Jonathanwallace

I am a New York-based retired attorney and software company executive. I have published The Ethical Spectacle, http://www.spectacle.org, a monthly webzine covering the intersection of ethics, laws and politics in American life, since January 1995. I am also the co-author of "Sex, Laws and Cyberspace" (Henry Holt 1996), an early history of Internet censorship. My Wikipedia contributions so far consist mainly of adding references to existing articles (for example, I contributed a section of cultural references to the article on the island of Kythera). I have just begun some translation work on pages brought over from French Wikipedia. I plan next to edit articles to eliminate redundancy and fuzzy writing and will work my way up to eventually contributing some new articles of my own. Still marveling at an organization and supporting technology which enable me to pitch in and do something meaningful if I can't sleep or have an hour to kill in the afternoon.

Opinions in Wikipedia biographies

On the one hand, it is useful to know that some historians or economists think Roosevelt's New Deal legislation helped end the Depression, while others think it was ineffective. Opinion definitely has a place in biography. OTOH, knowing that one or more people with a website think that someone contemporary is stupider than a plant, a traitor, etc. is not very useful. Wikipedia bios of controversial living persons tend to clutter with this kind of nonsense; as long as the nonsense is evenly balanced ("He's a hero! He's a goat!") it doesn't necessarily offend Wikipedia weight standards. IMHO, this kind of clutter makes many Wikipedia articles unprofessional and almost unreadable. As a thought experiment, try a Google search on "[person of your choice] is an idiot" and then ask yourself how quoting such opinions in a biography advances our knowledge of the person, or accomplishes any other purpose of an encyclopedia. For example, a search on "the pope is an idiot" produces numerous pages with that exact phrase, first among them a very entertaining post at www.insanityreport.com which does not belong in an encyclopedic bio of Pope Benedict XVI. But then what is the utility of knowing that The New Republic ran an article calling Joseph_C._Wilson a "nobody"? Perhaps we could adopt a rule that opinions, expressed as epithets, don't belong in a Wikipedia bio if they could conceivably be applied by some commentator to every public figure and communicate nothing about the particular individual. Thus, the opinion "did not end the Depression" passes the test, as it is a specific criticism of Roosevelt, while the opinion that someone is an "idiot" fails, because potentially applicable to anyone.

Best machine translation ever

From the originally French language bio of UFO maven Aimé Michel: "This match is a plethora of unique phenomena since the Enlightenment!"

Later--Sadly but appropriately gone from the article.

Here's another one found on WP:Pages needing translation into English: "Cruel Thursday of abundance", referring to a medieval peasant's revolt. No English Ghits so its an artifact. Makes me want to formulate phrases like "Every day in Manhattan is a cruel Thursday of abundance".

Attributing book titles to poems

This is a really trivial gripe inspired by Sailing to Byzantium. Can we please not say a book title is derived from a poem unless it consists of four or five unique words identical to a phrase in the poem? McCarthy's "No Country For Old Men" is almost certainly derived from Yeats, Roth's "The Dying Animal" not so definitely. And Bruce Sterling's "Holy Fire" was not; he told me so.

Bios of living people

I spent some time recently on the WP:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard debating the deletion of accurate, well sourced information from the bios of living people. In general, I think a fear of being borderline libelous, expressed in WP:BLP, has mushroomed into a protectiveness of living people that can be quite un-encyclopedic. An extreme example was a college professor arrested and charged with the rape of a baby (I kid you not). Arguments were made that the article gave the charges undue weight, etc. For a short time, the article existed with biographical information about his career and publications, and a cryptic statement that he no longer is a professor at his university, but no explanation why. The solution in this case was speedy deletion of the article, which had only been added after his arrest. In other cases, the majority (or most outspoken) impulse on the board was to protect one professor against intemperate, bigoted remarks he made, and defended, which had been widely publicized; another against an unfortunate situation in which, due to the fraud of a collaborator, she entered into an agreement with a federal agency under which her research would be monitored; a third against any mention of the arrest of a spouse. Read enough of these debates, and you may be left with the impression that we are applying a WP:BLPNiceness standard--which, as you can see from the red, does not exist. For an example of the extension of this Niceness to the bio of a dead person, see Marc Blitzstein, where until I edited it recently, all mention of his murder by sailors he picked up in Martinique in 1964 had been excised sometime around 2008.

