Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check Archive …

This is an archive of past discussions on Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Help

Please help. I have a hard time explaining why some anonymous editor's insertion in Software patents under the European Patent Convention is either original research or not verifiable. See Talk:Software patents under the European Patent Convention#Original research. Thanks in advance. --Edcolins 17:57, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Can anybody help? The question is whether counting the status of more than three thousand records in a legal registry is original research. --Edcolins 12:46, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I tried understanding the problem, but I think you need to provide a little more background on it. From what I could make out, if the guy is adding one published figure to another published figure for the same data point, and saying that since the first one, the value has increased to the sum of the two published figures, that wouldn't be original research IMO. If he's drawing conclusions or extrapolating future figures from the existing ones, that would be OR. --Coyoty 21:27, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Here is the background. It is very likely not to say evident that the sysadmin is acting or believes to act on behalf of the EPO . This organisation has a long history of siding with lobbying efforts to extend patentability to the field of software in Europe. An undertaking in which so far they have failed over the years. For reasons which are not clear, Edcolins or on whose behalf he is acting does not want the fact to be generally known that the EPO in fact concedes only a very small number of patents in this field. These numbers arise from a publically available register which they are obliged by law to provide. On the basis of the sysadmins contributions it is absolutely clear that he possesses a privileged information channel to the EPO. It is therefore more disturbing that he does not contest the vericity of the numbers obtained from a public and official source, but their verifiability, as he personally would have no trouble whatsoever to verify or contradict them. The additions he does not like in particular are the following:

While according to the the European Patent Register in 2005, 85% of European patent applications in the field of electric digital data processing (G06F in the International Patent Classification (IPC)) did not give rise to a granted patent but were refused on various grounds or withdrawn by the applicant in response to the search report or substantive objections of the European Patent Office (EPO), some of them have been granted by the EPO since the '80s. At present, applications in this field account for 7% of the total number of applications to the EPO, but only for about 2% of all granted patents.

Clearly conclusions may be drawn from these numbers, e.g. that it is in fact relatively hard to get a software patent in Europe, and that it might not be worth while. Such a conclusion might not be in the interest of an organisation which generates its income from dealing with patent applications. But this conclusion is left to the reader.

Edcolins´ "contributions" may give rise to a more far reaching issue, to which I have no easy answer. Should professional or govermental interest groups be allowed to use Wiki for their partisan interest and public relations? Would it be acceptable that Microsoft provides Linus Thorwalds biography, the Chinese government writes the history of Tibet , the CIA defines the purpose of Guantanamo? I mean in Wiki? And if they are allowed to do so, should they be allowed to censor others?

This is of particular importance in the case of a contributor whose professional mission does not seem exactly the free (in the sense of "for free") availability of information being at the root of the Wiki project, but on the contrary to help the industry to collect royalites on what they consider the intellectual property and close markets. This may be a honourable profession but one that may be incompatible with the aims of Wiki and the role of a sysadmin.

Finally to his reference to the anonymity of the contribution. An IP number may say more than ´Edcolins´ I don´t see why the latter should give more credibility to a point of view than the prior. I can only understand that the latter has its importance when conceding sysadmin status and for that matter withdrawing it, but not when it comes to the merit of a particular contribution.SmallRoots

Well, I am afraid I'll disappoint you entirely but I am not acting on behalf of the EPO... Instead of making some sort of personal attack, I suggest sticking to the Wikipedia policies. --Edcolins 21:51, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply, User:Coyoty.

My point is simply that the second paragraph of the article Software patents under the European Patent Convention contains unverifiable data. There is no explanation as to how to verify the figures provided, such as "85 %".

As of today, the European Patent Register [1] (which is the official register to check the status of European patent applications and patents) provides 99314 pages (each corresponding to one European patent application or one European patent) [2] corresponding to the IPC class "G06F" [3] (this class can be said to contain all applications and patents relating to the software field). In order to get the figure "85%", what you need to do is the following: open the 99314 web pages and check in each page whether the patent has been granted, or whether no patent was granted because the application was refused or withdrawn. Count the number of applications refused or withdrawn and divide this number by 99314. That is original research to me. (In addition, some patent applications are still pending and cannot be take into account yet into the count, which makes the computation more obscure - no explanation is provided about this point).

