Philip Sandifer wrote:
On Feb 25, 2007, at 5:31 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
We have a more practical reason to base WP on secondary sources, which is that we don't have big-name experts writing the articles, so we fall back on amateurs acting as the experts' proxies, via published works. By their nature, primary sources are full of traps for the uninformed; in areas where I'm expert, I can look at a primary source and instantly know what its defects are likely to be, while a random person not only doesn't know about them, but doesn't even know that there *are* defects. (A falsified birth date in government records? How is that possible?! :-) )
Absolutely. Primary sources require skill. But the problem is that writing an encyclopedia entry requires skill. Wikipedia was never intended to be written by random people and idiots. It was intended to be written by volunteers. It's not idiot-proof. In fact, it depends on having experts on articles. The assumption is that someone who knows something about a topic will go to edit it. Yes, the system is succeptible to the clueless and the crazy.
When we begin to read a new article we need to begin with an assumption of good faith that this individual is neither clueless nor crazy. Usually we don't need to read very far before we find evidence that our assumption was in error. That's where the application of judgement comes in. The nutcases can generate citations just as easily as the sane; screwball publications can have very autoritative sounding titles. Identical contents in "The Remote County Scamsheet" and "The Journal of Remote County Criminology" will get different receptions. Is the latter really more reliable when you have seen neither. If we need multiple sources, that too can be accomodated. You don't know how reliable a source is until you have checked it out, and that's not always easy. We do ourselves a disservice when we salve our self-esteem by adding a couple of references, and smugly go forward believing that the article is now accurate, and delude ourselves by believing that someone else's two references have brought the article to an apotheosis.
And the fix is to use the talk page, get reasonable people to come have a look at it, etc, etc. In cases where the clueless/crazy are particularly intractable we have a system whereby intelligent, sane people are given bansticks. And in bad cases we have the arbcom.
I think that we have some people who feel that an early application of the banstick will cure the problem more quickly without having to bother with tedious discussion that could take days to resoplve. ;-)
There is no good mechanism to have an encyclopedia written by idiots. If we do not assume that our userbase is primarily comprised of reasonably competent people who will follow the principles described we are screwed.
That's right. Those reasonably competent people also know how to listen to constructive criticism, and will easily adjust their thinking in the face of rational comments. Just because they have repeated a common falacy on an article does not make them sockpuppets. They deserve discussion with the same respect that the first poster of the falacy should have received.
Ec