George Herbert wrote:
Yes, we all agree, we want good experts to come contribute and make highly technical articles better.
No, we don't want to allow anyone including experts to slip unverifyable unreferenced stuff in, because we basically don't know for sure what anyone's qualifications are.
Precisely. That's why what is said is far more important than who says it.
It is likely that in many cases, "anyone" isn't going to be qualified to understand primary or secondary sources. That is probably simply cold reality; as an example, I don't understand much of the math in the advanced physics articles, and less so in the primary sources, despite having had many years of advanced university math.
Policies which are good for soft sciences, history, etc, where anyone generally can read the source and understand it, are probably not a good match for hard ones where even the notations used are domain-specific and arbitrary.
Yes, if every mathematical step in deriving a theory in physics needs to be explained on the spot in great detail the whole article loses its impact.
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