Citations vs. bibliography?

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

While I value having annotated bibliographies, the cluster does have a specific place for them in a subpage, which, I believe, Larry Sanger has reconfirmed is the intent.

Many history articles seem to lack inline citations, which makes it hard to understand the source of specific observations. Some information, certainly, can be from personal expertise, and I wish we had a better way of denoting when that is being done -- I'd use it myself. Nevertheless, some of the more subjective observations in the body of articles would be easier to understand if they were sourced. Some of those are observations with which I disagree, but I don't know if it's a question of alternate sources, differing personal opinion, or, in a few cases, direct personal experience with primary sources.

Howard

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Howard_C._Berkowitz

[Aleta Curry]

Howard, I'm afraid I have to disagree with you.

If by inline citations you mean this (Curry, 2008), I can't tell you how much it irritates me.  Saying I hate it with the passion of a thousand fiery suns gets close to the mark.

Who is/was Curry?  Eminent historian?  Fringe wacko theorist?  Your kindergarten teacher?  And what work are you citing?

What in twelve types of instant pudding is wrong with...?:

Curry, Aleta.  Inline citations and why I hate them.  CZ Forums, 2008

Seminal work by Aleta Curry, writer, historian, social commentator, good cook, exquisitely lovely and generally pretty nice. Known for being open-minded on most subjects, but unreasonable about toilet seats, boom boxes and inline citations.

-----------
The other problem I have is also one I feel strongly about.  This is an encyclopaedia, for the love of all that is holy, not a b**** high school term paper, and I WILL QUIT if we EVER force people to cite every living blessing comment they write.  These are articles, written by people who know what they're talking about (well, usually), and such knowledge is confirmed by experts (we hope).

The moment I see "Willam Shakespeare was a male [citation needed] English [citation needed] playwright and poet [citation needed]"I'm outta here; it's a promise!

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

We've more or less decided to use footnoted citations. I agree, certain things should be cited, but we do not have the same policy as "The Other Place" because we do have editorial control...

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

Howard, I'm afraid I have to disagree with you.

If by inline citations you mean this (Curry, 2008), I can't tell you how much it irritates me.  Saying I hate it with the passion of a thousand fiery suns gets close to the mark.

Uh, no. What I mean is using the <nowiki><ref name=Curry>{{}}</ref></nowiki> format. What you are describing  is often called a Harvard citation, and it's not what I mean.

The first time it is used, what would be written, in text mode, might be
 <ref name=Curry-BB>{{citation
   | first = Aleta | last = Curry
   | title = The Black Book of Fringe Wacko Theorists
   | publisher = Platypus Associates
   | date = February 31, 2004
  }}</ref>

Subsequently, one would write
  "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters who know how to use a vorpal sword<ref name = Curry-BB /> (the space before the slash is important, dammit, and the Mediawiki here behaves a little badly if the full citation isn't first -- at The Other Place, as long as it is in the document, it will be located.

What will appear in the rendered text is "...twas brillig, and the slithey toves, did gyre and gimble in the Wiki ^[2]" , and, later "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters who know how to use a vorpal sword^[2]"

At the end of the article, one puts
{{reflist}}

which will produce, more or less depending on some Mediawiki settings,
 1.0 Berkowitz, H.C. (2002) Building Service Provider Networks, John Wiley & Sons.
 2.0, 2.1 Curry, Aleta, (February 30, 2004) The Black Book of Fringe Wacko Theorists, Platypus Associates
 3.0 Berkowitz, H.C. (2008) On Running Amuck at Wikipedia, Tabloid Press

[quote author=Aleta Curry link=topic=1736.msg15785#msg15785 date=1211765876
Who is/was Curry?  Eminent historian?  Fringe wacko theorist?  Your kindergarten teacher?  And what work are you citing?

What in twelve types of instant pudding is wrong with...?:

Curry, Aleta.  Inline citations and why I hate them.  CZ Forums, 2008

Seminal work by Aleta Curry, writer, historian, social commentator, good cook, exquisitely lovely and generally pretty nice. Known for being open-minded on most subjects, but unreasonable about toilet seats, boom boxes and inline citations.
[/quote]
If you mean the stuff I have in bold, that looks like something appropriate for an annotated bibliography.
[quote author=Aleta Curry link=topic=1736.msg15785#msg15785 date=1211765876
The other problem I have is also one I feel strongly about.  This is an encyclopaedia, for the love of all that is holy, not a b**** high school term paper, and I WILL QUIT if we EVER force people to cite every living blessing comment they write.  These are articles, written by people who know what they're talking about (well, usually), and such knowledge is confirmed by experts (we hope).

