this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2021
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If the article in question is something that needs sources that are scientific. What if you want to update a page about a band (for example) you are actually in, are you then not one of the valid sources? (I think @[email protected] is referring to this).
In deed that was one of the thing I got in mind. I don't think the academic writing rules can be applied to any topic the same way.
The main issue is that it needs to be verifiable. If you do original research and write on the basis of your own knowledge, there's no (easy) way for anyone else to verify that what you wrote is true. The trust is on that one person who claims to have experience with what they wrote. @[email protected] mentioned the second main issue which is bias. If you're writing about a topic that is close to you that has multiple viewpoints, what you're writing is most likely going to be biased toward that view. Wikipedia can't just have "the truth" about a topic that people disagree about through consensus. It's job is to only list the different viewpoint and to tell how prevalent those viewpoints are.
If the topic is notable, you're likely to find a good source that talks about that topic, if you can't find a source for that (regardless of how true you think that fact is), then too bad.
Oh that makes sense. In that case I guess Wikipedia could use a way to verify "original source" of information. if they don't have that already
I think the idea is to try to get less bias. A lot of French MPs offices edit their MPs page, sometimes not even malicious but sometimes just reorganising critiques or whatever. Wikipedia has had to ban a couple of IP adresses because of this.
In a lot of cases that makes indeed sense, that if i create a personal wikipedia page and declare myself person awesome the awesomenest and emperor of the world that that will not fly. But academic writing rules can't be fully translated to be talking about people, or groups, or particular things. It really depends on the topic which ruleset you can apply (and i guess Wikipedia is trying to do that).
I suppose you could say that an academic could write a paper about it then use that as their source? Maybe a form of verified accounts could be implemented into wikipedia in a sort of test run.