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.
It is not taught (at least by any remotely intelligent teacher, which, admittedly, is far from coextensive with the set of high school teachers) because it is true or good practice - it is taught because high school students *honestly do not understand the basic idea of citing a source yet*. But what it produces is not good writing - it produces writing at a level which can be further improved to good writing.
(And notably, high schoolers intuitively grasp that they are not engaged in good writing, because the moment they're not being watched by a teacher they will revert to more normal writing, which, while often not good, at least eliminates some of the artificially imposed badness of high school writing).
The problem is that Wikipedia needs to be better than high school writing. And thus it needs to have a more intelligent relationship with the idea of what research is, what summary is, and what the relationship between a source and a presentation of information is. Right now V and NOR present viewpoints on these topics that are not merely poor policy or unwise, but are *wrong*. That is, they make claims that are explicitly contradicted by the basic rhetoric and composition curricula of major universities.
-Phil