User:Zhengfa12

While you’re here, please take a read at what I’m interested in! On Wikipedia, I am particularly interested in the application of the Daum model of open primary source repositories pioneered by Yale University, and the integration of open source foreign-area knowledge repositories into Wikipedia pages in a way that follows the thought leadership of the Yale Scholars. I believe doing so will allow us to shape a more equitable and connected world.

Below are the issues I care about and what I’d like to help do about them. However, since I only understand one topic very well, I’d like to share how it can be applied to many other topics.

Most of what I am editing has to do with increasing content for underserved national/ethnic communities, social information that is otherwise not well-represented on Wikipedia. I am interested in helping promote knowledge about world areas outside the US and UK. While I think that is consistent with Wikipedia guidelines, I'll explain the background rationale for each of those changes.

Recent research by scientists cited as an image below, shows that non-native English speakers are at a disadvantage in scientific publishing, shown with hard data. This confirms what has been observed by journalists about the dominance of American English natives in most publishing, thought leadership, culture, news reporting, and professional services.

The Wikimedia Foundation has acknowledged that this inequity affects Wikipedia itself as well. In particular, content across Wikipedia centers heavily on information about the United States and the United Kingdom, neglecting other countries. As a result, scholars from, for example, Asia will receive much less attention than scholars from the United States because facts about Asia are reported less, and scholarship from Central Asian writers is analyzed less.

Even if scholars are willing to cite non-US writers to provide equity, the lack of world facts on Wikipedia about scholarly subjects creates friction that will dissuade them from doing so. A basic reason is that scholars need access to reliable information about those underlying facts.

A good example is found on Snopes in the fact-check on an article by a highly respected Columbia University adjunct professor titled, “Do Chinese Drivers Intentionally Kill Pedestrians They Hit?” The article was written by someone praised by the Chinese government as an expert on Chinese law, with access to inside sources. Nonetheless, Snopes argued that the law expert’s opinion is “unproven” because they had no access to English-language corroborating sources.

At many flagship law reviews around the United States, editors are unwilling to accept international law articles, citing a lack of foreign language material. Journals’ solution to the issue is segregation, to put those articles into a second-class “International” law journal, instead of the prestigious journal. This “separate but equal” treatment is anything but equal—the international journal is always less prestigious; in fact, federal judge clerkships routinely pick the prestigious journal over the international journal.

In my view, adopted from Yale scholars, the root cause of lack of exposure within Wikipedia to information about communities who are not majorities in the US/UK, has to do very much with language barriers and lack of access to information.

Jeremy Daum at Yale University recognized this problem around the time of the above Snopes article, as it was a widespread phenomenon. At the time, Perry Link at Princeton University had already been warning about an inadequate American understanding of China. In particular, one that could have disastrous consequences. Daum conceived of a clever new idea to host a repository of primary sources about one part of Chinese society (the law), containing highly neutral, community-produced translations into English, which could then be used for comparative law scholarship. Therefore, if the Yale scholars’ CLT repository information is made accessible on Wikipedia, people not conversant in Asian languages could quickly find reliable information.

While China Law Translate (CLT) is not a part of Yale University, being a personal project and repository, it is extensively used for the school’s academic research. The quality of the work in the CLT repository is good enough that the Chinese government uses it to help cut costs on future English versions of its own laws, by copying and then improving from there. One major feat of Daum’s project has been to throw cold water on much of the alarmism surrounding some of China’s laws, for example, its social credit system, calling them more of a quaint airline points system than a model of actual total social control.

The implication of enabling Wikipedia to dispel ignorance and misapprehension about Asian society in a high-credibility manner is quite significant and will benefit everyone in the world. As a case study, Trump advisor Michael Pillsbury warned that China would seek total world domination and that it would need to be contained through swift action, but the resulting trade war did little more than waste several trillion dollars. The underlying reason, according to expert opinion at international conferences at East China University of Politics and Law, was ignorance of China’s social system, leading to the US making false allegations that amounted to the China Initiative, and the US DOJ’s defeat in the Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit industrial espionage case. The experts opine, if only Americans understood the social context in East Asia better (if I might add: facilitated by Wikipedia), they would not have made such a blunder.

