Eclecticology wrote in part:
Also, I do not attach as much weight as you do on being credentialled. On the positive side it shows that one has a long standing acquaintance, but on the negative side it suggests that the person has accepted the biases of the profession as though they were truths.
I know that I try to be doubtful of the received philosophical truths in mathematics -- not that there is much controversy in that field, but when there is, I'm usually at least sympathetic to the minority. OTOH, I find that uncredentialed dissenters (both in mathematics as well as in the more controversial theoretical physics) often don't understand even the most basic ideas that they're criticising. This can make argument and NPOV quite difficult to deal with -- one reason that I have stayed away from physics articles on Wikipedia. However, replacing "uncredentialed" with "uneducated" above makes the correlation even stronger -- I am uncredentialed in physics (since my only degree is in mathematics), but I am well educated in it (since I studied a great deal of it on the way to that degree, and would have gotten a degree in it under only mildly different conditions). So I would not speak about credentials at all, but only about education. If a dissenter does not understand what they are criticising, then they have little credibility; but if they understand the standard view, then their criticisms mean a lot more, regardless of any credentials.
An initial contribution very often expresses a particular POV; that's OK at that stage because the opponents to that view have yet to come to bat in the bottom of the first inning.
That's OK /if/ it was an honest mistake due to the first writer's ignorance, or /if/ the initial version explicitly stated that it was incomplete. NPOV is not a competition like baseball; every contributor has the duty to leave the article in as NPOV a state as they can reasonably manage.
-- Toby