LW - Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard by TracingWoodgrains

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard, published by TracingWoodgrains on July 10, 2024 on LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin, posted in full here given its relevance to this community. Gerard has been one of the longest-standing malicious critics of the rationalist and EA communities and has done remarkable amounts of work to shape their public images behind the scenes.
Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others. As always, I write aiming to provide a thorough and honest picture, but this should be read as the view of a close onlooker who has known about much within this story for years and has strong opinions about the matter, not a disinterested observer coming across something foreign and new. If you're curious about the backstory, I encourage you to read my companion article after this one.
Introduction: Reliable Sources
Wikipedia administrator David Gerard cares a great deal about Reliable Sources. For the past half-decade, he has torn through the website with dozens of daily edits - upwards of fifty thousand, all told - aimed at slashing and burning lines on the site that reference sources deemed unreliable by Wikipedia. He has stepped into dozens of official discussions determining which sources the site should allow people to use, opining on which are Reliable and which are not.
He cares so much about Reliable Sources, in fact, that he goes out of his way to provide interviews to journalists who may write about topics he's passionate about, then returns to the site to ensure someone adds just the right quotes from those sources to Wikipedia articles about those topics and to protect those additions from all who might question them.
While by Wikipedia's nature, nobody can precisely claim to speak or act on behalf of the site as a whole, Gerard comes about as close as anyone really could. He's been a volunteer Wikipedia administrator since 2004, has edited the site more than 200,000 times, and even served off and on as the site's UK spokesman. Few people have had more of a hand than him in shaping the site, and few have a more encyclopedic understanding of its rules, written and unwritten.
Reliable sources, a ban on original research, and an aspiration towards a neutral point of view have long been at the heart of Wikipedia's approach. Have an argument, editors say? Back it up with a citation. Articles should cover "all majority and significant minority views" from Reliable Sources (WP:RS) on the topic "fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias" (WP:NPOV).
The site has a color-coding system for frequently discussed sources: green for reliable, yellow for unclear, red for unreliable, and dark red for "deprecated" sources that can only be used in exceptional situations.
The minutiae of Wikipedia administration, as with the inner workings of any bureaucracy, is an inherently dry subject. On the site as a whole, users sometimes edit pages directly with terse comments, other times engage in elaborate arguments on "Talk" pages to settle disputes about what should be added. Each edit is added to a permanent history page.
To understand any given decision, onlookers must trawl through page after page of archives and discussions replete with tidily packaged references to one policy or another. Where most see boredom behind the scenes and are simply glad for mostly functional overviews of topics they know nothing about, though, a few see opportunity. Those who master the bureaucracy in behind-the-scenes janitorial battles, after all, define the public's first impressions of whatever they care about.
Since 2017, when Wikipedia made the decision to ban citations to the Daily Mail due to "poor fact-checking, sensationalism, and flat-out fabrication," ed...