Julie Kemp wrote:
Stan said
you've fallen into the "I'm a
professional" trap
**You are right – on the other hand, when I first started working on
the ‘pedia (I am testing the waters after a hiatus of about 8 months,
but contributed regularly for a long period before that, and also
collaborated on many of the initial discussions on standards, etc.),
people tended to trust each other’s areas of expertise – whether
professional or amateur. The thing I have found is that people who are
interested in good articles can usually tell good work, and a good
professional will often bow to a better informed amateur -- or vice
versa. In the case of these particular articles, I really do suggest
that you read the discussion that’s been taking place. You seem to
have gathered that I am in a very small minority, but if you read the
discussions, you will see that I have qualified my discussion, been
very inclusive of other viewpoints, and have provided reasons for my
edits.
To be totally candid, I got a mixed reaction from reading your comments.
There were several that sounded to me like "this is what me and all my
buddies have agreed is the truth, and anybody who disagrees with us is
ignorant and can't read either". I know that's not exactly what you
said, but that's what I heard, and if you had said something like that
directly to me, I would have been hopping mad.
I'm sure the good old days of wikipedia are long gone - there are
lots more editors and lots more opposing viewpoints to deal with.
[...] remember, Wikipedia isn’t paper. It isn’t the
place for original
research, but there are tons of examples where we make statements that
mention growing trends and new approaches. And if we know more on a
subject, don’t we have some sort of obligation to share that knowledge
and make wikipedia better than other online encyclopedias? After all,
even the famous Helga did a great deal of eventual good in that she
managed to get articles on issues like the Heimatvertriebene included
and to shake several of us into checking facts and neutralizing the
Polish-German borders. THOSE articles certainly contain lots of stuff
you might not see all in the same place.
Absolutely. Part of my work with navy ships is simply to assemble a
consistent set of accepted facts that are presently scattered across
dozens of books and sites on the net. But those aren't particularly
controversial, or perhaps more accurately we haven't yet had a
thousand ex-sailors descend on the Wikipedia to tell us that "those
admirals and their eggheads didn't know what really happened". If
you want to tangle with a tough subject, well, it's going to be
tough, and you have to decide if it's worth the time you're going to
have to spend arguing about it, when you could instead enjoy filling
in the many empty parts of Wikipedia. For instance, what are the
main sources of what we think we know about the Dark Ages? Many of
the primary documents have interesting stories of their own, but only
a handful are described in articles, and as I far as I know there's
no "list of" article that I can scan to see what all there is.
Stan