User:Julle/Swedish AfD discussions
Rough draft.
I’m not primarily an English Wikipedian; most of my Wikipedia time is spent contributing to Swedish Wikipedia or explaining the encyclopedia to the Swedish public. But I still hang out here. I fix mistakes I come across while reading. I illustrate articles, dabble in policy debate, take part in some talk page conversations, even write the occasional English article. Mostly I haunt Articles for Deletions, where I keep an eye out for anything related to Sweden, where I try to help hunt down and contextualise sources to ensure we can save notable articles.
Usually, it’s a simple task of expanding the article a little bit, adding a few sources to make sure key information is can be verified elsewhere, and letting people know it’s no longer the same text as was taken to AfD.
Sometimes it’s a frustrating exercise for everyone involved.
On journalism
[edit]Ideally, the encyclopedia wouldn't rely on journalism. Journalists are rarely subject-matter experts; their speciality is the craft of journalism – writing, storytelling, interviewing, quickly absorbing key points of a topic and present a digestible version to their readers. They have deadlines. Newspapers have budgets which rarely allow them to truly take in field of knowledge. This is not to disparage journalism, which plays a crucial role in society; it's just that ”create the best possible encyclopedic sources” isn't part of the journalist's job description.
Wikipedia editors have the luxury of working at our own pace, gathering and synthesizing information from diverse, more authoritative sources. But newspapers are accessible. Easy to find. Easy to read. They write about people, organizations and topics which might not have been covered by academic research or other, slower forms of non-fiction writing. And so we constantly fall back on them in our discussions on whether an article is notable or not, verifiably or not.
Google News often omits Swedish news articles. If one relies on Google News, it's quite possible to do a decent WP:BEFORE – and attempt to see if an article can be sourced before one takes it to Articles for Deletion – and come to the conclusion that no significant coverage exists, although there might be dozens of relevant articles. This is true for most languages I've reason to look for news in. When searching for Finnish news, where I have no specific skill or access, I have far more success searching for the topic and individual news outlets than Google News.
To further complicate the issue, outside of the Swedish public service – national radio and television – there's a strong paywall norm. Even when speaking Swedish and being familiar with the Swedish media landscape, looking for articles can be fairly hopeless without access to Swedish newspaper archives.
Archives
[edit]There are two significant Swedish newspaper archives.
The most useful one for our purposes is Mediearkivet, a for-profit collection of almost all modern Swedish newspapers, as well as many other media publications, and some other Nordic sources. It's comprehensive current news, but coverage gets more and more sketchy as we go further back in time. For a few newspapers it's decent into the 1990s or even 1980s, for others it's less useful already in the early 2000s.
Access is typically institutional. Anyone – or at least most – with a Swedish university account should have access, both students and staff. Others, like me, have access through Wikimedia Sweden, who are covering the costs for a number of Wikipedia editors who depend on it for their work on the encyclopedia. Most Swedes lack this privilege.
The other significant archive is Kungliga bibliotekets (The Royal Library) newspaper collection Svenska tidningar. This goes back to the 1800s, though some newspapers have been scanned and others are still awaiting digitalization. The main issue isn't the partial coverage, but access: For copyright reasons, it requires you to go to the library itself, or one of the libraries which have access. For me, living in Sweden's third largest city, the library network have two computers which can be used to connect to the service.
Libraries and individual newspapers
[edit]Many newspapers can be read through the library, from home, without having to leave the comfort of one's own couch or desk. Those of us who subscribe to a newspaper might have their entire archive at our disposal. But this is – especially for reading newspapers through the library – typically more useful when you have already found the texts and just need to be able to read them, than when doing a thorough search of what's available.
What is a good source?
[edit]Beyond access it’s a matter of understanding the context – what sources are reliable in which situations? There is no such thing as a ”reliable source” without contextual qualification. A source can be excellent at one topic and far less reliable in another situation. I’ve been told that we can trust The New York Times because it’s reliable source, in a conversation about a news piece about events in Sweden, where they don’t have a foreign correspondent, in a situation where it’s fairly clear that they’ve done a rewrite of an article in The Guardian which in turn was a rewrite of an article in Expressen. On the one hand, award-winning investigative journalism, on the other hand Swedish tabloid journalism made worse by the game of Telephone: We should not treat these the same way, even when they live in the same newspaper. Similarly, figuring out the relationship between a source and the topic at hand can be difficult enough for those of us who sometimes deal with them professionally. Sometimes the best possible journalistic source is the small local newspaper.
Assessing Swedish news as sources
[edit]So I patrol Swedish-related articles on Articles for Deletion, to see if I can source and save articles about notable topics; I'm less inclined to spend my time on articles where I assume I won't find anything useful and which will be deleted whether I participate or not.
I usually try to find an online equivalent to link to. Sometimes they are paywalled. I often fail, and the only thing I can reference is in the archive, impossible to link to. These I treat as print sources – it’s not like we expect every piece of information we refer to to be easily accessible online. Yet some editors tend to ignore anything unlinked in their source assessments, as if it weren’t there at all. This is a slightly bizarre experience: Having spent quite some time skimming newspaper articles, discarding most as irrelevant, adding a few, pointing to them in the conversation, and it’s like they don’t exist, in a world where we still print books.
On the other hand, it’s frustrating for anyone trying to do an independent source assessment, when it’s implied that it will be more or less impossible for them to reliably assess what’s being presented.
First, it means that it’s important that I’m not alone in both having access to these sources and having Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Sweden on my watchlist. It’d be folly to expect everyone to have access to all sources we reference – but the Wikipedia model is definitely helped by the handful of people with the ability to check these articles who keep an eye on the Sweden-related AfD conversations. Second, it demands that we not only add the sources, but also describe them in the discussions. Length, to which degree does it cover the topic at hand, is the source generally considered reliable? Is the newspaper national, regional, local?
It’s a fine balance: Trying to convey an assessment where one feels confident one has a far better understanding of what’s been written and in what context than those without the same access, without attempting to monopolize the conclusion of what this means for the editorial discussion.