What makes these debates such an "ethical spectacle" is that we rarely confront what we are really talking about: under which (if any) circumstances Wikipedia policy demands the deletion of accurate, reliably sourced information about a subject. Instead, these battles tend to be fought over subsidiary issues. Hence arguments I have seen that Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is not a reliable source, or that references to highly publicized incidents should not be covered because the subject is "notable" only for scholarship, or that an incident is not important because it happened some years ago. I find this last particularly amusing, because I have just been editing Liturgy (ancient Greece), in which the assertion is made that Lycurgus created the "misthos" policy to sideline his more showy rival, Cimon. Under the "notable for one thing only" criterion, the Ward Churchill article should not mention his unfortunate blurt about 9/11 victims, because he was previously notable only for Native American studies. And, if we are applying "Niceness" criteria to dead people as well, the Henry Adams article should not mention the suicide of his wife Clover. After all, Henry was notable for his writing --and he saw fit not to write about her death (or indeed her existence, or his marriage) in his autobiography.

Ethnicity

I got involved in one discussion, settled amicably, about whether to refer to someone's ethnicity in the fourth and fifth words of the first sentence of the bio, as in "Joe Botz, a Jewish American...." There is a lot of that out there, and people who put a lot of time and energy into tagging people's ethnicity, and edit wars, and even people getting banned from editing. Because of the anonymity tolerated at Wikipedia, it can be hard to determine anyone's motives, but often you can get a sense of things by looking at the history of their edits and the talk pages on which they've participated. Though I'm not 100% sure, the person I had a controversy with seemed to be proudly claiming whomever possible for the Jews. Nevertheless, we live in a volatile world where a lot of bigotry still simmers below the surface. It can be expressed sometimes in factual assertions which are inappropriate to the discussion. Remember the film "Ordinary People"? Mary Tyler Moore is told her son is seeing a psychiatrist, and inquires, "Jewish doctor?"

It is easy to find gross and overt bigotry in discussions here, such as a comment on the talk page for the Jewish American article in which someone reanimates the tired old idea that these recently arrived Jews are here taking "our" livelihoods and our education. Bigotry gets inserted into articles a lot as vandalism, too. I edited the Romany people article and keep it on my watchlist. Once or twice a month, someone adds a comment insulting the Romany; it is promptly deleted by the rest of us.

In a world where respect and equality are still constantly being negotiated, I question tagging the ethnicity, at least at the very top of the article, of people whose notability has little or nothing to do with ethnic background. A Talmudic scholar or an employee of the Anti-Defamation League? Relevant. A professor specializing in a secular topic who happens to have written one or two essays about Judaism, or mentioned Passover celebrations on his blog? Not so much.

I am Jewish American and proud to be. But I am also secular, a lawyer, a retired software executive, author of books, publisher of "The Ethical Spectacle", and, most recently, avid Wikipedia editor. If my bio (I am probably not notable enough to have one here, which is fine) began, "Jonathan Wallace, a Jewish American..." I would be distressed. The positioning of the words indicates it is the single most important thing you can say about me--and IMHO, it isn't.

Later--For someone's hilarious attempt to score a point on this never-ending debate, see Judaism and Bus Stops.

Anonymity

The right to communicate anonymously is a well-recognized First Amendment principle (I wrote a paper for the Cato Institute about it a long, long time ago). What this means, however, is that the government cannot require you to attach your name to your speech. It doesn't require any of us with a printing press, or a web site, to publish anonymous speakers; its a personal choice.

At The Ethical Spectacle, which I have edited since 1995, my policy is to publish anonymous statements of opinion of every political stripe, so long as they do not promote violence or hatred.

That said, I question what the public policy and ethical reasons are for allowing so-called "IP users" to edit Wikipedia. Setting up an account here, still preserves a high level of anonymity (using your own name here, as I originally did because I didn't know any better, is discouraged). If you were required first to have an account before you could edit an article, it would still be the encyclopedia "anyone can edit", but we would screen out most of the noise and nonsense.

Just in the past twenty-four hours, one anonymous IP address substituted a photo of a vagina for Tina Turner's picture, and another one added a "We don't want you in Vermont!" rant to the talk page for Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. All of the offensive anti-Romany comments I mentioned in the prior section, came from IP's.

Requiring an account would prevent most impulsivity, as well as deterring drunk (and very stupid) people from editing. It is not clear to me what valid content or contributions we would lose, if people were unable to participate as IP's and had to set up an anonymous account instead.

On the other hand, kudos to Wikipedia for the high level of community and accountability maintained here. It may be that the final reason to let IP's edit is more a practical than an ethical one: they can't do any permanent damage, because the rest of us are watching. Wikipedia is an example of an Internet community whose tone is actually not dominated by the lowest common denominator. Even keeping track of IP numbers creates some deterrence of bad behavior. Compare Craigslist's "flag and delete" policy, under which an undisclosed (but apparently vanishingly small) number of anonymous trolls (or just one, gaming the system) can delete any posting without explanation, and without leaving any trace (not even IP number).

