Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wikipedia reliability

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Video Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wikipedia reliability

Reliability of self published books

One of the emerging vectors that is beginning to compromise quality and reliability in Wikipedia is the alarming growth in self publishing. The number of vanity presses that assist authors in producing a "reasonable looking book" has been growing. In fact, the oldest of them all, Vantage Press is getting left in the dust now, as a new and aggressive breed of internet based vanity press has emerged. Books by these types of publishers are appearing within references in Wikipedia with alarming regularity.

After a discussion on WP:RSN, we have now started Wikipedia:List of self-publishing companies and List of self-publishing companies to inform Wikipedia editors of these publishers.These types of references need to be avoided before they are used in 10,000 more Wikipages. In many cases, the contents of these books are derived from Wikipedia itself, making a mockery of WP:CIRCULAR.

I suggest that we somehow promote the existence of these lists so that:

• People know they exists and hence avoid these publishers, given that they often show up on Google books, and just get used

• People can look for the uses of these sources in the thousands of (or even more?) articles in which they are used, and somehow remedy the situation

Help in promoting these lists and encouraging editors to avoid these books will be appreciated. History2007 (talk) 20:16, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

• I support this most strongly. My work on here is fixing bad pages and patrolling for POV, and all bad pages have two things in common: primary and self-published sources. The former is used to support OR and SYNTH, which is relatively easy to get taken out with a few good editors backing me up, the latter of which is used to give OR and SYNTH a veneer of legitimacy by writing it somewhere else first (or just printing a certain revision of a Wikipedia page), and is harder to expurgate. I came across an article the other day, Aerial Toll-houses, a heterodox doctrine taught by some (Seraphim Rose) in Eastern Orthodoxy, which may be the worst article I've ever seen on Wikipedia: what's the problem? WP:SPS. Also particularly bad are all of the theology articles that quote Scriptures directly to "prove a point" by private interpretation, which is inherently SYNTH. St John Chrysostom ^????_?? ^??? 21:48, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
• I too wholeheartedly support this. I know of a couple editors who know the vanity publishers very well (DGG and Orange Mike), so recruiting their help in compiling such a list would probably be a good idea as well. The Blade of the Northern Lights (??????) 22:55, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

If you could talk the other two editors you mentioned into taking a look at the list that would be great. History2007 (talk) 05:49, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

• I support wholeheartedly as well.--YHoshua (talk) 23:03, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

I posted on the village pump and someone suggested that we should add a link from the policy pages to the lists. I think that would certainly be a permanent way of making people aware of the existence of these lists. I have posted here and here so people can become aware of these lists. History2007 (talk) 05:49, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

• Support I'm surprised a list like this doesn't already exist! IRWolfie- (talk) 08:56, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

What is even more surprising is if you reverse search the links to see which pages use them, and will see that they are all over Wikipedia like weeds. History2007 (talk) 14:42, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

• I support this most strongly too. Good references are one of the jewels of Wikipedia; bad ones compromise the whole endeavour. A note: sometimes a self-published source can make an important contribution to the overall picture as I hope the memoirs of Len Fox did when I added his book to the Bibliography section of Nasturtiums (E. Phillips Fox). Relevant memoirs can form part of the historiography but even in such cases, it is important to note that the book is self-published. Is such a note about the publisher being routinely added to other articles? Whiteghost.ink (talk) 03:13, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

• There are two parts to that. One, SPS isn't intended to apply to autobiographies published through reliable presses (c.f. Zoya Phan's, which was published by Simon and Schuster). Outside of that, things like Len Fox's memoirs are very helpful for talking about the subject or something notable they did, but I too think it should be made more obvious they're self-published. The Blade of the Northern Lights (??????) 19:01, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

By the way, what do you think of "ancient sources" Blade, as discussed below, say 4th century material. History2007 (talk) 19:09, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Always a tough one. I think they need notes on who translated them, for sure, but I think with sources that old a note giving their age should suffice. Most people will pretty much know it wasn't vetted the same way modern books are, especially autobiographies and contemporary accounts. Of course we'll want to have modern scholars' opinions on those texts as well, but I don't think it presents the same problem as modern vanity presses. When it comes to ancient attempts at recounting history, like the Shiji or Fulcher of Chartres, as long as it's marked that their authors lived in the 2nd-1st century BC and the 11th-12th century AD respectively and supplemented with modern scholarship those should be fine. The Blade of the Northern Lights (??????) 19:24, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, and in many cases, Wikisource has ancient texts as well. I have been impressed by Wikisource, it has turned out to be a really rich repository of ancient texts in many areas. I wonder how we can inform people of that. History2007 (talk) 20:04, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

I like you already. There is Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikisource. There are two points I would like to make regarding ancient texts, Wikisource and this reliability project.

