On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
phoebe ayers wrote:
Of course, what's interesting and troubling
for us is that this is a
respected publisher who apparently did all the normal things in
setting up an academic journal that is typical of the sort of thing
Wikipedia is supposed to use as a "reliable source." But (naturally, I
suppose) the academic publishing process is as open to failure as any
other publishing or reporting process.* And I can't help but think
that in a more open process -- an open access journal, say, or even
Wikipedia -- this would not have gone on for so long or played out in
the same way.
True, though I think the biggest (and long-standing) problem has
actually been books, which in many fields (especially in the humanities)
are both the canonical "reliable source", and hugely problematic as
sources. Academic presses have a peer-review process, but it isn't
intended to make sure the book is representative of consensus in the
field, unbiased, or otherwise a good source for writing an encyclopedia
article. It's more of a minimal level of reviewing to ensure that the
author is making a legitimate contribution to the academic debate, not
plagiarizing anyone, etc.---even if the result is a highly polemical
book contrary to consensus and accepted by nearly nobody, it may be
worth publishing as a contribution to the overall discussion, especially
if the author is already well known.
Sure, and maybe this isn't even a problem per se -- it's the job of
scholarly discourse to present and discuss new ideas, etc. etc. I am
thinking more about a failure of scientific publishing as meaning a
(theoretically) respectable journal published by a (theoretically)
respectable publisher shouldn't really be an unquestioned soapbox for
one guy who may or may not be writing patent nonsense.
Same goes for a Wikipedia article, naturally, and this is something we
have certainly been fighting against in obscure topics for years... I
seem to recall this even led to a to a policy called "No Original
Research" once upon a time. Now of course our problems have shifted
more into what materials we cite, though, and why we cite them.
This is all fine if books are read with full knowledge
of their status
in the field---that they represent the possibly idiosyncratic view of
one particular writer. But if their claims are then entered into
Wikipedia articles, with a citation to the book to justify them, that's
more of a problem. This isn't as rare as people might think either; I'd
say the *majority* of academic-press books make at least one significant
claim that is controversial in its field, often without even admitting
that the claim is controversial.
Maybe we need to put more emphasis on "encyclopedia as a tertiary
source" -- let other people do the summarizing and the vetting and
sorting out of what ideas are going to stick around for the long-term,
and focus away from citing original research directly, which helps
side-step the danger of representing obscure or untested theory as
canonical truth. This might be particularly be true for new scientific
discoveries or new ideas in the humanities. (Different perhaps for
events in the news, articles about pop culture, etc).
-- phoebe