POV Quilts

A "POV Quilt" (phrase I just invented) is an article, which, edited by people of opposing viewpoints, never achieves a neutral point of view (WP:NPOV). Here is a made up example:

Joe Botz is one of the smartest people who ever lived. Some people think he is stupid. ABC News called Joe Botz "an original American who has made a large contribution." However, Fox News responded that "if Joe Botz was any stupider, they would have to water him". CBS News, however, said that Fox "does not know what it is talking about".

This is one of the drawbacks of the encyclopedia "anyone can edit": the failure to achieve a consistent tone in an article about a controversial person or idea. For examples of POV quilts, see Public image of Sarah Palin and Joseph C. Wilson. These kinds of accretions happen through scattershot "point/counter point" editing. See an assertion you don't like? Add one which counters it. The problem is that readers genuinely seeking information are likely to be confused, or to lose interest; some of these articles grow beyond any reasonable length as proponents and adversaries add more material.

The solution is for people like you and me to comb through these articles (perhaps when the initial furor has died down) and, while preserving all relevant and encyclopedic information, to put them into a single voice. I copied the Joseph C. Wilson bio into my userspace, and hope to do exactly that, sometime soon. One beneficial side effect: it should come out a whole lot shorter.

Later. After writing this, I found a good example at Cloward-Piven Strategy (which I then rewrote to eliminate its quilt like qualities). Someone had added that a particular commentator blamed Cloward and Piven for the bankruptcy of New York City in 1975. To which someone else had added that most other commentators, don't, blaming the city's mismanagement etc.

Polls

I have an issue with inclusion of poll results in most Wikipedia articles because I think they are usually used to support the truth of an assertion. This just came up in the 2011 Tucson shooting where a Quinnipiac poll is being used to indicate that most people don't think that there is a connection between violent rhetoric and the actual assault.

If the only point of the assertion is what "most people think", I question its relevance to virtually any Wikipedia article not itself about public opinion or polling. Is the Pope's international approval rating important to his bio? A poll indicating that x% of people think Lincoln is the most important president ever, or Y% have never heard of him, would be of minimal interest in the Abraham Lincoln bio. Inclusion of poll information in such articles is not really "encyclopedic".

On the other hand, postulate a statement in John F. Kennedy assassination that z% of Americans think there was a second gunman. The key words are really "there was a second gunman", and not "Z% of Americans think..." The information has almost certainly been included for its perceived probative nature, and not its insights about public opinion. The problem is that it has no probative value whatever. If Joe Botz is not an expert on the Kennedy assassination, inclusion of his opinion would be reverted by any rational editor in a second as not a reliable source. Citing a poll in an article, treats some hundreds of Joe Botzes collectively as expert, when individually they are not.

My first article

I am proud to contribute my first Wikipedia article, What is a Nation?, on Ernst Renan's 1882 essay. I have also done extensive editing on Freud and Religion and Religious Toleration.

The ethics of reversion

The "undo" button next to someone else's edit is a very useful tool, which (like certain real world weapons) is best used sparingly. Keep it holstered, and it has a deterrent effect. If we all start drawing it all the time, the streets of Wikipedia will run red.

Personally, I have an aversion to reverting other people's edits and have only clicked "undo" in two situations: when people added juvenile, drunken or bigoted matter to articles, or unsourced contentious material about living persons. I have re-worded and edited much material which I felt was poorly presented, in order to save other people's work, even stuff which I personally wouldn't have put in the article at all. I have sourced statements with which I personally disagreed, rather than take the easy out and delete them as unsourced.

We often go to a lot of effort adding information to an article, researching, checking reliability of sources, writing. When another editor clicks "undo" without an edit summary or with a brief statement like "probably UNDUE", its tempting to click the revert button yourself, which constitutes edit warring and can lead to everyone being blocked from editing Wikipedia. If, instead of engaging in battle, you attempt a good faith edit to meet the other editor's usually cryptic suggestions, you can wind up jumping through hoops, making several efforts to save the material only to be reverted again and told, in another cryptic summary, that its still not good enough.

I prefer the philosophy expressed in this editor essay, which says to

revert a good faith edit only after discussing the matter. A reversion can eliminate "good stuff," discourage other editors, and spark an edit war. So if you feel the edit is unsatisfactory, then try to improve it, if possible – reword rather than revert.

Undue uses of "Undue"

Editors here accuse each other a lot of violating undue weight standards. As I write this, I am involved in a situation where two editors are claiming that the addition of a two sentence section to an article with thirty three sections violates WP:UNDUE. This lies at the outer limits of the argument, which is more frequently encountered when an article is very short in the first place. Then people like to say, often wrongly but with a little more logic, that the addition of one well-sourced critical paragraph to a four paragraph article overbalances the "good" information. There is also a debate on one of the noticeboards I follow in which some editors are claiming that any mention of recent police disciplinary problems, and allegations of racism and police brutality, in a particular Western city (sourced to the local million-circulation newspaper) violate the standard. A similar frequently encountered argument is that any mention of negative information, no matter how brief, transforms an article into a coatrack (a highly colorful and amusing metaphor which is not, however, an official Wikipedia standard).