1. Wikisource has text pages with scans (e.g. s:On the Vital Principle), and text pages without scans (e.g. s:The Republic), and only the former should be considered reliable. There are many instances where a text on Wikisource is a dump from somewhere else on the internet, and then modifications are made by anons and nobody ever checked to see whether the change was appropriate. When scans are readility available online, the Wikisource community quickly verifies edits are good by checking the scans.
2. Wikipedia should not do 'wiki' translations in the Wikipedia page. Wikisource does translations - some say it shouldnt, but it is far more suited to the task. On Wikipedia pages, the vast majority of the edits are about the text. On Wikisource, the edits are primarily alterations to the translated text, which makes prior investigating translation decisions an easy task. For example, try to follow the translation changes of Brazilian National Anthem vs s:Hino Nacional do Brasil.
   Also, Wikipedia pages are GFLD/CC-BY-SA, with no thought given to copyright status of copied works, whereas Wikisource translations are on separate pages with copyright tags at the bottom, and they are often placed into the public domain. e.g. s:Balade to Rosemounde. For an small item like a poem, the Wikisource contributors feel that because the original is public domain, the translation should be widely re-usable, without legally enforced attribution. Good reusers will continue to give credit.

John Vandenberg ^(chat) 08:44, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks John for bringing up the Wikisource issues. I will later suggest a cooperation of some type with them. Sorry for the delay in responding... just too many things to do. Cheers. History2007 (talk) 20:56, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

• I support this entirely. Factseducado (talk) 22:42, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

• Suggestion. Bots. Any reference that ads a self published book will be flagged. --Harizotoh9 (talk) 04:56, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Eventually yes. But as a start I will just do a quick program to generate a report, before we modify articles. As below, what I need however is a better list of the ISBN codes for the self-publishers. That is the stumbling block at the moment. There are various lists on the web, it is the question of finding and organizing them. They can also be inferred from books, but that can take time. But there are only a few publishers here, so it is not a huge task. History2007 (talk) 08:18, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Are you aware of Wikipedia:Republishers? Nageh (talk) 19:37, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

I just became aware of it. I think it is a form of wiki-mirror and I would support that merge. Thanks. History2007 (talk) 19:51, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Well, no! That list includes republishers of Wikipedia content, in book form, just as your list does contain. So it should be merged into Wikipedia:List of self-publishing companies. Nageh (talk) 19:54, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

I was referring to the merge flag there. Anyway, voting is taking place there. History2007 (talk) 19:57, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Maps Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wikipedia reliability

Further Proposals

Question: is it possible to co-ordinate a general drive for deletion of these sources and articles that solely depend on them for a veneer of reliability/legitimacy through a Wikiproject, or would that be considered canvassing or vote-stacking (even though it's mere policy-enforcement)? In the first fifteen minutes of looking at back-links, I found a rat's nest of self-published author and book articles that are all intertwined in their own little corner of Wikipedia, much like maths is. I had no idea the problem was this endemic. One thing can be said for highly-controversial pages (like Genesis creation narrative, which I believe most here participated in): the heat burns away the crappy sources and dubious information like the slag of silver, purified in a fire seven times. There mere fact that such pages have stood so long with no interest nor improvement - often for five years, being tagged in 2007 with no further work done - is proof-positive of their non-notable character. St John Chrysostom ^????_?? ^??? 20:44, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

It would certainly not be canvassing, given that there is no voting of any type. The problem is indeed endemic:, e.g. Wikiproject Elements (where someone fixed a source because of a message I left there). These are also used in projects such as Medicine, Philosophy, etc. I am planning to write a simple program that generates a list of the use of these on pages. Then the drive can ask people to check/fix them. History2007 (talk) 21:00, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

I think we should be careful to distinguish between content that is good, but merely poorly sourced versus content that is bad and poorly sourced. For example, let's say that these two sentences are both sourced to self-published books:

• The United States of America was founded in 1776.
• The United States of America was founded by reptillian huminoids.

The second sentence should obviously be deleted, but we should not be deleting "The United States of America was founded in 1776" simply because it's poorly sourced. Instead, we should do one of the following:

• Replace the SPS with a reliable source. This is the ideal solution, but it's also the most time consuming.
• Add a template.
• Remove the source and add a template.

