Over my years of editing Wikipedia off and on, I've come to think this is mostly a bad excuse. The issue is that very few articles meet Wikipedia's real standards for citations. Yet new content provided by experts is often challenged for lacking citations, perhaps because of a sort of status quo bias.
What needs to happen is that there should be collaboration between Wikipedia insiders who know the Wikipedia system and subject matter experts who have valuable information to add.
Worse, the demand for citations is often just absurd. There's a big difference between "this is a controversial claim that might need citations" and "no one has yet bothered to look in a basic textbook for citations."
There are real reasons why experts can't just come in and say "do it my way" but the response has to be geared towards saying "how do we take advantage of your knowledge without forcing you to learn arcane policies?"
Update: As for identifying experts, that's not altogether obvious. But if an article is an absolute mess, there should be a low bar for cleanup. If the article is in decent shape, then presumably someone is running around with a bit of subject matter knowledge, and can coordinate. Think about any area you know something about: how quickly can you distinguish someone who generally is on target from someone who doesn't have a clue?
I was thinking about this the other day and I came to think that Wikipedia's rule about citations is this: Wikipedia does not want to be a source of information. It wants to be a collection/aggregation of other sources of information, and those other sources have to be accessible to others for all time (i.e. not a human being but a book written by a human being).
What I mean to say is that Wikipedia's system is one that does not/will not give article editors credit for original content; it treats them as just collectors and explainers of original content. When the explainers start writing stuff that has no source, they then disappear and leave Wikipedia holding the content which is now unverifiable. And that's just not how Jimmy wanted it to work I guess.
When I look at it that way, the policy doesn't seem that ridiculous. It may be inconvenient, but that's like saying a stack data structure is inconvenient because you can't remove things from the bottom. It's just the way it is; it has advantages and disadvantages.
I agree that Wikipedia's goal is to be the collection of things that we know that we know. So we do need citations. But when an article is wrong and doesn't already have thorough citations for every claim, should we demand citations for every new contribution?
My point is really about process: when someone comes to us with a bit of knowledge, but no citations and limited understanding of the Wikipedia process, how do we react?
The model whereanyone can edit and see their changes live has real benefits and costs. It makes it easy to make your first contribution, but it also means that if an editor doesn't like it, they just revert it. Sometimes, maybe changes should go in a queue or something.
I come to Wikipedia, and dump a ton of graph theory on some page. An editor says "look, this isn't quite how it works, but it looks like you're trying to improve the page. Is this stuff you have citations for? Do you know what textbooks would cover it?"
Maybe my edits don't go live immediately, but it's better than the current situation, where they just get reverted by some guy spouting WP:STQ!
(That's the grain of truth the comment down below that Wikipedia needs to be more like git).
> But when an article is wrong and doesn't already have thorough citations for every claim, should we demand citations for every new contribution?
Ideally, you'd go through the article. You'd remove anything that is "wrong"[1], and find citations for everything else. Then, when someone wants to add anything, you can find a cite for it, or ask them to find a cite for it, and remove it if there is no cite.
This demonstrates why WP can be horrible - anyone doing this to any article would soon find themselves skewered in horrible WP processes. Good cites are mocked as POV pushing, hopeless cites are forced in by people with more time than you.
> I come to Wikipedia, and dump a ton of graph theory on some page. An editor says "look, this isn't quite how it works, but it looks like you're trying to improve the page. Is this stuff you have citations for? Do you know what textbooks would cover it?
Sometimes that's how it works. There are people on WP who are great at helping that style of new editor; finding them mentors or whatnot to help them with the process. it's hit and miss, sometimes it fails badly.
> where they just get reverted by some guy spouting WP:STQ!
WP has made some effort to prevent the over active 14 year old using tools to auto-revert hundreds (thousands) of edits per day.
I agree that many articles lack sufficient reliable sources. Only college or postgrad textbooks are considered reliable sources, but not great ones, unless written by noted and/or frequently cited authors.
In my opinion, experts should be sincerely welcomed to kibbitz on talk pages - not directly in editing articles - with a strong invitation to cite sources other than themselves. This approach, optimistically, will keep bias on the Talk page, and out of articles, and give experts a substantial real and perceived voice, currently lacking.
Yeah, but the talk pages are basically just sewers for a lot of articles. I look at a talk page and my thought is "god, no one will ever read what I write here".
What you can do is first start a section on the talk page about the topic and which sentences/sections could be changed. Then go ahead and make the intended edit on the article and then link to the section on the talk page in your edit comment. Then any editor who may potentially revert or have an issue with the edit will see that link and can go directly to that talk section that you started.
The markup used for the linking in the edit comment is the same as the wikitext markup. For example, an edit comment like this:
... see talk page for discussion.
would be marked up:
... [[Talk:Article name#Section heading|see talk page]] for discussion.
This might help start discussions about low-traffic article topics that would otherwise languish at the bottom of the talk page for weeks if not months.
Oh, that's another association for sewer that I wasn't thinking of. I didn't actually mean that the comments are crap or nasty, though they sometimes are. I just meant that it's a big backlog of comments that people would probably not read through.
The set of experts I'd like to invite to Talk page discussions would be published, widely cited authors, including professors, engineers, scientists, and non-degreed practitioners with a good reputation in their field. Publications can be academic, professional, and/or popular, IMHO. Peer review, of course, helps. Longevity helps. Professors who have published, and been cited, would certainly become seen to be established in their field.
What needs to happen is that there should be collaboration between Wikipedia insiders who know the Wikipedia system and subject matter experts who have valuable information to add.
Worse, the demand for citations is often just absurd. There's a big difference between "this is a controversial claim that might need citations" and "no one has yet bothered to look in a basic textbook for citations."
There are real reasons why experts can't just come in and say "do it my way" but the response has to be geared towards saying "how do we take advantage of your knowledge without forcing you to learn arcane policies?"
Update: As for identifying experts, that's not altogether obvious. But if an article is an absolute mess, there should be a low bar for cleanup. If the article is in decent shape, then presumably someone is running around with a bit of subject matter knowledge, and can coordinate. Think about any area you know something about: how quickly can you distinguish someone who generally is on target from someone who doesn't have a clue?