On 10/30/05, Brown, Darin <Darin.Brown(a)enmu.edu> wrote:
In the case of research papers, though, it
wouldn't be the mathematician at
all...since the mathematician (or anyone writing for an academic journal, if
I understand correctly) doesn't actually personally have the copyright...the
publisher does.
It doesn't matter -- that is just assignment of copyright. The
question is about whether a copyright would be generated in the first
place.
Well, there are many people with "real jobs"
here, and it's easy to verify
that. I am not talking about research-level material, I'm talking more
about basic skills, undergraduate-, or at most, beginning graduate-level
material. In the case of math, I really think there's less to worry about.
If a true crank does post some nonsense or even half-nonsense, it will get
viewed by many people quickly.
It's actually not easy to verify that. It's easier to just point to a
published resource by a reputable press, which is a lot harder to
fake. We reach outside the internet for our verification, in the end,
because we know that the internet is unreliable. It's an interesting
model of digital epistemology, is it not?
We allow people here to correct grammar and sentence
structure, or at least
check that it's correct, without them having "certified" authority.
Of course, in general. But when there are real disputes, where the
answer is not self-evident to most editors (such as the use of "there"
vs. "their"), we turn to manuals of style, the Oxford English
Dictionary, etc. You see this all the time in disputes over style and
definitions. Again, the need for citation only comes from the problem
of dispute, and if the problem is legitimate (i.e. it is not one crank
against the consensus of everyone else who looks at it) then we turn
to external verification. I am pretty sure you can apply this logic to
all subjects.
FF