A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 21:21, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

I was not planning to write a program that changes Wikipedia pages, but one that searches them, and generates a list of ISBNs that trace to self-publishers. Then we can place the list somewhere and ask people to check them/fix them as they see fit. And as you said there must be guidelines for how they go about it. Once we have those two components we can start a drive for it as St John C. suggested. History2007 (talk) 21:58, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

I just discovered a problem with this. I have quite a few reliable self-published books - ones from CreateSpace - that are reprints of ancient works long out of print, from Irenaeus to John of Damascus to Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange ("Ex Fontibus Press", the publisher, uses CreateSpace): I have these because 1) some aren't on the internet, 2) I don't like reading books on the PC, and 3) The Fathers of the Church and Ancient Christian Writers versions often run up in to the hundred-dollar range for a single work (for example, Augustine's "On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis" is sixty bucks in 2 volumes from Fathers of the Church, but $15 and also includes Genesis against the Manicees and Unfinished Literal Commentary from Ex Fontibus through CreateSpace); some of Origen's commentaries, for example, on Romans, are upwards of $120 and very hard to find.

Other books, like many of Fr Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, or the 1582/1610 Douay-Rheims Bible (or the Spanish Torres-Amat), simply are not available for purchase outside of CreateSpace or Lulu reprints, unless one is lucky enough to find one on eBay or used on Amazon for a ridiculous price (or has access to a library where they are still available, which is, nonetheless, inconvenient - the Dominican House of Studies' library doesn't allow many books to be borrowed, and, in any case, I don't write Wikipedia from the university library). Many other reliable sources are published in this way. How should this problem be handled - a reliable source that is unavailable or out of print, that is reprinted only through a self-publishing company? St John Chrysostom ^????_?? ^??? 03:33, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

That is a valid point and perhaps "ancient works" need to be exempted. Of course Wikisource has many of the works by the likes of Irenaeus, Jerome, etc. But still if a work is by a scholar and is republished because the copyright expired, that must be a separate issue, I think. History2007 (talk) 08:26, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Reprints of ancient works aren't "self-published" in the normal sense. Of course the original may have been self-published back in the day (in a very different cultural context), but really ancient works present a different set of issues than modern self-publishing. What is a bump in the road is that "unreliable" publishers can be used to reprint works that were originally published by a "reliable" one, and anyone reviewing the use of the source needs to look into that possibility. Which reaffirms what we already knew, that you can't just go through with a bot and strip out sources from these publishers -- you have to flag them so a person can evaluate the details. --RL0919 (talk) 19:48, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Yes, and that issue should really be stated somewhere beyond a talk page. I think Kessinger Publishing is an example of a company that just prints old books. I removed them from the list, but someone can add them back if they are really a self-publisher.

As for the bot, as I said I will write a program (not a bot yet) to generate a list of the uses, and we need links to guidelines of what to do when they are pointed out. I do not think a bot should delete the references, but leave messages for people or on a board, just as the disambig bot does. It would be good, however, if a guideline for how to deal with them get started while I try to find time to work on the program after May 5th. History2007 (talk) 20:01, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Kessinger publishes old books at exorbitant prices - I'm talking $50 for a copy of GK Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, although most books from the Imperial era can be purchased for much more cheaply reprinted by Dover. I always get a kick and a bit of anger when I click Amazon's drop-down list of paperbacks, and see: "Dover: 9.99, CreateSpace: 12.99, X: 13.01, Y: 14.99, Z: 16.00, AA: 19.00, Kessinger: 37.63" (for some reason, 37.63 is very common for a price for them). However, Kessinger books are generally photocopies, whereas Ex Fontibus are always re-typeset. St John Chrysostom ^????_?? ^??? 03:17, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

That is one thing, the ripoffs are another. I was surprised by these ripoff reports. Some vanity presses charge the authors $16k to $20k to publish books, and some of those reports mention money taken from senior citizens authors, etc. History2007 (talk) 07:44, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

I think it's more reliable if people cite to the original books rather than reproductions, reproductions may have unintended changes in them, there is no sense in citing the reproductions. As a result of the photocopying, kessinger books are probably more likely to have unintended errors than a re-typeset version. IRWolfie- (talk) 20:20, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

src: i1.wp.com

Discussing usage of vanity press

So, should instances of dubius uses of vanity press etc be discussed here or at RSN? I speak of instances where there is no particular contention on the article page but just for clarification purposes etc. IRWolfie- (talk) 21:08, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

RSN is a forum to get community input on specific disputes about reliability. This is a project to coordinate efforts to improve reliability generally. So I would think "instances" should continue to go to RSN. --RL0919 (talk) 21:13, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree. Now we do need to start coordinating things. I was busy the past few days but will free up soon. I am hoping that DGG will have an evaluation of the sources for us soon, given his knowledge of the field, after that we can get a better idea as well. History2007 (talk) 22:27, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

src: upload.wikimedia.org

List of ISBN codes for publishers

Are you guys aware of List of group-1 ISBN publisher codes? I am not sure where that information came from and how reliable it is. In fact it may be a suitable topic for this WikiProject to try and address/evaluate the reliability of these "hard facts" at some point. These are not matters of opinion, etc. because they are just numbers.

