User talk:Julle/Essays/The Patroller's Dilemma

Open Letter

Hello and thanks for taking the time to write such a thoughtful essay with such great context. I will mostly focus on "On verifiability" and the way I believe it's in conversation with this open letter

I find this context helpful in understanding why we've arrived at the current ruleset in the ecosystem:

• "Partly, this is a result of more than twenty years of debating what Wikipedia is and should be. What should an encyclopedia contain? What is kept and what is not is decided largely on two factors, notability and verifiability. They are intertwined and difficult to fully separate from each other: an abundance of verifiability helps notability in itself: look, see how much effort has been spent on writing about this thing – surely that makes it notable. To the degree notability can be decoupled from verifiability, that is primarily based on our understanding of what we want to be, our vision of the encyclopedia – an internal process.

• But our relationship to sources – verifiability – has, like marble or gneiss, largely formed under external pressure, as reactions to vandalism, controversies and mistakes. To patrol Wikipedia is to feel like one is under constant siege: there’s a never-ending onslaught of destruction, mischief and misinformation to keep at bay. When someone points out that certain topics are more likely than others to be shut out of the encyclopedia, patrollers typically agree that it would be good if something could be done about it. But the solution “change the standards we use for verification” tends to sound like “open a breach in the wall and let the attackers in”".

And I find this part of Fredrick's letter to be about the need to reconcile/reimagine the very idea that we can only keep threats at bay while keeping out alternative ways of knowing:

• "(5) It might seem like the rules are fair and equal to all. Citations, reliable sources, notable topics, or individuals — all these are crucial to maintaining “standards”. But how does the bulk of the planet come up with citations, print references, or online entries to back up its knowledge, when the information dirt-track has just passed them by? Most of humankind hasn’t even seen a reporter enter their village, doesn’t have a printing press for maybe a hundred or more kilometers, and has never been “researched’ men and women from the ivory towers — global, national or local — in all their history?

• Ours is a complex world. How is it understood in often monolingual distant parts of the planet, which themselves indulge in so much navel-gazing?

• (6) To argue that “oral sources” will bridge this knowledge gap — as has been done in recent times — isn’t very realistic, These sources would again need to be “mediated” and “curated” through some intermediaries, infomediaries, and other third parties. This again makes things unworkable.

• Instead, it might be more practical to simply accept that knowledge comes up in different shapes and forms in diverse parts of the globe. It doesn’t become credible only once it goes through a lab, a peer-reviewed journal, or a dominant newspaper."

In your illustrative example, you referenced a Swedish newspaper that was translated thrice over.

I think Frederick's open letter was trying to illustrate that in the cases of alternative forms of knowledge, there is no institution, no formal source, or digital paper trail to point to. Often the knowledge cannot adhere to any of our definitions of credible because most of these sources are backed by institutions-- newspapers, academia, archives/preservation. Power shapes resources which shapes institutions. Therefore the knowledge in our encyclopedias is informed by Power.

How can folks (helpful patrollers with little time and eager new editors) mitigate that chicken or the egg conundrum if credibility depends on institutional access? I agree that whatever we do to accept and embrace the fact that knowledge emerges in alternative ways should be informed by/aware of/ and anticipate vandalism, noise, and fake content. I am in awe of the brilliant history that informs how we got to the point of needing those safeguards in the first place. But as a new excited junior editor still learning about the movement, and as someone deeply passionate about alternative ways of knowing, I wonder what it would mean for us to have a conversation about tools and trust in a way that acknowledges that our definition of credibility is currently designed to keep out alternative ways of knowing.

If acknowledging that keeping out vandals and misinformation leads to a systemic bias in the content, is this a tradeoff we are willing to make? What can we do to imagine other possibilities and mitigate them? I believe this was covered partially in the latter half of your essay. I ask mostly because I definitely don't have the answers and I'm still trying to imagine the possibility along with other folks who have been devoted to this cause of making humans participate in the sum of all knowledge for far longer than me! Velvetfacts (talk) 21:00, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks!

I don't have any good answers myself, to be honest – my ambition was mainly to explain where we are, the easy part. I think there are things the movement could do to mitigate the current situation within the existing system, especially around getting better at recognising sources in other languages, building other systems of trust to bridge the language gap. But as for the issue when the sources Wikipedia has always asked for don't exist, my assessment is that the communities see this as a problem without a solution – something they regret but can't see how they'd fix without breaking the encyclopedia. I'm sure others have thought more about that than I have, though. Julle (talk) 06:16, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

We shouldn't underestimate how conservative Wikipedia is, at its heart. While the editorial method is different, at its core its built to fit into a specific existing system of information. Julle (talk) 07:26, 14 April 2022 (UTC)