My point is that this paragraph should be removed because it cannot be verified without opening 99314 web pages. --Edcolins 21:51, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Welcome back again. My point is that the numbers are verifiable. Sources are given. In any case running thru 99314 applications is less of a hassle than verifying the budget of DoD. I guess even a less than gifted Perl programmer would not need more than 2 hours. It takes scanning millions or billions of records to find out that somebody by the pseudonym of Edcolins spasms wiki with an average of 500-1000 posts a month. While I am sure that the "Special:Contributions script " was a lot more demanding to write, running it is not original research either.

You are not trying to enforce existing policies but to impose new ones which equal censorship.

On whose ever behalf you are acting, the nature and number of your contributions make it clear, that you do have a privileged channel to this kind of information and that you personally would not even have to know perl to verify these numbers. Your remarks are, therefore, clearly in bad faith. This is not a personal attack but arises from the facts at hand. Another evidence that you are acting in bad faith is that your pretense of quality enforcement is totally hypocrite in view of your own contributions which are not only redundant and verbose but clearly partisan and single eyed and at times simply wrong, and your recurrent removals of contributions bear the unmistakable signature of censorship. Half of the wiki documents would not exist if every body was asking where every single number came from and pretend a direct link to a separate source.

Evidently, your are not inclined to give up your battle for what you think is quality. We aren´t inclined to give up ours for freedom of information SmallRoots

IMHO it shouldn't be necessary to be a Perl programmer to verify the information. I suppose many readers have no programming skills whatsoever and would rather be frustrated not to be able to verify the statistical data without taking a Perl course. You are basically asking these readers to take your word for granted and just rely on it. Some are probably not willing to do so.

In order to fuel the debate on this issue, as I said briefly above, even if providing the data wouldn't constitute original research, several points have not been tackled and fully clarified: What about the applications which are still pending? What about the applications which have not been published? How do you verify that an application has been abandoned or that it can still be saved by one legal remedy or another? When in 2005 did you make the computation (given that the number of applications in that technical field the status of these applications changes every day - btw there are now 99355 applications)?

Even more importantly how can we verify the 2005 status of the IPC class in the Register while now in 2006? The European Patent Register is a very particular source of information in that the information which is contained in it changes every day and in that, as far as I know, there is no easy means to obtain a full copy of the European Patent Register database at one given point in the past. For these reasons, from the European Patent Register alone, we cannot verify in a reasonably easy and reliable manner the statistical information you provided. There are clearly many assumptions to be made and many obstacles to fight in order to verify the data you provided.

Yes, I am not inclined to give up a battle for what I think is quality. Freedom of information is surely important, but access to reliable and easily verifiable information in wikipedia is just as important. --Edcolins 10:17, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Then continue yours, we continue ours and we´ll see what happens. The above posting is really hilarious. Nobody is in a position to verify your totally personal assessments on many things. Your are not just asking others for verifiability but easy verifiability while at the same time you drown us in your personal opions. How easy is easy enough for your? Already your remarks on the method makes it clear that you have all the information at hand without having to learn Perl. Placing numbers in doubt which one knows are correct is bad faith.

Verifiability may be an important notion of quality. Another at least as important notion is limitation to the essential. Comparing your contributions to that of Britannica in this respect tells you are bound for failure. I wonder when you publish the pedigree of the poodle of the late EPO porter´s daughter.SmallRoots

Unpublished analysis is original research. If you're crunching the numbers yourself, even from published sources, then you are creating primary sources of your own. Your results would have to be professionally published before they can be used in a wiki article.

Coyoty 02:02, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

New proposal WikiProject Reader

I have made a new proposed project. WikiProject Reader aims to group people reading through sources to add references throughout Wikipedia. It's complementary to Fact and Reference Check. You could help by

suggesting sources (e.g. ones you find when fact checking an article)
joining and reading sources.

