On Apr 7, 2008, at 7:42 PM, SlimVirgin wrote:
On 4/7/08, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/7/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
And the reason it's a problem is editors who are bright but are unschooled in joined-up thinking, who (usually unconsciously, some consciously) don't like the idea that judgement takes time and effort to learn, and jump at the promise of a mechanised substitute. Because it clearly works *up to a point*. (Which is what I mean when I say it's at best training wheels for beginners, even if it's no way to do serious work.)
Yes - it's worth noting that many of the research practices espoused by Wikipedia on WP:V and WP:NOR are the sorts of things that are taught in high school, where the "every statement that has ever been thought by anybody other than you has to be precisely sourced" thing is taught.
WP:V has been written and maintained by a number of people with PhDs and other higher degrees, both in the humanities and the sciences, so it's wrong-headed to talk in terms of it being appropriate for high school students, as though we're too stupid to know how to do good research. :)
I remain agnostic about how WP:V and WP:NOR were formulated - I note merely that they present a viewpoint of research that is, by current prevailing standards, wrong. It seems to me that they got wrong not because somebody stupid went and changed it but because careless editing over years caused the pages to drift from sane to wrong, but the point remains - they are simply wrong.
We want to be questioned, we want to be challenged. That's a fundamental part of the revolutionary nature of Wikipedia. The expert is still respected, but he's no longer on a pedestal, where what he says goes just because he went to Harvard or Oxford. We want to know who his sources are, and who his sources' sources are, and on and on down the line, so our readers can make up their own minds.
Wikipedia's quest is to present the ur-source from which all knowledge depends through a process of recursive sourcing? That's new...
An article that provides that for people is a really useful resource. An article that offers a Wikpedian's original research isn't, even if happens to be accurate.
Well, it's still useful. The problem with an article that offers accurate original research is that it's not presenting a NPOV perspective. Our articles shouldn't say what "is" about the world - they should provide attributed accounts of the important accounts of the world. Which, to say again (and hopefully this time it will stick and people will stop responding to claims I'm not making), we strive to provide accurate information, but the only information we strive to provide is accounts of what other people think.
-Phil