The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia, Chronicle of Higher Education Options

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The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia

Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)

By Timothy Messer-Kruse • For the past 10 years I've immersed myself in the details of one of the most famous events in American labor history, the Haymarket riot and trial of 1886. Along the way I've written two books and a couple of articles about the …

[Malik Shabazz]

Regretfully, I haven't finished reading Timothy Messer-Kruse's book, but it does seem well-researched. It is also unfortunate that Paul Avrich, whose book is the standard text on the Haymarket incident, isn't alive to defend himself.

With respect to WP:V and WP:UNDUE, I stand by what I wrote, although I might have picked a better example than the color of the sky (which can be easily verified). I'm not in a position to judge whether Avrich or Messer-Kruse is truer to the evidence, and where Messer-Kruse's seems proud to be an iconoclast, Avrich's account is consistent with prior scholarship.

Short of blowing up the encyclopedia (and I know some of you would like to do that), what would you do?

This post has been edited by Malik Shabazz:

[iii]

Short of blowing up the encyclopedia (and I know some of you would like to do that), what would you do?

The biggest problem I see is that a published expert in the field was making factual corrections to an article which were then rapidly and reflexively removed. This was additionally accompanied by a condescending tutorial on Wikipedia's insipid rule-based culture. He was accused of vandalism for shit's sake! If the claim is that the factual changes were contrary to all the rest of the scholarship on the subject, then it should be easy for those advocating for the status quo to show how and why that is. If you disagree with his factual claim, it should be easy to show where he is factually wrong.

The discussion was shut-down before it could even begin by unnecessary rule-mongering. Instead of trying to engage actual scholarship or even simple fact-checking, you changed the subject and attempted to school an acknowledged subject-matter expert in the made-up vocabulary of Wikipedia. Rules that were developed as an ineffectual attempt to reign in the worst amateur proclivities should be of no concern to a scholar correcting errors. For example, the claim that there was "no evidence" presented at the Haymarket trial is a pretty remarkable one. When an expert offers a factual account that demonstrates evidence was in fact presented, what kind of scholarship requires outright removal of the demonstration or a parochial attribution as though the factual claim is only opinion? Either evidence was presented or it wasn't. Either these are factual errors or they are not. "Most scholars have reported that the sky was green in 1888, but the sky was blue." is a perfectly reasonable statement. But such would turn heads at Wikipedia! This is just a symptom of how fucked up and unctuous the community is.

But I can hardly blame you. This is the attitude that Wikipedia encourages its community members to adopt. It's the kind of behavior that will win you arguments and friends at that website. If you can argue with a WP: in front of the concept and [[]] surrounding it, you've "won" in the Wikipedia world whether or not the sky is blue. That's the crime that Wikipedia does to scholarship.