Hopefully we will be able to help Fact and Reference Check by leaving sources in place which you can use when you get round to fact checking the articles that have been improved by Wikiproject Reader. Anybody who likes the idea and wants to help please add your name to the project page. Mozzerati 15:38, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Scientific peer review

A scientific peer review has been started and we're looking for Wikipedians who are members of the scientific academic community to run for the board. If you want to give it a shot come over and post a little about yourself. New nominations are being accepted until the 00:00 on the 17th March.

The project aims to combine existing peer review mechanisms (Wikipedia peer review, featured article candidate discussion, article assessment, &c.) which focus on compliance to manual of style and referencing policy with a more conventional peer review by members of the scientific academic community. It is hoped that this will raise science-based articles to their highest possible standards. Article quality and factual validity is now Wikipedia's most important goal. Having as many errors as Britannica is not good–we must raise our standards above this. --Oldak Quill 18:12, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

References formatting

I'm seriously thinking about starting a Wikipedia:WikiProject Footnotes or something along those lines. When it comes to footnotes and references the articles on Wikipedia are an absolute mess and need serious cleaning up. It doesn't help that the old {{ref}} and {{note}} system was hard to use and very prone to falling out of date with further edits, to the point that there are isolated refs or notes that don't match anything or the numbers have gotten out of order. The Cite.php is much better and to that means I have created the Ref converter, which works to convert properly formatted old-style refs and notes to the new Cite.php. Of course, a lot of the old-style refs and notes were done incorrectly, and so lots of human hands are needed. The ultimate goal would be to zero out the What links here list of {{note}}, {{ref}}, {{an}}, {{anb}}, {{ref label}}, and {{note label}}, as well as eliminating inline external links. Obviously that's a hard goal to achieve, so we would probably be better suited to go for education efforts, i.e., educate users on how to properly use <ref> and <references /> so that, over time, new references and footnotes are added correctly and ones in the old style are gradually converted. Who's with me? (please echo to my talk page) --Cyde Weys 01:40, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

I've been doing a fair amount of this by hand (although I've been especially focused on articles with plain blind HTML links), and I've been trying to "educate" everyone whose path I cross in footnoting matters. I notice that there are a few articles that mix two sets of notes by different mechanisms, one for citations and the other for clarification of details; I'm not sure what would be best to do with those. - Jmabel | Talk 00:48, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

A significant part of my work here lately has been in reformatting references, but not in doing ref/note → cite.php conversion. I'd support any WikiProject that aims to improve the use of existing footnote technologies, but not presently one to the exclusion of the other. Such a large effort at this time could be very disruptive. User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:54, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, Clyde seems to be chasing his white whale of converting everything to m:Cite.php, no matter how inappopriate that is for a particular article. It's quite a destructive endeavor, to my mind; made worse by a robot that aids in the destruction. No matter how many times he repeats the largely false claim that m:Cite.php is so clearly better, there are many cases where Harvard refernces are much more appropriate. I guess this is getting close to a user conduct RfC, unfortunately. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 06:23, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Sigh. Yes. This is tiresome, when there is still so many uncontroversial uses of {{ref}} {{note}} to be converted, arguing with people who prefer Harvard references is a throughly foolish endevor, IMO. Having one system would be nice, but that's still a long way off. Until then, fighting with good editors is not a good use of anyone's time. JesseW, the juggling janitor 08:47, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

I plan to continue using the {{ref}} system as it seems substantially easier, but I see not problem with people converting them to whatever system they want; the two are capable of coexisting on the project. Christopher Parham (talk) 05:07, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

And I plan to continue using the cite.php system ... but not in a manner that replaces existing {{ref}} implementations, but rather on articles that have not been treated with either of the two systems. The unfortunate part of the proposal here is the notion that effort should at this juncture be expended in switching between the two systems rather than in getting one or the other system in place for articles that could benefit from it. At some later date, if the consensus to do a full switch is achieved, proper formatting in either system will be invaluable to robotic transformation between them. User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:52, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Comments on reliability of early 20th century source appreciated

