A “deletion debate” recently took place on Wikipedia about whether or not to remove what looks to be a vacuous and self-promoting entry on a set of equations (apparently self-baptised by a collaborator and compatriot of the author as the “XXX Equations”). <\/p>\n
A remarkable series of interactions! I am neither a physicist nor a mathematician, hence I am completely unqualified to make any judgment about the substantive content at issue here, so I won’t. <\/p>\n
But I think I may be qualified (after a quarter century of umpiring Open Peer Commentary<\/a>) to make a judgment about the quality of the interactions among those who appear to be adjudicating the content in this deletion debate. <\/p>\n One observation is inescapable: Those who say (and sound like) they understand the substantive content under debate are the ones who are for deletion<\/i>, and those who say they do not understand the content are for retention<\/i>. <\/p>\n This is quite striking. I have never before looked into a Wikipedia deletion debate, but if this trade-off is not an uncommon one, the question that naturally arises is whether the quality of Wikipedia content (such as it is) arises because of or despite factors like this. <\/p>\n Those adjudicators who proudly state that they “don’t know what they are talking about but…” seem to cite two things in defense of deciding on a basis other than understanding and truth:<\/p>\n (1)<\/b> Wikipedia is not by or for qualified experts<\/a> (“peers”), but by and for “ordinary people”.<\/i> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Is this true? If true, what does it mean? Do ordinary people not need content whose truth can be relied on?) <\/p>\n (2)<\/b> The alternative to truth or understanding is “notability”.<\/i> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Presumably this means that even if something is wrong, if it gathers enough attention, it merits a Wikipedia entry.) <\/p>\n There does, however, seem to be some consensus against using Wikipedia for self-promotion.<\/p>\n Another striking feature of Wikipedia is that most contributors (whether authors or editors) seem to prefer to contribute anonymously. (I wonder why?) <\/p>\n In peer review<\/a> (about which I know somewhat more), referees have the option to be anonymous to authors, and authors (sometimes) have the option to be anonymous to referees, but both are answerable to the editors, who know their identities, and who are themselves openly and personally answerable to the entire peer community (including their authors and referees) for their editorial judgments. <\/p>\n There is no such personal answerability in Wikipedia. (Is that a problem?) <\/p>\n And without open personal answerability, and without the need to be qualified to judge content, hence no answerability to understanding or truth, what are we to make of “notability”? <\/p>\n They say that the ultimate goal of commercial “branding<\/a>” is to make a product’s name so notable that you are ready to pay just for the name. <\/p>\n I spend a lot of my time defending and promoting open access<\/a> to peer-reviewed research, and one of the chief incentives I cite is that open access increases citation impact (“notability”). <\/p>\n But citation impact is based on refereed work citing refereed work (not self-citation, or circle citation), and refereeing is constrained by personal answerability. (Could the growing spate of email and search-term spamming be a sign that free-floating, unanswerable “notability” may not be a value but a virus?)<\/p>\n There’s something to be said for a “CiteRank” version of Google’s PageRank<\/a> algorithm (recursively weighting citations<\/a> by the citedness of the citer, rather than just relying on flat citation counts). <\/p>\n I notice that someone “weighted” the deletion votes here by affixing the voter’s prior number of Wikipeditorial contributions; but surely we can come up with a more sophisticated algorithm than that, lest our self-generated busybody-metric becomes our self-validating ticket to “notability.” <\/p>\n Perhaps it’s safer to trust a mindless algorithm for measuring “notability” (suitably designed to detect and expose self-citation, circle-citation, noncumulativity, etc.) than measures of “notability” invoked by minds that have cheerfully declared themselves to be without understanding or answerability to the truth. <\/p>\n