While Daum is extremely critical of the Chinese government, his project anchors his journal-published critiques in a repository of neutral facts. Daum’s repository, unfortunately, cannot tell us everything, as it only focuses on the regulation of civil society, such as civil rights, social credit, policing, crimes, and other topics that cover government intrusion into personal life. Thus, if we add resources the Yale team is producing to Wikipedia, users will have accurate primary source information about Asian government behavior, in a manner that avoids government sockpuppetry or conversation-steering.

Filling the void, free-to-use English language primary source repositories on Asian facts subsequently have emulated the Daum Model of open source evidence. A second repository to appear recently is the China Open Source Observatory offered by the Council on Foreign Relations. This repository is more closely affiliated with New York University, particularly Aaron Hebenstreit, who teaches there, but also Harvard University, with Tianyu Fang. This repository is structured as a charity, describing itself as an “institute.” These texts mainly relate to politics.

Song Lijue and Adrian Dunbar, who are affiliated with the East China University of Political Science and Law, have discussed a China Business Law Translations Repository, which could be accomplished primarily by talent from China by applying evidence-based methodologies from the Shanghai International Studies University Graduate Institute of Interpreting and Translation. The data derivatives can be used to create value in business contexts.

The Chinese government has also launched its own repository of primary source information in English, at Sixth Tone, headed by translator David Bell. This repository includes Chinese newspaper articles on cultural facts, in clear, easy-to-read standard English. A key feature is the avoidance of “China English” or Chinglish, thus ensuring that readers clearly understand the nuance of what is being said. These texts can be useful for sociology and anthropology, allowing for claims to be made about Asian social phenomena, grounded in reliable, third-party primary sources located in a repository. Due to its government affiliation, Sixth Tone, if used, should explicitly stand for what the Chinese government wishes to say on its own behalf, but in an easy to understand manner thanks to the excellent work of David Bell.

In this section, I want to provide a framework for an epistemically valid, pro-social framework for remediating Wikipedia’s issues, so that before I spend time making changes, the community can recommend methodological improvements.

In the above sections, I described a serious moral problem about social inequity manifested on Wikipedia, deriving from a lack of reliable, independent information that can verify basic facts about what is happening in the world, particularly in Asia since that is the only area I am qualified to speak about. Various individuals have begun to organize subject matter-specific repositories (civil rights, politics, business, culture), which are hosted independently of critical scholarly claims about what is happening in those regions. All of those repositories ask for only a citation to the source of information. More critically, even if two sets of critics disagree, for example, Daum and the PRC, they do agree about the reliability of those primary sources. Moreover, primary source access is essential to enabling discourse beyond the US/UK.

By integrating true facts from repositories and adding some information from the critical debate around the core of primary source facts into Wikipedia, we can make it easy for scholars around the world to confidently talk about what is happening in other jurisdictions. For example, the Harvard Law Review article, “Land Assembly Districts,” draws on a conception of property rights in Japan, a relatively well-described jurisdiction, thanks to its high level of economic development. But less-developed countries are not cited therein as an inspiration.

Thus, world knowledge need not be merely for critique and comparison, rather, by putting it onto Wikipedia, I can enable the platform to meaningfully provide inspiration to Americans who are now being asked to share the same table with many world actors. But as with trade in physical property, trade in intellectual property is generally mutually beneficial, even if it can sometimes cause disruption—such as with ChatGPT causing private developing-country universities to suddenly fail. For example, with the Bangladeshi “PhD = Copy + Paste?” critique raised by scholars within the country, GPT could render the degree entirely useless, if I correctly understand what they have described.

However, Wikipedia can do more than the repositories; it can meaningfully contextualize why these primary source facts matter with reference to the scholarly debate. Often, Asian countries adopt scholarly American proposals in an attempt to speed up their economic development, placing their belief in technocratic experts from abroad. The USA often entrenches and rejects modernizing proposals, for example, erupting into protests against high-speed rail. Thus, if an American scholar recommends X with a prediction of Y as a result, by looking at facts from an Asian jurisdiction that really did recommend X, they can see if Y really does happen. However, to do that, primary source information associated with theoretical proposals is necessary.

Repositories have begun to spring up everywhere following the Daum Model established at Yale. Thus, if we integrate primary source repositories with scholarly theory, we can give every part of the world an equal seat at the table.