The moment I see "Willam Shakespeare was a male [citation needed] English [citation needed] playwright and poet [citation needed]"I'm outta here; it's a promise!
[/quote]

No, I'm not saying to use them everywhere. But, as a practical matter, I just edited a page where I am making blockquotes from several official sources and from reputable sources challenging them, and the text is interspersed. When I read the text on the page, I'm going to know that [77] meant it was from George W. Bush, [88] from a Congressional investigating committee, and [99] from a declassified CIA document. 

That's not saying Shakespeare was a man. It's clarifying sources of quotes, or paraphrases of sources, that are intermingled and need to be disambiguated.

This isn't a matter of my expert opinion alone. In some cases, my expert opinion slips into insignificance if conflicting quotes, with attributions, are side by side and shows someone has to be lying.

[/quote]

[RJensen]

In the history aryicles I write I usually include a reasonably comprehensive bibliography that will have the sources of information. I also add inline cites for many arguments, especially if they are based on a specific book or article.  people can then explore if they want to learn more on a specific topic.  Anyone who thinks that a statement is incorrect should raise the issue on the talk page. It is very hard to guess ahead of time what specific problem a reader will have and want clarification about. So just ask.

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

In the history aryicles I write I usually include a reasonably comprehensive bibliography that will have the sources of information. I also add inline cites for many arguments, especially if they are based on a specific book or article.  people can then explore if they want to learn more on a specific topic.  Anyone who thinks that a statement is incorrect should raise the issue on the talk page. It is very hard to guess ahead of time what specific problem a reader will have and want clarification about. So just ask.

One of the problems I have, and I'll constrain it to my work, if I'm using expertise simply to put together a number of primary sources (Gulf of Tonkin incident, still a work in progress, comes to mind), even if I wrote it, I often have trouble sorting out the various source quotes/paraphrases without inline interpretation.

I'd like us all to think of how to handle -- not to avoid -- expert opinion and synthesis. For an example, although it was a deletion, I was working yesterday on an imported article on CIA activities on counter-proliferaton. While I created the page at The Other Place, I found someone had added a Wall Street Journal rant about Soviet binary chemical munitions. Now, I started as a chemist, had professional experience with CBR in the sixties and seventies, and remain certified by FEMA in some aspects of CBR defense. The author was making some statements that simply didn't make sense from a chemical or military standpoint, but did lend themselves to a particular domestic political agenda. That, in good conscience, I was able to delete except for the specific point about CIA activities.

More complex was a section about PRC (and possibly DPRK) accusations on BW. With some additional cites, but also my own informed opinion, I put in a potential explanation for some of the claims -- and why they were both plausible to the Chinese and implausible to anyone with a knowledge of actual US biological weapons at the time of the Korean war. To cut to the chase, they described things that were very consistent with the Japanese WWII biological weapons, but was completely different than the contemporary US technology -- and they didn't, in their collection of evidence, show anything remotely related to the actual U.S. aerosol-dispensing bomblet of the time, nor of the disease the U.S. had stockpiled. Serious question: how should that best be cited or not cited when expertise is used?

You and I, Richard, do not have a common definition of an intelligence failure, or, at least, I'd like to see (think Cuban Missile Crisis) of what was a failure to estimate the Soviet emplacement of missiles in Cuba, versus the process that found them once the deployment started. I'd be perfectly happy if the "failure" was described as a strategic failure, but I also recognize that estimative intelligence lives in an "infinity of mirrors", where mist and shadows are the equivalent of desert-lit objects in regular life. I've been editing down some not-terribly-bad comments from the Iraq Intelligence Commission, and, in the generic intelligence articles, I've been discussing the constant communications problems between intelligence producers and consumers.

We may be coming at the problem from different viewpoints, yours of what I'll call, for want of a better term, diplomatic history, where I look at it more from the capabilities and management of the intelligence process as it is. I'd like to hope there is a way to reconcile these viewpoints, which I believe are complementary. Citing may not be the way to cover expert synthesis and direct experience, but I do think we'd have a better product if we could identify such. "Signed articles" are in the right direction, but that only works for complete, sole-author articles, not collaborative writing.

I'm open to suggestions.

[Aleta Curry]

Uh, no. What I mean is using the <nowiki><ref name=Curry>{{}}</ref></nowiki> format.

[er...CODE?!--Are you trying to kill me?]

What you are describing  is often called a Harvard citation, and it's not what I mean. [Aleta nods vigorously]

SNIP!!

Well, I'll leave the whys and hows to greater minds.  Slashes with the word "nowiki" make me feel queasy.

