--- Jens Ropers ropers@ropersonline.com wrote:
Again, I hold that the "review club" should be very open to all comers, just as the "edit club". We may choose a more disciplined approach within the "review club" and be more harsh about disturbances, but we absolutely should not ask for (and entrants should not mention their) academic qualifications at the doorstep. Their ''actual writing'' should be their sole guarantor. With reference to this post: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-September/030499.html If renowned academic Alice cannot conclusively prove and defend her view of things and layman Bob can, then we should follow Bob. We should NOT believe something is right just because "the right people" say it. That's a reverse ad-hominem. Go read the [[ad hominem]] article. Do it now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Or rather, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority
Can we put aside the specific issue of academia, for a moment, and deal with the more general concept of "experts"? I'd like to address one specific instance: would you object to requiring at least one expert to review an article, in addition to laymen? (Let's make the non-trivial assumption that experts exist and are identifable by some means).
I would argue that Wikipedia needs at least one expert to review each article. A non-expert can check things like grammar, spelling, formatting, etc; moreover, a layman can take any fact within an article and, by policy, should be able to verify it to himself. This is a good thing, and is very necessary.
However, there are some things that a non-specialist cannot do, or is limited in his ability to do. A non-expert will struggle to determine whether an article is comprehensive. Unless you have a sufficiently detailed knowledge of the subject, you cannot know what is missing. While obvious omissions can be spotted using common sense (or by looking at a textbook table of contents, say) subtle gaps in more technical areas can only be detected by someone conversant with the field. More generally, a non-expert cannot be certain that the article treats the topic in a balanced way. Here I don't mean NPOV, but the amount of text devoted to various subtopics.
A non-specialist will likely be unaware as to which of the sources cited are out-of-date or erroneous. As an example, I found that when reading about the [[Enigma machine]], I discovered that early publications (in the late 1970s) were riddled with mistakes and errors, which were subsequently acknowledged by the authors and corrected in later literature; however some errors have propogated rapidly and persist on the Internet today, and even, I discovered, within Wikipedia.
These are problems which Wikipedia faces both when writing and when reviewing articles. However, we can tolerate these problems when writing articles -- "eventually" they will get fixed. However, when we review an article and certify it to pass muster, we are in effect claiming that "eventually" has arrived in some measure. The risk is that a dozen competent and diligent non-experts could agree that an article is accurate and well-written, when in fact it has significant flaws detectable only by an expert.
-- Matt (User:Matt_Crypto)
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