--- Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Julie Kemp wrote:
[...] What's in textbooks is not always accurate! I don't know how it's done in
France, but I think it's
similar everywhere in that much is decided by
committee. If you
subscribe to some of the H-net mailing lists, like
I do, or belong to
the American Historical Association, you know how
bad it can be.
I think you're touching on the root of frustration here. Wikipedia is supposed to be a secondary source, not a primary one, which means that every factoid in it should be extracted from somewhere else, preferably from the published work of a recognized authority. When there are multiple authorities disagreeing with each other, it's a difficult situation for editors. For instance, you've alluded to latest research or latest trends among historians, but is the latest trend authoritative? Not really, because maybe it's just a fad and will be discredited by an article - maybe even one of yours! - a year from now. Although we'd always like to pick up the latest info possible, in some cases I think we have to hold back, just use what is at the most recent edge of consensus, and note that more recent claims are not yet settled. (For instance, many of the articles touching on biological taxonomy are full of caveats because recent DNA results are casting old groupings into disarray, and nobody yet knows how it will all shake out.)
Merovingians as not-French is definitely in the radical rethink category, and it may be a decade, or a generation, or even longer, before it comes to be generally accepted. Until then, trying to edit Wikipedia based on the assumption that the assertion is true is going to be hard; you're going against an army of editors who are backed by a horde of published authorities with reputations much higher than your own.
Stan
...So, for now, we should assume that we don't really know. Some say this, some say that, and there is no general consensus on who the french really were. We should write about all of the opinions. --LittleDan
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