On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 08:21:18PM -0500, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
It's not our place to decide *for* the community, what sholuld come to the top of the pond. It's our place to just skim the top of the pond and write up what we find.
We can also use our actual knowledge as members of the relevant community of physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, etc. to judge for ourselves how "prominent" a particular viewpoint is, in order to decide whether to go along with some particular content addition.
The idea that we have to wait a few years for secondary sources to sort things out before we write about a piece of news would be very surprising to the people who edit biographical articles about current politicians and articles about the latest release in the Harry Potter series. The general practice on wikipedia is simply that if material is verifiable and a consensus of editors on a page favors it, then it can be included. Why would academic articles be different - why would we have to wait for history to judge a new mathematical theorem, when we don't have to wait for history to judge some political scandal?
- Carl