David Gerard wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
An excellent argument for why AfD should never be democracy-based (or believed to be that way). In these situations, you almost need someone to step up, say, "Look, I actually know something about entomology. I believe this insect is notable", wipe all the existing votes, and say "now, does anyone actually disagree?" It also seems to me that "ignorance-based debates" are not in themselves harmful, provided that there are mechanisms such that they don't drown out the informed. Everyone's worst nightmare is the 10 pokemon fans drowning out the tenured professor in his own field. But does it actually happen?
It has already happened, on webcomics - a dedicated few editors worked hard to alienate and drive off actual experts (while an actual academic expert who's a Wikipedian tried to stop it happening), and tried to force through that an expert could be outvoted by the proudly ignorant.
I think they were advocates rather than experts, weren't they? Webcomics haven't really been around long enough to have established academic roots. I think I'd bow to Scott McCloud if he deemed something notable, but webcomics is such a new medium that it's impossible to determine scholarly worth: there are few academic papers on the subject. It's a different field to etymology; we're not comparing like for like. Wikipedia isn't the place to be asserting the notability of things, it's where we record the notability granted by other sources. That was an aspect of the forking too. I also think it's rather mean of you to discuss people as ignorant.
Steve block