See Talk:Warsaw Uprising (1794). An early 20th century Russian source has been found which has some controversial information (for example is using the term massacre and such). No other references (English or modern) can be found to collaborate some of the facts (and the POV) of this source. Yet the author defends it 'because it is a source 'and there is no contrary source saying 'it was not a massacre' (all other sources call it a battle...).--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 20:39, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

A robot proposal -- please comment

I often patrol the new articles, and I find myself constantly adding template:verify. Is there a robot capable of checking articles and tagging them "verify" if there are no ref tags, ISBN tags, or web links? If not, could someone please create one? Or, is there a policy objection to having such a robot? Thanks! --M @r ē ino 22:07, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Request for Comments

I have opened Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Cyde to try to resolve some ongoing problems with conversions of articles in other reference formats to m:Cite.php, where contrary to consensus. I welcome your input. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 23:18, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Please help test Citation Tool

The tool (semi-bot) that I have been working on, Citation Tool has reached a usable and useful state, I believe. The purpose of this tool is several fold, but the main (and implemented) goal is the detection and guided correction of errors in m:Cite.php markup.

As of this exact moment, the tool does the correct diagnosis of two types of errors. By later today, it should also be able to propose specific modified text that corrects the errors (sometimes requiring operator decisions). The web page for the tool also links back to the edit page for a given corrected article. Notice that any modification made based on the advice of Citation Tool is made under the user's own WP username. The two types of problems currently identified are:

Multiple <ref name=...> tags with the same name but different contents (hence hiding all but the first in the rendered page).
Empty <ref name=...> tags that occur before ones with content. Same basic problem, but this is especially easy to inadvertantly create if articles are reorganized.

These type of errors seem to occur quite frequently "in the wild".

The proposed changes made by Citation Tool do not change the referencing style or technology used on a page (currently: plans are underway to aid insertion of Harvard references as an adjunct to footnotes, where a mixed style is appropriate). So as far as I can see, the changes proposed by the tool should be non-controversial. The only possible issue I can see is that editors might disagree about whether a currently hidden footnote content is or is not better than the one that had been visible; but that's a pretty regular editorial/content issue, per article.

Well... the other issue is that the tool might be buggy, since it hasn't been banged on by anyone other than me yet. That's why I'd appreciate some other people using it, and paying attention to results. If the diagnosis or proposed solution seems to be wrong for certain pages, that matter needs to be identified and fixed. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 21:41, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Check Reliability

I assume everybody knows the Isuzu Experiment.

This link to The Isuzu Experiment is broken - that page doesn't exist and the site reports "no posts matched your criteria." The same link exists in the main article and lots of others on Wikipedia, making the fact that this link is now broken a demonstration of something in and of itself. Chester320 07:37, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

During the discussion Carol Dgill wrote the following:

"[T]he right way to validate Wikipedia and the strength of this open-editing model is to find some factually incorrect material and use the change log history to determine how long it has been there."

she also had the idea for a much harder challenge to you guys:

"If you really want to test: don’t make small one-sentence errors that anyone can verify with google. Make a substituantal contributation with an error in it. Most people go for the easy fixes – they are less likely to question three long paragraphs of well-written text."

WP:POINT Shinobu 01:35, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

As for the finding "factually incorrect material", I'm doing that - one fact at a time, at Talk:Warren Beatty/References. Feel free to join in, or better, pick another good (with a small G) article and do the same thing. Come on in, the water's fine! JesseW, the juggling janitor 07:49, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

An example of non-existent fact-checking

Have a look at this edit. A basic and easily checkable fact in the Prime_Minister_of_the_United_Kingdom article (the salary) was not updated. This is the sort of thing that justifiably gives Wikipedia a bad reputation. What is the point of saying that our articles can be more up-to-date than others, when no-one checks to see if they are up-to-date? This case was all the worse for being in an article that was linked from the Main Page. At several places around Wikipedia I asked "Can processes be put in place to stop this happening again?" - and from the Main Page talk I was directed here. So my question is how this project would have prevented this error from remaining in the article? Carcharoth 00:31, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

