Julie Kemp wrote:
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.
** Why do you think this? What evidence do you have? Even Anthere admits to the possibilities of what I am saying.
Well, your own words bolster my point - "Anthere admits to the possibility". The mere fact that multiple Wikipedia editors are doubtful means that, by definition, the assertion is not now "generally accepted" by the population of Wikipedia editors.
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.
**Again, that's pretty patronizing. Did you read at all what I had written? It includes the fact that French people traditionally consider Clovis a king of France, but that this is not properly true, in that France didn't exist. In fact, have you read any of the discussions on the talk pages (where there are a couple of comments that demonstrate that a compromise view makes sense)?
Every last bit of it, and twice. There were certainly a lot of hard words said before anybody mentioned that the list of British monarchs already incorporated compromises that have been accepted by consensus. Doesn't anybody ever consult similar pages when there's a dispute?
And, since you have jumped into the fray ready to tell me that, as nice as they are, my views just don't jibe with what "most people know based on published authorities," I have to ask you one question. Why exactly do you think you have enough background knowledge on the subject to tell someone who has probably read a lot more on the subject for the past 15 or so years, including reviews of the books I haven't yet gotten to (which means I have an idea of what colleagues think of these newfangled theories) that her judgment as to what is accepted and what isn't, is in question?
Well, you have managed to miss my point, although I probably expressed it poorly. I've had a little over 20 years of experience building things with online communities, going back to the earliest days of Usenet (look for "shebs" in Google archives to see some of my embarassing noobisms), and you've fallen into the "I'm a professional" trap. Empirically, that line never ever works in an online community. I'm going to write a separate item about this later, because while it's good that we have professionals discovering Wikipedia, the rules of the game are very different from what they are used to, and even after just a couple of months here, I'm seeing the same upsets happening over and over.
To take an area where I am an expert, every day I see stuff in the articles under computer science that just make my stomach churn with their lameness. But it would take some adroit writing and citing to produce something that wouldn't be mangled by the semi-educated eager to promulgate the wrong things they were told by incompetent and biased CS professors, so I don't tend to work on those articles very much. It's an unfortunate weakness of Wikipedia, but no amount of fulminating about it is going to change things; what you and I experience in our respective fields is a predictable consequence of the rules under which Wikipedia operates. It's motivating me to ponder ideas for new rules that would address your complaints better, but it's tricky and I don't have any good ideas yet.
(I'm sorry if all this sounds patronizing; I have screamed at the screen myself over article content, so I think I have at least some idea of how you're feeling.)
Stan