On 12 October 2010 19:33, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We have a danger here though; peoples bona fides are
hard to verify
online in general, and on Wikipedia with its culture of pseudonymity
particularly.
An "expert" may not be who they say they are, and we may have no way
to tell either way even if they are. A large part of the system we
have is designed to mitigate not knowing the quality of the people we
have editing.
You're talking about qualifications; I'm talking about expertISE. They're
not the same thing.
It's the difference between making reasonable edits, and having a piece of
people that says you ought to understand something. We don't care about the
latter.
I'm saying that the wikipedia is set up as a plaza at the admin level. This
means that, in many cases, admins don't have much clue as to whether they
know enough about a dispute to intervene. In some cases (most) it's very
clear and they'll keep away from things they don't understand, but in some
cases they may make the determination incorrectly... and bad things will
tend to happen, *particularly* where there is an obvious, but wrong point of
view (wrong with respect to the available sources), then the person with
expertise will be labelled as a trouble maker.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com
--
-Ian Woollard