be no consensus, or even with consensus it would be difficult to say how the project outcomes would be made actionable. The participants did their best to address these questions, I know, but in the end this project might be just too big for the fellowship program right now. Its possible that narrowing the scope of the project would be useful, or doing some more preliminary research to provide more agreed upone common starting ground for a broader discussion would help here.

I'm archiving this idea for the time being, but anyone would be welcome to continue to develop it and re-open it when we have another open call for fellowships in the future. Many thanks to everyone who participated in developing this idea! Siko Bouterse (WMF) (talk) 23:43, 30 May 2012 (UTC)