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| Not reliable enough for Wikipedia |
Wikipedia
has a reputation for displaying bias against certain subject areas, and how it can
work was demonstrated to me this week. On
27 March I received a message on my Wikipedia ‘talk’ page headed ‘Information
on forgotten members of the SPR’. Signed
by a ‘JuliaHunter’ (sic), it proceeded without preamble: ‘Have you got any
information on some of the original council members of the Society for
Psychical Research, such as the electrician Desmond G. Fitzgerald (1834-1905)?
See the talk page for the SPR.’
This
came as a surprise because I had forgotten I had a Wikipedia talk page. It dates from when, some years ago, I
tinkered with a couple of articles on the site, notably the one on the Society
for Psychical Research (SPR). Thanks to
my edits being consistently reverted by someone who it seemed to me had a
strong desire, allied to obsessive patience, that the article should be as
unhelpful as possible, I had abandoned the effort and had not participated in
Wikipedia editing since.
It
happened that I had come across the name JuliaHunter several days previously
when I noticed a new, very brief, Wikipedia page on Count
Perovsky-Petrovo-Solovovo (1868-1954), described as ‘a Russian psychical
investigator and skeptic’. Compiled by
this JuliaHunter, it is entirely inadequate and ignores the lengthy
affectionate obituary printed in the May 1954 issue of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (JSPR) by ‘W.H.S’ (W. H. Salter), though JSPR papers by the Count are listed. There was a reason why Salter’s obituary
could not be used even if JuliaHunter was aware of it, to which I shall come.
Thinking
that JuliaHunter was merely gathering information on early SPR Council members
I wrote back, referring to the SPR’s online library, the Psypioneer journal, and various academic books I thought she (assuming
the writer was a female, something that is not necessarily the case with an
online persona) might find worth
looking at for her research. I was
surprised to receive a response which read in part:
‘Thanks for the
reply, Unfortunately anything in the SPR journal or the Psypioneer (which I
have read) and other parapsychology journals cannot be cited on Wikipedia,
because they are not considered reliable sources per WP:FRIND or Wikipedia:RS.
Also Wikipedia rules on WP:FRINGE balance forbid this sort of thing, this is a
mainstream encyclopaedia that deals with reliable academic sources on such
topics. This is why SPR journals or other fringe journals should only be
mentioned in the "further reading" sections of articles or cited if
they are quoted in secondary independent sources which is rare.
‘I have no
problem with citing academic books from the SPR like Alan Gauld's or Archie Roy
etc. Academic or scholarly books that can be cited on the history of the SPR
are Shane McCorristine, Janet Oppenheim, Roger Luckhurst, Trevor Hamilton etc...’
Hence,
in the example above, it was fine for the Wikipedia entry to cite Count
Perovsky-Petrovo-Solovovo’s own JSPR
papers in a further reading section, but it could not draw on Salter’s
obituary, even if it was more informative, and authoritative, than the
secondary sources upon which the Wikipedia article was based (after all, Salter
knew him personally).
There
was quite a lot more in JuliaHunter’s reply to me, but I knew that she had not
accessed the SPR’s publications; she referred to an item in the SPR’s Proceedings, Fraser Nicol’s ‘The
Founders of the SPR’, March 1972, pp. 341-367, in these terms: ‘In Frazer Nichol's (sic) 1972 SPR paper (I
have limited access on Google books) The Founders of the S.P.R, he says…’
before going on to talk about her uncertainty over resignations by
Spiritualists from the Society in the 1880s.
She was struggling with Google Books despite Nicol’s paper being
available in its entirety – not some ‘snippet view’ – in the SPR’s online
library. Later she sent an update which
astonished me:
‘I finally
managed to find some of the early spiritualists who resigned over the Eglinton
affair, the list of names is as follows: Stainton Moses, Dr. Stanhope Speer, G.
D. Haughton, H. A. Kersey, Mrs E. Cannon and Mrs Brietzcke. JuliaHunter (talk)
22:05, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
‘Do you have an
academic book that would qualify as a reliable source (Wikipedia:RS) that
mentions the above names that resigned? Oppenheim and other scholars have let
us down here by not covering this in detail. Unfortunately we can't use the
Nichol paper as it is not a reliable source. JuliaHunter (talk) 22:41, 27 March
2016 (UTC)’
That
first paragraph sounded familiar. Nicol had
written the following:
‘Much could be
said on this matter, but I need only mention that of 51 S.P.R. members who are
known to have had sittings with Eglinton only six resigned: Stainton Moses, Dr
Stanhope Speer, G. D. Haughton (Mrs Sidgwick's most ferocious antagonist), H.
A. Kersey, Mrs E. Cannon and Mrs Brietzcke. One person who in another sense did
retire was Eglinton—into private life.’
So
JuliaHunter had managed to track down a list of resignations which must have
originated in Nicol’s article, as the individuals are listed in the same
order. It sounds like she had experienced
difficulty locating it, though it could have been found in the SPR’s online
library in minutes – and I would argue that an editor who feels qualified to
create and edit Wikipedia articles on the early history of the SPR should have
read it already. However, it is not good
enough for Wikipedia as it appears in a source which is ‘fringe’ and consequently
not ‘reliable’.
On
the other hand, if Oppenheim et al had not ‘let us down’ and one of them had
reprinted Nicol’s list of those who had resigned, it would have been acceptable
for inclusion in Wikipedia, coming directly from a scholarly volume, even
though the ultimate source and the value of the information would have been
exactly the same. What is particularly
ironic is that while the SPR’s Journal
and Proceedings are peer-reviewed
there is no guarantee that a specialist has checked the contents of a book
published by an academic press. Why is
one considered legitimate while the other is not?
As
to Nicol being deemed not a ‘reliable source’, I have seen a great deal of
private correspondence that passed between Fraser Nicol and his colleague Mostyn
Gilbert and can confirm that Nicol was a painstaking scholar (as was Gilbert). He was steeped in psychical research, unlike a
couple of the ‘permitted’ authors JuliaHunter mentions who may have written excellent
books but who have moved on to other things and do not possess the range and
depth of knowledge of the subject,
gathered during a lengthy career, which he had. Yet his work does not count even though it is
more detailed on this point than the respectable Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical
Research in England, 1850-1914.
Oppenheim, it should be added, refers to Nicol’s 1972 paper several
times, clearly not sharing JuliaHunter’s reservations about it.
In
one of her final messages to me JuliaHunter made a point of demonstrating the
trustworthy sources she had employed in her Wikipedia article on CC Massey,
then made a suggestion I found easy to ignore:
‘Let me give you
an example, I created the page Charles Massey. Do you see what I have done
there? Cited academic books, not cited any nonsense. This really shouldn't be
up to me creating these pages, but nobody else can be bothered. If you could
get anyone on board to create such articles that just cite academic books and
don't push any fringe nonsense, then this would be appreciated.’
Leaving
aside the condescending tone, I was being invited to ask people to contribute
to a project which reflexively considers SPR material, however robust in fact,
to be inadmissible ‘nonsense’ in Wikipedia terms. Why I would do that is beyond me.
I
had never heard of JuliaHunter before, but assumed she is new to the
field. It has been suggested to me that she
is someone who has posted frequently on Wikipedia under a number of pseudonyms,
including ‘GoblinFace’. This individual
swoops in, makes a huge number of changes (and a glance at the edit histories
for the SPR and parapsychology articles shows how prolific JuliaHunter has been)
then goes quiet before resurfacing later in a new guise. That identification may or may not be accurate,
but I think this episode has provided a small but illuminating insight into
Wikipedia’s biased regulations.