My own opinion is that there is almost no process that can be put in place that generally guarantees rapid recognition that changes in the world have made an article outdated. One thing that does help in cases where the next change will be at a predictable date is to do exactly what was done there in the edit you mark: note when the data will become outdated. Other than that, "volatile" data (populations, political office currently held by a living person, etc.) should generally include an "as of" (e.g. "as of 2006" or even "as of July 2006"), which can be periodically updated. But still. Any time we say someone is a record-holder, their record could be surpassed. Any time we describe the current constitution of a country, they could amend or replace it. Any time we talk about the number of people who speak a language or live in a country, it could change. I think most of us try to write in a way that will age (you don't see a lot of "eight years ago" or "in the last few months"), and more of it might be better, but things will always slip through the cracks here or in any other reference work. - 19:22, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

Is this project active?

So, i started working on what looked to be the current "biweekly special article" (Martin Luther King, Jr.) then realized it was not at all ready for fact checking. Seems that it has been listed since 2004 and was just an example. Is anything happening with this project?EricR 02:12, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Wikimania discussion on fact-checking

Paul Kobasa and I are coordinating a discussion session on fact-checking on Wikipedia, at 4pm on Friday:

I thought folks from this project might be interested in attending. My background is work with Wikipedia 1.0, while Paul Kobasa is editor-in-chief at World Book. I am keen for us develop a complete system to deal with this old chestnut! I will suggest a system of expert review teams, based at appropriate WikiProjects, working to develop validated versions of articles that have had every individual fact & reference checked. These validated versions would be available via an extra tab, and (unlike the main article) they would not be editable other than for updating by the review team. These ideas will simply start off the discussion, and I hope that the discussion will close with a consensus and some clear action points. I'm hoping that some of the Wikimedia software people will be there, with ideas on how to solve the validation problem. I will put up a Wikipedia page to continue the discussion, and I hope people from this project can help with that work. If you have any specific proposals you'd like to see me raise, please mention them here. Hope to see you there, or at least helping us online! Walkerma 22:30, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Where are the articles lacking sources?

I see that the "Articles lacking sources" category is in red, meaning that there is no such page. Please go through the entries and restore the page as soon as possible.--Desmond Hobson 17:57, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Log/2006_July_21#Category:Articles_lacking_sources for the decision, however wrongheaded it may have been. -- nae'blis 15:42, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

It seems like Category:Articles lacking sources is back... but for future reference, the same purpose is served by looking up the relevant template and clicking "What links here", e.g.:

Singkong2005 ^talk 06:16, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Biweekly Special Article suggestion

Sniper. I think with a good list of sources added into this article, it would be good enough to nominate for featured article status. I'll start working on this as well, if this project is active I'd appreciate a hand as well. --Daniel Olsen 20:11, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Test case for Wikipedia:Stable versions

See Wikipedia talk:Stable versions#Testing --Francis Schonken 10:58, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

When blogs are cited

I was going to add a comment to the talk page of Zaadz, saying "Blogs are not suitable as references" but I couldn't find this policy written down. Is this a policy, and if so, can we make it clear in pages such as Wikipedia:Citing sources? --Singkong2005 ^talk 06:19, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

See: WP:Reliable sources#Self-published sources. EricR 06:47, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks - I've left a note saying I was concerned about the extensive use of blogs as sources, and gave that link. --Singkong2005 ^talk 09:09, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Biweekly or semiweekly or bimonthly or semimonthly? And where is it?

I can't find the featured article "at the top of the page." Where should I look? Also, how often is it changed? Every 3-4 days or every 14 days? Biweekly can mean either. Sincerely, GeorgeLouis 04:37, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Biweekly means every 14 days. Twice a week is semiweekly.

You should look towards the top of the page. This link will get you closer, although not exactly where you should look: Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check#Current work ClairSamoht - Help make Wikipedia the most authoritative source of information in the world 05:04, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I will try to find it. As for the meaning of biweekly, you are half right. Biweekly, however, also means twice a week; therefore, a careful editor will normally change the word to "every other week" or "twice a week," depending on what is meant. I will have to admit I was confused by the term as used here. Are you saying that on this page biweekly means "every other week"? And how would the reader know that is the meaning? Still puzzled, your friend, GeorgeLouis 07:06, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check/Archive 4