Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Newsletter/20150701/Feature
Feature: The twists and turns of Editorial Discretion edit
Submitted by Thibbs
It doesn't take long in one's career as a Wikipedian to run into the concept of Original Research (or "OR"). One of Wikipedia's three Core Content Policies, the basic idea behind WP:OR is that all claims added to the article must be supportable by reliable, published sources. The concept is easy to understand and is easily integrated into the new Wikipedian's understanding of the culture here. Those who are a bit more experienced in the Ways of the Wikipedia will also be aware that even the synthesis of two reliably-sourced claims into a single claim can be a form of original research. The details of the Original Research policy are not always as intuitive as the basic policy and many a newcomer has stumbled on this point. But as time goes on and edit counts increase, this too becomes a part of the Wikipedian experience.
Wikipedia takes its role as a re-reporter of facts seriously and there are several basic OR-related prohibitions listed at WP:NOT including "Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought", "Wikipedia is not a blog, Web hosting service, social networking service, or memorial site", and "Wikipedia is not a crystal ball" among others. So it may come as a surprise that several thousands of times every day Wikipedia sees established editors introducing original sentences that appear nowhere else (in the same form), altering the neutrality/emphasis of articles by removing verifiable and reliably-sourced material, and making executive decisions regarding which images to use to illustrate a topic even when these images have never appeared in any source previously. And then again, perhaps it won't.
The phrase "editorial discretion" is a term of art on Wikipedia used to describe the editor's capacity to edit according to common sense (in fact an extrapolation of her individual editorial best judgments). Editorial discretion is the force that leads you the reader to write a different version of an article than I would write or than User:Jimbo Wales would write even when all three of us were to write redundant articles on the exact same topic. The decisions we would have made at each step of the article writing process from research to writing and finalizing would yield differences in sourcing, structure, tone, and a host of other subtle writing characteristics that define our individual writing styles. Individual editing decisions crop up in a variety of areas. Today we will be looking at where editorial discretion enters into the article writing process and where the dangers and possible sources of error lie.
When and where to be discrete edit
The practical effects of editorial discretion can be seen throughout Wikipedia and it is practiced daily by many editors. Some of the more common areas where an editor will have to exercise her own discretion in order to write, improve, or clean up an article include:
- Layout, structure, logical divisions, etc.
Apart from general guidelines recommending a logical ordering of common article elements, there are no hard and fast rules for how to set out subsections, paragraphs, and sentences, or even the positioning of objects like tables, embedded lists, and images. The structure of an editor's article should serve to present the topic in a logical, aesthetic, and easy-to-digest format for the benefit to the readers, but logic, aesthetics, and ease of digestion are subjective concepts and this is where editorial discretion enters the calculus. Although the article should generally have a lede, body, and reference section in that order, it is up to the individual editor to decide how to divide and in what order to present the individual elements in the article's body. One example of this can be found in the guidelines of WikiProject Succession Box Standardization where the order of headers is identified as a matter of editorial discretion.
- Source selection and weight
There are a few reasons why one would wish to select between sources. Perhaps the most obvious is that of relative degrees of reliability. As we see reflected in the "Rules are principles" Information page, editorial discretion plays a key role in on-the-fly assessment of reliability. The determination of outlying perspectives and the weighing of sources based on credentials and expertise of the authors and reputation among editorial staff for fact-checking and accuracy are essential aspects of good article crafting. Identification of errors (e.g. factually incorrect claims that are repeated in numerous sources) is a more problematic issue, but can in some instances be overcome as a matter of editorial discretion at a community level via local consensus and cautious application of the "Ignore all rules" Policy.
Other examples abound. In that most fortuitous of circumstances when an editor is faced with an enormous number of equally reliable but factually redundant sources then source selection via editorial discretion is again required. WP:VG's own Reliable Source Guideline suggests that when deciding between an abundance of sources, editorial discretion should promote breadth of coverage to reduce POV.
- Tone, emphasis, word choice, typography, etc.
The flow of an article can also be greatly influenced by editorial discretion. Simple typographic decisions are generally considered to be so minor as to be entirely within the realm of the editor's discretion. Examples can be found in several site-wide guidelines including the Manual of Style (MoS) on Organisms (describing the use of bold vs plain text as a matter of editorial discretion), the MoS for Titles (use of italics vs quotes in formatting references for minor works is up to the editor's discretion), and the MoS for Dates and Numbers (choice and order of numerical formats and conversions is up to the discretion of the editor).
The lengths of plot summaries used in articles on artistic works (books, film, video games) are also subject to editorial discretion as can be seen in the "How to write a plot summary" Essay. Outright exclusion of sourced information, on the other hand, may be more a matter of relevance. It is a matter of common sense that information should not be included in this encyclopedia solely because it is true or useful. Wikipedia is not, after all, an indiscriminate collection of information. The discrimination required when sifting through content is of course dictated by our old friend editorial discretion. As we see codified at our Biographies of living persons (BLP) Policy, the relevance of mentioning reliably sourced but non-public associates of a BLP subject is up to the discretion of the editor.