The only thing I know how to do is:

<ref> Berkowitz, Howard.  When a Russian History Citation Just Isn't Godunov. London: Little Whinging Press, 2008.</ref>  and then at the end I put <references/>

Would I learn a new format?  Sure, if you're all agreed--why not? [she says optimistically and with more geniality than confidence]]

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

Uh, no. What I mean is using the <nowiki><ref name=Curry>{{}}</ref></nowiki> format.

[er...CODE?!--Are you trying to kill me?]

What you are describing  is often called a Harvard citation, and it's not what I mean. [Aleta nods vigorously]

SNIP!!

Forget the nowiki; I forgot I wasn't in Metawiki text mode. 

I'm pretty comfortable in doing the formats (many many years surrounded by librarians), but perhaps someone can comment -- I think there may be some tools for prompting you through them.

Actually, I would like someone to tell me about the differences between <references/> and {{reflist}}. At the Other Place, people I respected said the latter was better, so I never got into the habit of using the former.

Well, I'll leave the whys and hows to greater minds.  Slashes with the word "nowiki" make me feel queasy.

The only thing I know how to do is:

<ref> Berkowitz, Howard.  When a Russian History Citation Just Isn't Godunov. London: Little Whinging Press, 2008.</ref>  and then at the end I put <references/>

Would I learn a new format?  Sure, if you're all agreed--why not? [she says optimistically and with more geniality than confidence]]

There are lots of refinements, but let me add one suggestion. Where you wrote <ref>, write <ref name=XXX>, where XXX is some unique identifier like Badunov. If you subsequently want to refer to the citation XXX, all you do is type <ref name=XXX /> (the space before the slash is important) and that will give the same footnote number that will show up under references.

[RJensen]

On the intelligence failure  Cuban Missile Crisis: in September 1962 there were in fact Soviet missiles in Cuba and one Republican Senator was very publicly saying so. The intelligence community repeatedly said that was not so, and that Russia would not put missiles in Cuba. The President believed them and said so. But they were wrong and finally (around October 14) photos proved they existed and the extremely dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of WW3.  That is what I call an intelligence failure. (It is true that as soon as the photo was taken the intelligence community immediuately figured it out--but it was a month too late.)  Our article on the Cuban Missile Crisis explains all this in detail, and the historians call this an intelligence failure, not a success.

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

On the intelligence failure  Cuban Missile Crisis: in September 1962 there were in fact Soviet missiles in Cuba and one Republican Senator was very publicly saying so. The intelligence community repeatedly said that was not so, and that Russia would not put missiles in Cuba. The President believed them and said so. But they were wrong and finally (around October 14) photos proved they existed and the extremely dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of WW3.  That is what I call an intelligence failure. (It is true that as soon as the photo was taken the intelligence community immediuately figured it out--but it was a month too late.)  Our article on the Cuban Missile Crisis explains all this in detail, and the historians call this an intelligence failure, not a success.

I respectfully ask what constitutes an "intelligence failure". Anything less than 100 percent advance prediction? Speaking from the standpoint of having been very familiar with intelligence infrastructure, the high-intensity actions that took place in October and earlier, before October 14, would not have happened quickly had there not been people already working on the project.

A Senator saying something in public is not necessarily representative of any definitive knowledge, but a hunch that can be write. For good reasons, an intelligence estimate is based on analysis, not hunches.

While intelligence analysts are sometimes trained historians, and some historians have intelligence experience, the disciplines are not fully interchangeable. The analysts do not always have the luxury of hindsight, where, rather by definition, historians do. I'm not limiting this to Cuba, but can go through a long history of failures where command, control, communications and intelligence interacted as a net failure -- but, for example, while other indicators existed that, with local imagination, could have sounded an alert, there was a delay in top commanders sending a warning message, and then a communications failure -- preventable in retrospect -- that prevented a key message to getting to Short and Kimmel in time.

I would suggest that there were several potential clues about the missiles in Cuba. I also find it odd that CIA keeps getting the blame, when NSA had the best early picture. There was probably overdependence on human reporting from Penkovsky before he was arrested; there was a failure in imagination that Khruschev would go with MRBMs and IRBMs, when the focus was on known lack of progress with their ICBMs.  There were Cuban agent reports of "long things on trucks"--was that enough to start a detailed air search of Cuba?

Some things make sense in hindsight, such as the particular mix of Soviet ships arriving in Cuba and previously observed characteristics of their sailing. There were a large number of ships with extra-large hatches and that rode high in the water, suggesting a critical but lightweight payload.

Very few national security decisions are complete failures or complete successes. We haven't necessarily learned, as demonstrated by CURVEBALL, that there needs to be confirmation, presumably from independent sources.