At 10:15 AM 5/23/2008, Mark Nilrad wrote:
"As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which governs man thoughtlessly..." "a crazed captain whose one thought is the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him..." "Ahab's monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as the symbol of all the evil of the universe."
If this was put in the Moby-Dick article, it would definitely be reverted immediately, with the edit summary reading something like: "No personal opinions, please".
I've got a lot to write on this, so I'm going to chop it up. Yes, Mark is right. That's what would be said. But are those personal opinions? Or are they a synthesized consensus judgement of those knowledgeable about the text?
An expert on Moby-Dick will write just like that! And it will not be a "personal opinion." In any case, any of this could be in the article if attributed to an expert or reliable source. Like one of those old encyclopedias. What the encyclopedia is then reporting is not the mere plot details of Moby-Dick, but what people have thought about it, and inferred from it, and that is part of human knowledge as well.
I think we've painted ourselves into a corner, and created a project where actual "writers" are not welcome, and where "editors" rule. In the rest of the world, writers are, as has been mentioned elsewhere here, hard to find, whereas editors are almost commodities. (Truly excellent editors are another matter, rare birds as well.) Writers without editors famously make bad books, but editors without writers make for boring books. And boring "knowledge" might as well be useless; inflict it too severely on children and they will grow up to be .... editors. That is, those who cut up and reject and mangle what others write. Call them deletionist editors, perhaps. True editors categorize information, repackage it and frame it to make it accurate, verifiable, and digestible, wasting little. Writers are frequently poor at that, on their own.