WP:UNDUE gets a lot of abusive invocations, and every editor should go back and read it again. The section, which is official Wikipedia policy, begins:

Neutrality requires that each article or other page in the mainspace fairly represents all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint. Giving due weight and avoiding giving undue weight means that articles should not give minority views as much of or as detailed a description as more widely held views. Generally, the views of tiny minorities should not be included at all.

The policy notes that "discussion of isolated events, criticisms, or news reports about a subject may be verifiable and neutral, but still be disproportionate to their overall significance to the article topic. This is a concern especially in relation to recent events that may be in the news." It also cautions "undue weight can be given in several ways, including, but not limited to, depth of detail, quantity of text, prominence of placement, and juxtaposition of statements."

There is an interesting section paraphrased from Jimbo Wales which I have sometimes seen cited on the noticeboards:

• If a viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to substantiate it with reference to commonly accepted reference texts;
• If a viewpoint is held by a significant minority, then it should be easy to name prominent adherents;
• If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small (or vastly limited) minority, it does not belong in Wikipedia regardless of whether it is true or not and regardless of whether you can prove it or not, except perhaps in some ancillary article.

I take the foregoing mostly as a guide to the right way to keep information in an article. Some editors invoking WP:UNDUE appear, however, to be using it to keep information out. This sometimes verges on censorship. It also violates another Wikipedia policy, WP:PRESERVE which states a philosophy I enthusiastically endorse and which more than anything drew me here in the first place: "Try to fix problems...preserve appropriate content". We are here to present information neutrally, not to protect article subjects against reliably sourced negative information and "significant minority" viewpoints.

Apropos of nothing

I just edited Icelandic banana production.

Intersection articles

Many problematic Wikipedia articles stand at the intersection of two or more ideas. You can spot these because much of the time the title includes a preposition: Judaism and Bus Stops, Mass killings under Communist regimes. Sometimes there is an adjective-noun combination such as Somalian genocide. An article may connect three concepts, such as Jewish lawyer stereotype or Icelandic banana production. (Probably even more.) Many of these intersection articles are lists of people by ethnicity and occupation, such as List of Jewish athletes.

Mass killings under Communist regimes is an interesting case study of the problem. I propose the two part "Tuesday" test for such articles: what distinguishes this article from one entitled "Mass killings on Tuesdays"? The answer here is that the author thinks (or, one hopes, can quote reliable sources to the effect that) Communist regimes have a particular tendency to commit mass murder, while no mass murderers (that we know of) have a particular tendency to kill on Tuesday. Step two of the Tuesday test then is: does the article spell out this distinction? In this case, no. The author assumes that everyone knows that Communists kill, and rather than quoting reliable sources for this assertion, relies on classic weasel words in the lede: "Study has been made of states that have declared adherence to some form of Communist doctrine and have intentionally killed significant numbers of civilians, or facilitated their deaths."

A surprising number of intersection articles fudge the significance of the connection. In Wikipedia terms, the connection itself should be notable, regardless of whether the elements are separately. I suspect that if you have one notable element, you can connect it to a non-notable one, so long as the connection itself is notable. O rings may not be considered a crucial matter for an encyclopeda to cover, at least divorced from their role in space missions. O Rings in Space Missions may be a notable intersection (failure of frozen O rings was a cause of the Challenger disaster). If both elements are notable, even better. The probable prank article I discussed above, Judaism and Bus Stops was deleted even though reliably sourced to articles about Jews demonstrating against bus stops, placing charitable collection boxes at bus stops, etc. because the connection was not notable.

I found two sources on Wikipedia for the proposition that the connection between the two or more subjects must itself be notable. The policy on categorization says, "Dedicated group-subject subcategories, such as Category:LGBT writers or Category:African American musicians, should only be created where that combination is itself recognized as a distinct and unique cultural topic in its own right." This is an official policy, but applies to those little category listings at the bottom of articles. It is of suggestive value about article content, though. It stands for the proposition we should not have articles on Left handed bankers or Musicians who squint. I also found a user essay, WP: Irrelevant Intersections for Lists, which states: "There must be at least one (though, if it is not a neologism, there should be more than one) article, book, or documentary specifically addressing the issue of a connection between the intersectees and showing how that relationship is manifested, for it to have some notability as an intersection."

I have gotten involved in a few debates about intersection articles, and even when I point people to these standards, they respond by (rather drearily) citing Ignore All Rules or claiming that "the consensus has moved on". The real sin of including list cruft--connection articles without such demonstration of notability-- in Wikipedia is not that we will be deluged with trivia, but that we are promoting sloppy thinking in an encyclopedia.