On 12/19/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 14:42:05 -0600, Rich Holton richholton@gmail.com wrote:
The NOR policy section Sarah quoted tells those people that their talents are not valued here.
The problem here is that we cannot tell the difference between an expert and an "expert", and we don't necessarily know if the editor is pushing a personal agenda.
But access to good academic references and knowledge of how to write a cited paper should allow any genuine expert to contribute authoritatively and without problems.
Guy (JzG)
It seems to me that part of this is the way we want to spin this.
Yes, we all agree, we want good experts to come contribute and make highly technical articles better.
No, we don't want to allow anyone including experts to slip unverifyable unreferenced stuff in, because we basically don't know for sure what anyone's qualifications are.
It is likely that in many cases, "anyone" isn't going to be qualified to understand primary or secondary sources. That is probably simply cold reality; as an example, I don't understand much of the math in the advanced physics articles, and less so in the primary sources, despite having had many years of advanced university math.
Policies which are good for soft sciences, history, etc, where anyone generally can read the source and understand it, are probably not a good match for hard ones where even the notations used are domain-specific and arbitrary.