Week 5: Provenance

Two volunteer projects, two incompatible theories of what makes a claim admissible, and what happens when a contributor moves between them

22 March 2027

Wikipedia will not accept what you saw with your own eyes. OpenStreetMap will not accept anything else.

Add a road to OSM because a newspaper says it was built and you have done something the project considers a low-grade offence: you were not there, you have no imagery, you have no trace. Add the same road to Wikipedia because you drove down it last Tuesday and you have committed original research, which is the higher-grade offence in the other direction.

Neither project is confused. Each has chosen the failure mode it can live with. Wikipedia decided that a reference work assembled by anonymous strangers cannot adjudicate first-hand claims, so it outsources trust to publishers and inherits their biases wholesale. OSM decided that a map is a claim about the physical world, so it demands physical evidence and accepts that large regions will stay blank until somebody goes there.

Then there is the failure mode neither anticipated. A claim enters Wikipedia unsourced, a newspaper repeats it, and the newspaper is cited to support the original claim. The loop has a name — citogenesis — and a list of documented cases, several of which are still in print.

Outline#

• reliable sources, self-published sources, and the circularity problem
• citogenesis: four documented cases and how long each survived
• survey, imagery and trace: OSM’s standard of evidence
• reference rot — about one in nine links cited on Wikipedia is already dead
• moving between projects without importing the wrong standard