Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-08-30/Recent research

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From the journal: "many people (and in my experience students) invest [Wikipedia] with a degree of objectivity and trust". I think that's quite far from reality. Even younger kids tend to be rather level-headed about Wikipedia and teachers will tell how to treat Wikipedia as a source in essays. Wikipedia, and the fact that anyone can edit it, isn't anything new anymore. --Pudeo (talk) 07:47, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Pudeo: Trust varies according to subject area and the depth of information being looked for, which the author alluded to. People might be quite happy looking up a small fact on Wikipedia to refresh their memory without taking everything they read there at face value. The statement doesn't seem particularly controversial given how much Wikipedia is used, and the author is not saying that Wikipedia is seen an unimpeachable authority, but that it is seen to have some objectivity. There is also the 2014 YouGov poll which found that in Britain contributors to Wikipedia entries were more trusted than journalists. Richard Nevell (talk) 10:09, 31 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for that very interesting link to the 2014 YouGov poll, Richard Nevell. I'm not that surprised, though it is curious how the editors of an encyclopedia that is necessarily a derivative of the information provided by those journalists can be considered more trustworthy than them. That derivation should reasonably mean that Wikipedia's trustworthiness cap is the value of the journalists' trustworthiness. The fact that trust of Wikipedians is higher than journalists either says an immense lot about Wikipedians (and journalists) or at least something about the poll participants—or both. I'd love to see a 2018–19 update to it. —Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 01:22, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
"pro Wehrmacht editors": I have never been pro Wehrmacht, nor am I even interested in the Germany military. I did, however, try to offer an opinion about Wikipedia policy on sourcing (whether I'm right or wrong is another question) on a talk page to try to resolve a dispute (obviously unsuccessfully), and for my troubles got quoted out of context without any right of reply before publication. But anyway. Regards, AustralianRupert (talk) 09:47, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Agree "pro-Wehrmacht" is uncalled for, and is not supported by materials presented in the case which made no such finding regarding any editor. Bri, would you consider removing this particular phrase, or at least indicating a direct attribution to the offwiki author so the term does not appear to be in Wikipedia's (or The Signpost's) voice? -- Euryalus (talk) 10:38, 1 September 2018 (UTC) Probably needless disclaimer - the request that this particular phraseology in the article be reconsidered is my personal opinion and not on behalf of Arbcom. -- Euryalus (talk) 11:20, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The research doesn't lend itself well to succinct phrasing which is needed in this review. The nearest relevant phrase I can find to the passage in question is "too many of the editors are clearly keen to see articles that reflect their own cherished, or at least uncritical, view of the Wehrmacht and its collaborators." I think "pro-Wehrmacht" is a fair and accurate condensation of that thought. I think it will remain as written. ☆ Bri (talk) 13:16, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the reply. Stahel certainly accuses some editors of being "pro-Wehrmacht," without offering much evidence. Charitably, perhaps that's a consequence of the need for brevity in his piece. I suppose my question is whether the current Signpost wording implies that the Signpost accepts Stahel's accusation as fact, or simply notes that Stahel said it.-- Euryalus (talk) 13:41, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It's already prefaced with "The author describes...". Are you suggesting further qualification? ☆ Bri (talk) 15:10, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that this wording is unfair to the editors here. Stahel actually uses the term "pro-Wehrmacht", but only in relation to "the notoriously pro-Wehrmacht J.J. Fedorowicz Publishing" company, not Wikipedia editors. He uses much more convoluted wording to describe the Wikipedia editors he focuses on, but the gist of it is that he sees their views of the German military as being outdated rather than actually advocating on its behalf as the term "pro" implies (e.g. "The problem is as much about what is written as what is left out and sometimes what is removed by editors acting, consciously or unconsciously, to preserve the myth of a ‘clean Wehrmacht’"). More broadly, the term doesn't reflect the findings of the arbitration case, or my years of experience with the editors in question. It should be removed. Nick-D (talk) 08:17, 6 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Belatedly, agree with Nick-D. The issue is the article's use of "pro-Wehrmacht," in The Signpost's voice, to describe editors named in the referenced article. Stahel certainly implies that accusation, though he doesn't say it explicitly. The Arbcom case outcome goes nowhere near such a claim. Of course it's up to the editorial group on whether to keep or remove the sentence, though as a passing reader of the Signpost I'd urge removal. But if the editorial decision is to keep this sentence, perhaps it could be amended with words like "editors who Stahel implies are pro-Wehrmacht" to make absolutely clear it is merely reporting someone else's views. -- Euryalus (talk) 08:58, 6 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, I would think it should be worth mentioning that a passage Stahel complains about having been cut, at the bottom of page 398, cited his own work as a source? He may have less disinterested motives in writing this than it seems. Daniel Case (talk) 20:51, 2 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

In the Stahel article (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13518046.2018.1487198), we can only find a non-critical timeline of the recent cup-of-tea-storm that occurred at en:wp. The key question was if Wikipedia has been used or not as a loud speaker to advertise a "pro-Nazi" point of view. The fact that all this tempest ended by Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/German_war_effort#Findings_of_fact is not mentioned by Stahel. In other words, this was only another tempest about another pokemon series: the so-called German Army "aces". Praising a quidam for "successfully conducting a car over the distance from Los Angeles to El Paso" is surely an access of fan-cruft. Even the porn-star wp-articles aren't going that far. But this can not be brushed as Nazi propaganda, whatever source is used to backup such an irrelevant factoid.

Moreover, it is largely surprising that, after being so vocal about historical context, there is not even the smallest allusion to the fact that large white-washing campaigns have been undertaken in the past, to allow the recycling of the defeated mass-murderers into murderers with our God on their side. MacArthur protecting Hirohito, Churchill protecting Kesselring, and so on were not isolated facts... but describing this situation as orchestrated by Wikipedia is too large a brush... and slightly anachronistic.

Stahel concludes by saying: "the best advice for students is not to risk Russian roulette on the Internet and instead seek peer-viewed literature from the library"... and just the next line, the same students are advised that "David Stahel has written four books about the Wehrmacht’s operations on the eastern front with Cambridge University Press". What a marvelous coincidence ! Pldx1 (talk) 08:44, 6 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]