The reason I asked was that I am starting to play with the program that will generate a report of the Wikipage names (in a given WikiProject) which include books by a given publisher. The publisher name may not always be present in the reference, so it may need to be looked up via a suitable ISBN. Of course, given the program can call WorldCat and screen scrape the publisher name in most cases. But takes more computing. Anyway anyone knows of online lists that map publisher names to the fragment of digits in the International Standard Book Number (and vice versa) that will be good. Thanks. History2007 (talk) 16:55, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

src: media.npr.org

Republishers

In Wikipedia_talk:Republishers#books_used_as_sources it was rightly pointed out that the republishers are now growing within wikipages like weeds.... History2007 (talk) 11:02, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

src: upload.wikimedia.org

Report on the use of self-publishers

I have now finished the first prototype of the Self-published source usage report. The program itself was straightforward given the API, but cross-referencing for the project report format took some time. It took several hours to execute the program to generate this report, and I will post a larger version some time this week.

My guess is that it will take several days of execution time every month to run the eventual program that I hope to complete by the end of the year. That version will use its own list of ISBNs that will be looked up on Worldcat.

Suggestions/ideas will be appreciated, and I will also seek input from a few Wikiprojects. History2007 (talk) 05:53, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm responding to the post left at WT:MILHIST (though some extra context on what you guys have been up to would have been good!). The military history articles you've found that have references to self-published sources seem to all be of quite low quality. The self-published sources should go, but it's hardly surprising that bad quality articles have bad references ;) Nick-D (talk) 06:33, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

By the way, you just gave me the idea that this may also work the other way around. One method for detecting low quality articles and generating a list of them may be to check if they have low quality references, plus a number of other conditions. So these ideas are interesting. History2007 (talk) 15:46, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that is right. In a future version, we should also categorize the report by article rating/importance, to see how self-published items are used in high importance articles. But it was surprising to me that wikiproject biography generated so many results. But we will have to wait a few days to get the full version of report with more publishers. Authorhouse dominated here, and I will try to run the others this week. History2007 (talk) 07:01, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

At least one of the hits in the Lincoln article (BiblioBazaar) came from a reprint of Sherman's memoirs. There are bound to be better editions out there, and just getting rid of those sorts of things should reduce the number of hits in biography. Although honestly it doesn't surprise me that they'd generate so many hits. Self-publishing tends to attract memoir writers. Intothatdarkness (talk) 14:16, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes it does, and that's going to be an ongoing issue, since an author writing about their own life is one of the exceptions where self-published work is acceptable as a source. I wonder if there is some way the report could weed those out? For example, if the name of the author is the same as the name of the article? Just a thought for improvement -- the first pass is a great start. --RL0919 (talk) 15:32, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that is quite possible and not that hard, once an ISBN system is in place. The issue will again be execution time, but given that it will be a monthly report, I could set a computer to run it for a week if needed. These are good suggestions and as a list of these appears, I will work on a design to encompass as many of them as possible in a second version. History2007 (talk) 15:41, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

I mentioned Sherman's memoirs for another reason, too: many of these publishers take items that are out of print (and possibly out of copyright) and republish them. You then have to make the distinction between that and an actual self-published memoir (not sure if a bot can do that or not...I don't know much about them). Older history stuff is especially vulnerable to that practice, but I'm sure it hits other areas, too. Intothatdarkness (talk) 17:29, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it can be done, but not that easily. One needs to get the title, look it up on Worldcat to see if there were earlier editions, etc. and if so, skip it. These are actually good suggestions, but given my unfortunate time constraint of having only 24 hours in a day, and fixing various articles, these will be 2013 items probably. There was also a good suggestion on the talk page of the report, so the suggestion list is growing, and I will get to them as I can. I am trying to do the Wiki-republishers next, however, because they are an issue too. History2007 (talk) 17:35, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Business project done. Fifelfoo (talk) 07:32, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Great. I saw this one now. That was fast. Thank you. History2007 (talk) 07:34, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

By the way, I must offer my apologies to all you guys here. I have now been liberated from Wikipedia and will not be spending a great deal of time on this project. Please do accept my apologies. Thanks. History2007 (talk) 20:50, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

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Comment on the WikiProject X proposal

Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

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WikiProject X is live!

Hello everyone!

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