- Images
Placement of images, selection between similar or visually identical images, and especially the content of the images are all frequently the focus of editorial discretion. The basic principle is commonly seen in debates over Wikipedia's "Wikipedia is not censored" Policy. Offensive content is only useful up to the point where it ceases to explicate the article's topic for readers in an encyclopedic manner. Determining where to draw the line is editorial discretion.
- At the meta- level
Ultimately, editing Wikipedia itself is a matter of editorial discretion. Editing Wikipedia is not compulsory, and when the editor elects to edit Wikipedia she will find herself self-directed and under her own management. What to work on, when to work on it, and how much to work on it, are all up to the individual's choice.
Dangers, solutions, and significance to WP:VG edit
Perhaps the biggest problem that can arise from improper use of editorial discretion is when the reader is misled. Misleading articles may be based on high quality reliable sources and may appear quite authoritative, but this is precisely what marks them as anathema to a good Wikipedian. In many cases misleading articles will have arisen through the innocent (in terms of good faith) error of failing to conduct proper preliminary research. Editors at Wikipedia will often write about what they know about. It is not at all uncommon for an editor to think she knows much more than she actually does about a topic and when corners are cut and insufficient effort is put into researching the topic, the result will be an improper overview of the sources. There are several methods one can use to counteract this problem ranging from the devotion of more time to the preliminary fact-gathering stage of article creation, to the use of collaborative efforts with multiple editors simultaneously building the article, to simply selecting smaller topics on which to write your articles.
A more insidious source of misleading articles comes from selection bias. When writing articles on topics where the editor has a non-neutral point of view (POV), it is easy for the editor to fool herself into preferentially selecting those sources that support her point of view over those that contradict it. This kind of editorial discretion crosses the line between permissible discretion and original research, but it is such an attractive idea that we even find vestiges of it at Wikipedia's "Perennial proposals" Information page. The best solutions for this problem is peer review, article oversight (which is available via the Good Article and Feature Article nomination process), and actually Wikipedia's basic structure itself. While it is generally true that the presentation of a Wikipedia article is inquisitorial rather than adversarial in nature (i.e. the reader as inquisitor receives information from the editor without any contrary evidence) and that there are no due diligence or mandatory disclosure rules that can be used to threaten editors claiming good faith ignorance as a defense for supporting one POV to the exclusion of others, Wikipedia's "Ownership of Content" policy bars any editor from blocking contrary evidence.
Article "ownership" itself can also represent problems for editors employing editorial discretion to provide logical, aesthetic, and easy-to-digest formatting at articles they have created or improved. The best solution to this problem may simply be to step back. The elements of article crafting subject to editorial discretion are discretionary precisely because they could work in a number of different ways. Reasonable people can reasonably disagree and this is important to keep in mind.
- Significance for WP:VG
Obviously WikiProject Video Games is concerned with writing articles just as the rest of Wikipedia is and so the use of editorial discretion applies with equal importance at WP:VG as it does in all other corners. A few areas of video game specific article crafting may bear further discussion in relation to this concept. One of these is the issue of erroneous sources. Video game journalism is a relatively new field of journalism and documentation of especially the oldest systems and games is still woefully spotty. This paucity of sources means that errors such as mistranslations in early articles may be perpetuated by later articles whose only source may have been the original erroneous article. This is particularly notable when closely comparing English sources to Japanese sources covering obscure non-localized systems like Nintendo's Satellaview. Providing appropriate and accurate sourcing for topics like the Satellaview is not impossible, but it requires editorial discretion that favors older Japanese sources over more recent English sources. This kind of editorial discretion can bring opposition.
Another facet of the same issue is seen in modern sources that produce revisionist or nostalgia-heavy coverage of older games. A good example of this is the often-mocked Zelda video games for the Philips CDi system. These games actually received mediocre to fair reviews at the time of their release, but modern sources tend to describe them as universally despised. Again the solution is to exercise editorial discretion to present the two different kinds of reviews in the appropriate temporal context, but this discretion rubs some editors the wrong way and coverage of positive reviews has been frequently blanked by detractors in the past.
Finally we turn to the tricky problems of source selection and systemic biases when working in controversial and volatile areas. When selecting between sources that often contain strong POV-heavy commentary on bitterly opposed parties to a common conflagration, editorial discretion takes the form of community consensus. The highest quality sources become the default and active disagreements shift to the issue of what constitutes expertise within the relevant field. Is a topic like "video game addiction" more of a video game topic (requiring video game experts) or more of a psychological topic (requiring psychology experts)? Is a topic like "video game violence" more of a video games topic, a sociology topic, or a firearms topic? Is a topic like "GamerGate" more centered in video games, feminism, journalism, or a mix of all of them? For heavily invested participants at such articles, it can be difficult to separate editorial discretion from POV. And this problem can compound itself when there is a sentiment that systemic biases like publication bias may be affecting the article's basic neutrality. These are some of the most difficult issues involving discretionary source selection, and there really aren't any perfect solutions. Patient discussion, active consensus-seeking, and openness to compromise are the only way forward.