On 12/19/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 14:42:05 -0600, Rich Holton <richholton(a)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.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com