On May 15, 2010, at 10:12 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
But I can't say that these points really
apply in many cases that we
appear to be applying them: We would reject as reliable sources many
hobbyist blogs (or even webcomics) with a stronger reputation to
preserve, less obviously-compromised motivations, and _significantly_
greater circulation than some obscure corner of Fox News's online
product. What can be the explanation for this discrepancy?
Two reasons. 1) Egregious anti-expert bias. 2) A fundamental misunderstanding of the
nature of the written record of humanity.
1) Our policies are explicitly and deliberately written to try to allow content decisions
to be made without any actual knowledge of the subject. That is, we have actively tried to
write policy that rejects any thinking about sources beyond the surface level readings,
and that take as a premise that, given a large enough pile of books, anybody can
adequately write or edit an article on any topic. This premise is dubious at best.
2) We also make the actively false assumption that all significant knowledge is written
down, and that the written record is simply a transcription of human knowledge. Neither
statement is true - in virtually every field of knowledge, because fields of knowledge
organize around communities, there is a substantial oral tradition of disseminated
knowledge that is often crucial to understanding the overall subject. The contents of this
oral tradition may be written down, but not in a systemic and organized way, while in
practice the oral tradition often is fairly systemic. At its most basic level, this
translates to "There are things in any field that everybody knows, and since
everybody knows them nobody has bothered to write them down."
The combination results in a badly distended view of knowledge that has wrecked more than
a handful of articles on Wikipedia.
Second try at sending this... here goes nothing. (gmail, man up!)
While this is not a reply specifically to what Greg raises, it
is a fact that we aren't just giving the cold shoulder to
"silent knowledge", but also stuff written down in a language
not our own, when it happens to exist.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen