[WikiEN-l] An expert's perspective - Tim Bray on editing the XML article

[Carcharoth]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Ken Arromdee<arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>> Here is the point. If an expert can't explain the subject to other
>> editors who are not experts, how in the world are they going to
>> explain it in the article?
>
> It's quite possible to explain it to other people while being unable to explain
> it to the specific other people who are complaining.
>
> In other words: they can explain it to article readers because the article
> readers are less biased and have less of an incentive to misunderstand than
> the people on the talk page.

Another point here is that experts are sometimes the only ones who can
properly evaluate the reliability of the sources used for some
articles. Ideally, there would be more accessible (as in
understandable, not as in free or available) sources, but sometimes
those sources are over-simplified or just wrong or outdated.

The trouble then is how to ensure the expert is accurately judging the
reliability of the sources, and not biasing things towards their POV
which may differ from that of other experts in the same field?
Sometimes you can find sources on how reliable a source is, but then
who judges the reliability of the source-judging sources?

Ideally, when things get that complicated, you will have an
dispassionate and neutral expert who is willing to explain things
carefully, pointing to copious sources, so that the logic of the
various expert views and their choice of sources outweigh the logic
and source-selection of armchair topic experts who might (often with
the best of intentions) be getting things "wrong". Not to mention
those with fringe ideas trying to get them represented to what they
feel is the correct weight.

But more often than not, you end up with arguments and fights instead.
Sometimes very polite arguments, sometimes very incivil arguments,
sometime very long arguments, sometimes very incoherent arguments.
Sometimes mediation and other measures can help. Sometimes not.

Carcharoth