User:MjolnirPants/Voices

This is just a single example of the meaning of "wiki voice" vs "source voice".

Voices

The use of 'voices' helps identify from whence a statement comes. It is related to the concept of the narrative point of view, though distinct from it. While the narrative point of view concerns the use of pronouns ("I" versus "You" versus "They") and thus, the audience of a written passage, voicing concerns the 'ownership', and thus the origin of the passage. The voice conveys who is speaking. Is it the authoritative voice of the encyclopedia? Is it one view among many? Is it the voice of a single speaker? Voicing allows us to convey this information, and prevents the introduction of counterfactual statements by ensuring that statements which are very likely to be true are presented as facts, while claims whose value is more subjective or which are very likely to be false are presented as the views of a notable figure or group. Statements originating from Wikipedia (using 'Wiki voice') should be un-debatable facts, objective, easily verifiable and held to be true by the consensus in the field. When the truth of a statement is questionable, controversial, known to be false, or of a subjective truth yet the statement is important enough to merit inclusion, we put it into 'Source voice'.

Example

Using an article written by Rosa Flores for CNN about the use of lawyers by individuals arrested in Chicago, we can phrase it two different ways.

Wiki voice

In Chicago, less than 1% of arrested individuals speak to an attorney.

Source voice

According to Rosa Fores, writing for CNN, less than 1% of arrested individuals speak to an attorney in Chicago.

Deciding which voice to use

It's not always clear which voice is the best. Different editors have different preferences for how to handle such claims of fact. In general, if there is good reason to doubt the accuracy of a claim, we should use source voice. If, upon reading the article above, we were to find that Flores failed to justify the claim, and merely asserted it, we would be justified in retaining some doubt. We wouldn't know how Flores arrived at this number; did she exhaustively and methodologically pour over every arrest record for the past ten years, carefully sorting them into "spoke to an attorney" and "did not speak to an attorney" piles, then carefully do the math, allowing for carefully considered weighting and controlling for demographics? Did she grab a random collection of a few hundred arrest reports and quickly sum them up? Did she carefully pick through arrest reports, choosing only African American males arrested for drug or property crimes, in order to skew the numbers intentionally?

We can't say. And so, we can't state her numbers with confidence. But what we can do is present her own words, in her own voice. We can use the source voice.

On the other hand, if it turns out that the numbers were prepared by an independent investigative committee, operating under public oversight and using well-documented methods, then what reason remains to allow any doubt in the way we present it? If we can be reasonably confident of the truth of the claim, presenting it in source voice adds a spin that shifts the tone of the article from neutrality to one of doubt. After all, a reporter you've never heard of saying something is a far cry from the world's most well-known encyclopedia stating it.